I've been building my own sluice boxes for 25 years. When I discovered how to properly classify and wash my dirt BEFORE throwing it onto the register of my sluice box, and I discovered Razor Hog gold mats.. I found gadgets like riffles, miners moss and gravel guards are unnecessary. Without a couple of gorilla miners throwing unclassified, unwashed material onto your sluice, you don't need these gadgets. The added advantage is, you cut your cleanout time and resetting your equipment down to almost nothing. Which allows you more time to actually collect more gold.
My stream sluice box is only about two and a half feet long. Contains a registry pad and two, or three Razor Hog Gold Mats. That's it. I sprinkle the concentrate on the registry pad with a garden trowel, sucking the gold up with a suction bulb and squirting it into an 8 oz. bottle. A clean out merely involves grabbing a two gallon plastic bucket, scooping up some creek water, picking up the front end of the box and washing out the sluice. No disassembly. No reassembly. No need to re-sluice material because it still might contain some gold.
First you classify the dirt into a 5 gallon bucket with a 1/4 inch screen over it removing all the rocks and big gravel (make sure to wash the bigger rocks off in your wet bucket (I'll get to that in a second). All you need to wash your soil and break it down to gold, heavies, white and black sand is a couple gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket, add a tube of tooth paste (a free ion of fluoride) and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide (a free ion of hydrogen) and stir. Same thing as "Clay-B-Gone" but a darn site cheaper. Add the soil to the wet bucket and stir again. The mud and clay emulsifies in the mixture and you just pour it out. The concentrate left at the bottom of the wet bucket goes onto the registry pad.
That's how you process pay dirt without the need for time consuming riffles, miners moss, gravel guards or clean outs slowing down your production. But if you prefer watching your gorilla miners leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes while you sweat over your Keen sluice box bought off the internet with all it's rediculous gadgets... by all means soldier on !
