DROP RIFFLE SLUICE Part 2
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- This is the second part of a video I made on Drop Riffle Sluices and is the "How To Build" video for anyone who is interested in building one.
This for those folks who would like to move up from a gold pan but don't want to put a lot of money into a sluice til they decide on whether or not the hobby is for them. These are also great for a scouting or boys club project as well.
You can find part 1 here:
• DROP RIFFLE SLUICE Part 1
This build is quite different from most homemade drop riffles in that it doesn't require a table saw or router to build. Mainly a hand saw, a drill and a couple of bits.
These sluices can be used as a recirculating sluice at home or with the removal of 4 screws made into a stream sluice. They can be made to any width or length the user desires.
I have spent a great deal of time testing these and they work very well. Especially when comes to catching the fine gold.
I don't how to illustrate this but I will try. I have watched your videos on riffles and enjoyed them all. The Drop Riffle in particular. Catching the Gold is all about controlled turbulance. Try this ; back of the riffle " / " front of the riffle " ) ". One behind the other an equal distance apart.
Hi Howard and thank you for taking the time to watch. Yes, your idea would be an interesting one to try. I’ll have to see if I can find a way to cut the curved part. I have been spending a lot of time working with the Silicone mats and I’ll have to spend some more on the hard drop riffles.
I must say Thank You.
I am retired and have built one of these Sluice Boxes and I must say it turned out excellent. Per your great video.
I love working in my shop and this was a fun project.
You just seem like a great guy who loves to share his expertise.
Hi Ron. Thanks for watching and building. Yes, even though I have some of the top of the line commercial equipment, I really like using my homemade equipment better. I have 6 of these and have tested them extensively and I'd have to say that they have much better gold catching abilities than my commercial sluices.
Built one like Glen Spryszak below did, almost to your specs. Made mine wider (12" wide and 60" long) and waterproofed the hell out of it with marine grade polyurethane clear coat. It actually out-performed a commercially built one my prospecting partner bought a few years ago. He liked it so much, he built one and now leaves his Keene at home when we go out. Thanks for sharing your build.
Hi Vin. Glad it worked out for you. A sluice that size should handle a lot of material. I've got a new heavier duty PVC stand build coming out that should be a really nice fit for that. It allows you to adjust the flow in the box quite a bit. If the water is too fast, just raise the front until you get the perfect flow. If you need more just lower the front. Allows you to work in almost any flow of water. I run mine in 18 inches of water and I classify my material and I can adjust the water flow to the size classification. Just like having an adjustable pump. I'd like to hear more on how it works for you this year. Best of Luck and many golden pans.
The rate of flow will determine the degree of rotation and the degree of flotation of the lighter material. You have designed them well as simplicity is the key. Water can move tons of sand with little effort. To understand sand and water the book "Waves and Beaches" by Willard Bascom. It's out of print but if you can find a copy; well worth the read. Thank you for your replys.
Hi Howard. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving. You’re right the water flow is a very big factor in how this all works. I find most prospectors run way too much water flow and it blows out most of the fine gold.
I got my router bit in and so I’ll have to spend some time putting a sluice and some riffles together. I think I’ll put a little different width on all the troughs to see how that works. Is that what you would like? any preference on the widths?
I’m finding that on my mats, a wider first trough works the best for catching gold and that is where the strongest action takes place. I may try that on this one. If you have any suggestions on what you’d like to see, let me know.
Another great build. I have made a pvc stand. I would like to see a short video on how you made your pvc stand and how it screws in to hold it's position. If you could.
Thank you. I have had several requests for my stand and so I'm currently trying to gather some clips and photos together to make a video on it. They really work very well, are cheap to make and 1 set of legs can easily be adapted to any size sluice.
I spent some time on trying to find a way to tighten the legs in position without any luck and the solution turned out to be the very simplest. I found that it can work for making all kinds of other PVC projects as well.
The space between the back of one riffle and the face of the other will determine the effectiveness of the flow. I would think that to keep the flow circular would yeild the best performance. I would think also that perhaps a larger riffle could be a little better. Let me know the results as one of my favorite subjects is hydraulics .
Yippers, changing the shape of the riffle can make a difference. For gold processing, I like to keep a circular flow in the trough as that picks up the finer material and takes it to the top of the trough so it can be carried on down stream. It's interesting that on the upstream edge of the trough, the very tiny black sand and gold collects and then slowly works down into the circular, spinning, processing area. If the water flow is proper, the finer gold will stay in the bottom of the trough. I'm currently working with a single 2 inch wide trough drop riffle. It works similar but has some rather interesting differences. I may have to do a longer mat and run it in the clear side sluice so I can watch it better.
