So I have been at it for a couple months now and I have a couple 5 gallon buckets of cons that have been screened down. Not real fine but soup strainer fine...LOL! Right now I have a couple Garrett panning kits and I put some window screen in the bottom of one of the classifiers and that is what the buckets are classified down to. I am working with pans and I have a CA Bucket Sluice set up on a recirculating system and after I run my cons through the Bucket Sluice a couple times I dump them into a 5 gal bucket (now I have two full). I know that down the road I plan on getting better equipment and plan on running these again to see what I missed but I am wondering......when do yall say enough is enough and dump those buckets out? Or do you have a stockpile of 5 gal. buckets full of dirt in the shed and the riding lawnmower on the side of the shed with a tarp over it?
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I always run my concentrates though a small clean-up sluice at least 3 times. If I find gold in the third run then I run it again...if not then I stop. YOU CAN'T GET IT ALL, just almost all. Most prospectors realize that no matter how good your equipment or you think your doing in the field...some goes out the end of your equipment...it just happens.
3rd times a charm! I have run all mine twice. I will save my dirt for a rainy day and run it one more time just to see.....
We call these the "Back Door Buckets". Keeping buckets because you think that there maybe gold in the dirt. After I run the dirt through my Gold Cube, I dispose of the dirt. I have proven to myself that the "cube" does such a fine job at capturing the gold, anything that is left, isn't worth the effort to try and retrieve.
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It looks like james is running his the way I run mine, in a shallow square tub with a recirculating pump.
I also prefer a variable DC power source to a battery or a garden hose. You might try a power supply from an H.O. railroad set.
I recently acquired two 5 gallon buckets of concentrated materials and am working on the first bucket for the 3rd time and still finding little pieces, although very tiny, could add up if enough are saved, I guess.
Jay "Tin Pan" Clawson I agree with you on the bucket sluice. I just run all the cons I had run through the bucket sluice one time (added up to a full 5 gal. bucket) and found a few little fines and that was it. I am really surprised how well it traps the fine gold.
When I run the bucket sluice I usually catch better than 90 percent, so if i find 100 specs in a batch and then re run the cons, I will find maybe ten more. If I run it a third time, I will find one more.
At that point, it's better to go get more cons.
Think of it this way. If the bucket contains $500.00 worth of gold would you save it till you get better at your recovery skills to get it out? So as a new Prospector, I would say that it would be a good idea to save the cons till your confident that you have the most value recovered from the cons. Then get rid of them. If a bucket has say $3.00 dollars of gold in it, do you feel that it's still worth the effort to get the dollars out of it. Thats a decision that you have to make. That tells you when it's time to dump them and go get more. Everybody has a different point at which they discard their old cons. Remember, that 1 grain of gold is worth around $3.oo today and that's a pretty small amount. Good Luck to you! Dickb
Thanks guys! I plan on keeping these for awhile and like I said I am new to this. I do see a few stacks of buckets in my future as I find myself in a creek every chance I get! LOL
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