Update: Spring 2020
Experiencing a bad case of cabin fever: too long cooped-up indoors. Snow is melting and I am busy getting my mining gear gathered for the upcoming season. This will be a year of intense sampling and testing. Lots of rich gravel pockets to sample. I am planning on purchasing a Gold Hog - if anyone has used this system with the full long-tom for fine gold recovery, please share your experience.
Sluice Box Sense
Do you use a sluice box in your search for gold? A standard sluice box is an excellent method of gold recovery. Sluice boxes are lightweight, simple and can be utilized in creeks, streams, and rivers to separate fine gold from gravel bars and sand deposits. The majority of commercially produced sluice boxes do a good job at grabbing and holding fine gold. However, a few precautions are in order to retrieve the most gold at the end of a long, hard day of mining.
Classifying Your Material Recovers More Gold
Large pebbles and rocks, bouncing down your sluice box, negatively impacts fine gold recovery. They jar and dislodge fine gold trapped in the ripples of the sluice, causing the gold to move and sometimes lost before it can resettle in the matting of the sluice. It pays to classify.
Use a screen or classifier to separate larger materials from fine gravels. Be sure to check your screen before tossing materials to be discarded. There may be a nugget hiding in the debris.
Classifying creates materials consistency, affecting the way gravels flow overtop the riffles of the sluice, helping to retain more fine gold particles than you would if shoveling directly in the sluice box.
Miner’s Moss – A Prospector’s Magic Trick
One of the most helpful inventions in the last century, miner’s moss replaces the old method of using potato sacks, or carpeting material was used to catch fine gold. Modern miner’s moss is designed to be placed laid under the expanded metal riffles of the modern sluice box and works exceptionally well in grabbing and holding flakes and fine gold.
Clay Can Be A Major Problem In Fine Gold Recovery
In many gold-bearing areas of the country, clay is a real problem. Clay clumps and holds small gold particles, preventing fine gold from settling in the riffles of a sluice box and keeping the box from working how it is supposed to work. When working in an area with heavy clays, classifying is crucial. While classifying, use your hands to break up clay clods that can carry fine gold out of the sluice box. It is also a good idea to feel the sluice box slower than you normally would to allow the sluice box to work efficiently.
Slow Down
When feeding your sluice box, don’t go after it “like you are killing snakes.” Take is easy and slow down. A common beginner’s mistake is to feed the sluice box too quickly. Overloading the sluice box impedes efficient operation: clogging up the riffles and allowing fine gold to tumble over and to be spilled out of the box.
Establish The Proper Water Flow Through Your Sluice Box
The sluice box should be placed in an area of water movement and positioned so that it falls one inch to the foot. When water is transported through the sluice box too slowly, riffles quickly clog with light materials such as gravel and sands, making it hard to catch the fine gold. When water moves to fast, fine gold is caught up in the whitewater turbulence causing the fine gold particles to be swept out the end of the sluice. It is important to experiment with the water flow, verifying that you have the right “fall” and that you are set up correctly.
Test One Area At Time
A common mistake of many inexperienced prospectors is to run materials from several different locations through their sluice box before doing a cleanup. In their excitement with looking for the elusive yellow metal, they take a few shovelfuls from a gravel bar, then run some bank material, or sand from behind a large stream boulder. While these are all good places to look for gold, if you do not focus on one spot and one spot only, when you do your cleanup and find gold in your concentrates, you will have no idea where they came from.
Rather than race up to the creek and immediately set up your sluice box, take the time to sample and test pan several spots that show promise. When you find the spot with the best color, then is the time to set up your equipment and process the gravels. Always run a minimum of a four-bucket (5-gallon buckets) test before cleanup. Make a note of the GPS location of your test site and keep a record of your results to help define your search area. Be sure to backfill all your test holes.
Do A Cleanup On Your Sluice More Often
A great many prospectors admit they just do a final cleanup of their sluice box at the end of the mining workday. While this may work fine in most areas, locations with an abundance of black sand or other heavy materials tend to clog the sluice. You will likely recover more fine gold if you do a clean up more often to ensure that your sluice box is working properly.
Take It Slow And Easy
When cleaning up, take special care to remove the sluice box from the stream in a way that no materials are lost. Carefully tip your sluice into a bucket before breaking the sluice box apart. Make sure to rinse and wash out mats and sluice box riffles.
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