I just made a silicone mat for my test sluice that has 1.5" wide troughs on it with small1/8" wide troughs on the bottom. I'm interested in how that one is going to work. Yep, hydraulics can be interesting.
"Rockler" will have the correct size router bit. Order on line. I am curious to hear how it works out. Giving a horizontal rotation between each riffle should allow the heavier gold to the upstream side. It may require a closer spacing. I have done most of my treasure hunting along the beaches of Florida .
Hi Howard. Yippers, it looks like they do although $50.00 is a bit steep for my pocket book for a 1 time run. Yea, I'm afraid social security doesn't pay enough for toys😢. However, I will shop around and see if I can find one that is in my price range. If I can find one, I'll play around with the spacing in between to see how that works out.
I have been working with Drop Riffle Silicone mats lately that are really incredible. Gold sticks to the silicone and if it comes in contact with the mat it sticks to it. I have some videos of them in action.
I'm going to see if I can get a clear side sluice video of it as well as with your suggestion.
Hi again Howard. I did find a router bit that fit the pocket book and it’s on its way. Should get here in about a week. So stay tuned and I’ll see if I can get something going.
Excellent tutorial. Thank you.
Thank you and thanks for watching.
Very very intelligent !
I think a thin coat of silicone on everything would be nice I like supercharging this thing.
Hi Peter and thanks for watching. This sluice works surprisingly well as is. That’s why this design has been around for 200 years. However you can thin Silicone down and paint the troughs and riffles and that will certainly improve the gold catch ability. If you paint the top slick plate with Rustoleum Chalkboard paint, the gold will stick to it while the other material slides off and you can quickly see if the dirt has any gold in it.
Hi Utah, I just sub'ed to your channel, You have some great video's on here. I'm working on an aluminum sluice when I came across this drop riffle box and am scraping the other and building this. With no garage ( I have a storage unit) this will be way easier to build.
After this gonna work on a blue bowl, that way I can work the cons in my apt......lol
Thanks an keep em coming.....
Chris
Thanks Chris and thanks for watching. These are some of the most efficient sluices I have come across and especially for catching the very fine gold. I have about 25 sluices and some of the top brand commercial sluices but these are what I use now days. You may also want to try building one of my cutting board Miller Tables for cleaning the gold out of the cons. It is part of my easy to build series. You can find it here:
ruclips.net/video/BPJfg2MWcjA/видео.html
You may also be interested in a video I'm working on right now for apartment dwellers or indoor winter prospectors. It's a recirculating table top set up with sluices and a miller table you can run on a counter top. I run mine in the bathtub for easy cleanup.
Yes I saw the Miller table and that is next. By next wekend I'll have the sluice ready to go.
Thanks
Thanks and GodBless.
Hi Howard. I.m on a highly censored and controlled system in a hospital but I thought I’d let you know the sluicing May be awhile yet. I got the latest Covid-19 along with pneumonia and the flue. So don’t know if or when I’ll get out. May be another month here.
Thank you for letting me know about the health issues you are experiencing. My prayers are with you. Please keep in touch as to how you are doing. May you get well quickly. ...GodBless , get well.
Thank you. This second batch of Covid is much stronger than the first one because they mixed it with pneumonia and flue viruses as well. Bill Gates made it special for most damage. And it worked.
Hi , It's me again. A cove bit in a router would work for the riffle.....
Hi Howard. Yep, that would work. I checked all the stores around here for one but unfortunately no one has one in the size I need. I’ll have to see if I can find one in one in a bigger city.
excellent work
Thanks Thomas and thanks for watching.
Took your idea and built one with an OAL of 72 inches, the last 10 inches has no bottom so the sides act as legs. Inside width is 11 inches. Sides are 5 1/2 inches high. Just a very few modifications regarding the riffle angles and even made a spot where I could put carpet identical to Miner's moss. It works great. It is even large enough to be made into a dredge by adding flotation to the sides. (my next creation).
Glen Spryszak
Hi Glen. Sorry RUclips is not notifying me of comments. I think your sluice will be one serious gold catcher. You can really make a lot of modifications to these to improve them. I wish you the best of luck.
If it were me I would try to keep the flow as circular as possible . The water that gets picked up by the upper edge of the Riffle will rotate to the rear and then up. The rear of the riffle being angular will trap the heavy material (gold) . Let me know how this plays out. You may need to change the distance between the riffles but not a lot ,I would think. You are correct on the flow rate. I have watched a lot of folks and many run way too fast. ( a gate valve will work better for flow control if you can find one made of a material other than brass. )
Well Howard, I got the riffles built and installed in the sluice. We had a nice day in the 40’s last week that looked good to run. Unfortunately I came down with a very bad case of Whatzit. Extremely miserable but no doctor would treat me till today. And that was only on a telephone call. Yup it is a confirmed case of Whatzit all right. He thought I sounded like I would be dead by sundown and so he wanted me to stop by and give him my Medicare card no. Before I croaked. So I did but out of curiosity he ran a bunch of tests to see what I had. It seems I have a common cold with an extreme strep throat and a case of COVID-19 without 2 symptoms. I also have double pneumonia without lung damage but with all the rest of the fun things that go with it. So it may be awhile til I get in shape to run the sluice. So hang in there, I’m trying to get to it.
