Trommel nugget trap

[beaver666]

What is everyone doing for a nugget trap?? I have 3/8 screen the dirt is going through to the sluice, worried I might miss a nugget or little chunk.

 

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[IMAUDIGGER]

Bigger nuggets: 3/4" screen at end of drum. That 3/4" minus material drops down into a recessed catch pan, which has a couple pieces of angle iron welded in the bottom. Basically the 3/4" rock drops into the recessed pan...the nuggets have to hop over both pieces of angle iron then over the lip of the pan, before it goes through a narrower sluice box of sorts.

Running another box just for 3/4" material increases your water demand. Takes more water to keep things moving.
We have recovered some gold this way. Mostly in the nugget trap.

For the 1/4" minus pickers..this screen stands off the bottom 1/4" or so and does a good job of catching the coarse gold before it really gets into the sluice. There is a shorter piece of vertical angle iron at the downstream side of that screen. The coarse gold pretty much stacks up in front of that and the first riffle.

A flap of rubber lays on top of it.




3/4" box (one of the versions anyway).
We threw that matting in there because it didn't seem to benefit us on the 1/4" minus box.
Figured it might catch some gold in the 3/4" minus box coming off the rocks or from 1/4" minus that overflows if you feed it too quickly. Really don't find enough in that box to even warrant cleaning it out. The rubber matting was a waste of money in our situation.

 

[Placer Paul]

Boiler box at the top of the sluice box. basically a drop down trench with water coming into it from separate pipes than the sluice run water coming from the trommel. Best way to do it is to have two separate sluice runs with two different screen sizes in your trommel barrel. Put a smaller screen first then a larger one second. This way you don't have big material knocking smaller gold out of the sluice on it's way down. Like a 1/2" minus on the first screen/sluice and 3/4" or 1" minus on the second one. All depends on the size of nuggets and size of the majority of the gold is in the area you are mining. I've got friends that where they mine they only get the odd nugget in the 3/8" size so they don't have to worry about two screens, two sluice runs. They just have a boiler box trench on their sluice box at the top. But other guys I know run the way I mentioned above.