Location
Lyman, WY
About
What type of prospecting do you do?
hobby placer
Do you belong to any clubs?
no
How did you find the site?
you tube
Who referred you to the site (optional)?
no one
What kind of equipment do you use?
sluice, desert fox spiral pan, gold & sands hand dredge, drywasher
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Comments
Happy Birthday, Kevin!
Happy Birthday, Kevin!
Happy Birthday, Kevin!
Happy Birthday, Kevin!
Happy Birthday, Kevin!
Happy Birthday, Kevin!
Hi Kevin,
Thank you. it has been way more popular than I thought it would. It has turned out to be a very surprising little project. It's like having a mini Gold Cube. I have been running stuff through it every day for a little while and it keeps coming up with more gold. I like this little gadget.
At Solitude there is about a block long stretch of river that is level where I think much of the gold from up around Brighton gets dropped. There is another place where the beaver dams are that a lot of gold will collect. How much gets past the beaver dams I don't know. I get most of my material at the spruces campground just above them. I think that some float gold makes it down and there are other streams that empty into the river below that, that may have gold in them. I would just sample anywhere you can get to and see what you can come up with.
Any places you can see where the water slows down at all is a good place to look. Usually there are good pockets on the downstream side of large boulders where as the water comes around them and creates a quieter pool of water. The fish and gold both love those pockets. If you are a trout stream fisherman, just look for gold in the same places you would find a trout resting in a quiet eddy waiting for a munchie to come by.
I use my hand dredge to get the material out of the stream. Especially this time of the year. Although you can't wade in that water any time of the year. But in other streams where you can I still like to use the dredge. The one I built you can see here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wigj8MYbWkk
These are great tools to have and easy to build. Great for working bedrock also cause you can put narrow nozzles on them and get into the cracks. I mostly use the super sucker nozzle which is the one that has a piece of the full size tube coming out of a 45 degree elbow. That thing will suck up almost a quart of material in one stroke.
yea, I had problems with making miller tables out of pine, aluminum and plywood. They all have problems with warping and twisting. The key to the miller table working is absolute flatness and stability. That was why people liked the slate. It was stable, waterproof and could be ground to a fairly flat surface. That's why I chose the melamine board after 3 tables warped on me. just had my new plywood small one for the mini sluice warp on me after only 3 uses as well. The Melamine board is made out of sawdust mixed with glue and put under high pressure to cure. It is perfectly flat, can't warp or twist but if it gets wet for a long period of time it will fall apart. So you need to give it at least 3 coats of water proof paint before you start. I like the chalkboard paint. Its as cheap as any other and if you want to glue a Hobbico pad to the board it will bond to the glue. Melamine won't and the glue will come loose. Table no 4. The extra chalkboard paint comes in handy if you want to experiment with other sizes of miller tables. Or even make a chalkboard. :-)
I'll send my info to your E-mail and use that to make sure I have it right.
Catch ya later.
Hey Kevin,
Well, I spent the day working with the new sluice. I got about a half a dozen samples from everything I could find around to run through it. None of it should have had any gold in it. I ended up with about a gallon of material. I ran it all through the mini and then got out the Miller Table to see if by chance there might be some gold in it and there was. A fair amount to boot. So I spent the rest of the afternoon screening all the tailings down to -30 and -40 mesh to make sure any fine gold would show up and running it all on the Miller Table. That was 4 hours of wasted work. I didn't find a single piece of gold in the tailings and I was sure I would find some. This sluice just sucks all the black sand and gold out of anything you run on it. I really find it hard to believe that it is that efficient but all my tests come out the same. I'm wondering what I would get if I had a bucket of gold bearing dirt.
Yippers, I wouldn't mind a pound of your Arizona dirt to run through this sometime. Might be interesting.
You have probably heard of everyone running a bag of Home Depot sand through their sluices to see if they can get some gold? Well I have a couple of bags here I'm going to run through it to see what I get.
I have some more mat on the way to try and it should be here in a week. I'm going to make me something like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EbpfZmxP9s
I finished my YouTube video on the mini and it took all afternoon to upload the thing. It just finished about a half an hour ago. I'm not much at making videos but maybe someone will get some info out of it. If you are interested to see what it looks like it is at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3mL2wAOY7c&feature=youtu.be
Hi Kevin,
Yea, this little sluice is working better than I ever dreamed.
No I am using it as a primary sluice and just screening the material to minus 20 and feeding it in. It just seems to strip all the gold and black sand out of whatever you feed into it and dumps the rest. Even the very microscopic. I even ran the tailings through again and there was nothing left. Acts like a real gold magnet.
I can remove the water bar plate and just put it in the river if I wanted to. But I find that most of these sluices work better if powered by a pump. You can control the water much better. I just drop the pump into the river and set the sluice on a 5 gallon bucket. I am currently running it out of a 10 gallon tote in the front yard. I am hoping to condense the tote size down to make it more portable for road trips kinda like you do.
The sluice is 6" wide inside to fit 6" mat by 18" long and I'm using a 500 GPH pump running almost full power to supply the water.
Our warm weather is about to come to an end and we will go back to ice and snow next week so I'll have some time to work on a bigger one that I can run more material through. I also just ordered a different mat for it so I can interchange mats to see which works best. The pictures I sent in the previous note are from about less than half a gallon of material so I am interested in what I can get out of a 5 gallon bucket.
Everything I have run through this has had gold in it even though none of it comes from a gold bearing area. I even got some sand I picked up from the side of the road that had a fair amount of gold in it. All sand comes from ancient streams and I have been wondering if a lot of it had micro gold in it. Seems like that may be the case.
If you added an output tube on your fluid bed like Doc does on his cyclone you could just empty it right into one of these to catch the fine stuff the fluid bed kicks out. Here is what that set up looks like. You may be able to use just the outflow from your fluid bed to run this without adding any more pumps.
Here is Doc's set up with the Cyclone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWq4vf7HSeA
This is how I am currently running mine.
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