Thanks Harold. I got your e-mail and erased it from here. I get in touch if I make it through this mess. Take care, really bad bugs out there.
Great build. Utah But I have a question. Wouldn't cutting one side of the riffles at a 45 degree angle (say on the downward side), which would create a "Vortex" to better draw the heavies (i.e. Gold), down into the bottom? A lot of the research by manufacture's seem to bear out that fact, so they manufacture their sluices with that fact in mind for their riffle designs.
Hi Op. Yes, cutting an angle on the bottom will create the vortex you mention and does improve the catching ability of these sluices. On mine I cut a 20 or 30 degree angle on the bottom of both sides of the rifle so it kind of looks like an upside down pyramid. 1 1/4" wide on the top and 1/2" on the bottom. This catches the gold much easier and gives it a more secure place to hide. I have spent a year with clear sided sluices testing and filming different riffle designs so I can watch how they work in slow motion. The angled bottom of the riffle is definitely the best although it requires a table saw or such to cut the angles.
The sluices in these videos are primarily designed for those folks who want an inexpensive, very simple and easy to build sluice that will do a good job of catching gold and doesn't require many tools.
There are many commercial sluices out there that work on the drop riffle principle like these and over the past 50 years, I have tried and owned quite a number of them. These sluices will work just as well as any on the market if not better due to the deeper slots plus you can modify them to your heart’s content and make them any width or length you want. I have some from 3” wide to 30” wide.
It’s also easy to build a hopper to set on top and make a very good high banker. Check out the G1 and G2 highbanker sluices for examples.
Awesome!
Hey, Utah. Thanks for stopping by. That was my backpacking setup for several years. It caught a lot of gold. A gentleman up in Minnesota who was just starting out made a big version and made enough his first year to buy a big highbanker. These are easy to build and really catch the gold due to the deep riffles.
Follow up to previous posting - When I mentioned cutting the riffles at a 45 degree angle, I was referring to them being placed with the bottom side being recessed backward (smaller at the bottom, wider at the top), to create the "Vortex" effect. If you follow what I am meaning?
I would love to watch your test where you caught every single fleck of gold eight times in a row.
was that just pure gold you ran or was it mixed with sand , and how much sand ?
Sorry, I don’t have any video on that. The material was a gallon of sand 20 to 50 mesh with about 1 gram of fine gold and black sand mixed in.
@@utahavalanch I would imagine you be feeding it very very slowly , unlike something you be doing on the creek , where there simply is not enough time to classify the material down to 20 mesh.
i classify down to 1/4 inch by using a trommel.
@@mohammednovalija
Yes, I usually wait for about a minute in between scoops so I don’t overload it. And allow the troughs to clear a little space. But I’m usually not in a hurry. I make 1 gallon screening buckets with 8 mesh screen on the bottom and I can screen 1 gallon in about 3 minutes with it. Our gold here is very small and so the 8 mesh will be way larger than the gold. I would love to have a trommel but I can’t get out and work the claims any longer so I can’t justify it.😢
Nowdays I mostly search for small pockets of gold using my black sand probe and collect and work them. It’s funny, I work about as much dirt in a whole season as I used to do on a good weekend and get about 8 times more gold.😁
@@utahavalanch LOL - you must be working smarter and not harder
@@mohammednovalija
Well what got it started, was my grandson had been coming to my house to pan the dirt I brought back from the field and one Saturday I ran out. He said that’s ok I’ll bring some. If you watched my urban prospecting video you will see what happened. I asked him where he got it and he said, “out of the gutter”. Long story short, we ended up with 28 grams of gold that summer from the gutters around town and my street.
So I’ve kept up with it and I find way more gold than I ever did working the river.
If you saw my video on the Redneck vac, I use that to clean out cracks and pot holes in the streets that act like sluice riffles. I find that cars and trucks coming from other parts of the country, drop mud with gold in it on the roads and in parking lots when it rains and the splashing water washes it off. They sand the streets in the winter with sand that has gold in it and the topping on the old roads is crushed rock that has gold in it and as the road breaks down over the year, the gold and gravel gets washed into the gutters for us. Most of it is very small but there is a quite a bit of it so it adds up. I put a handle on my black sand probe and make a cane out of it and walk around town and check any little or large piles of dirt for black sand. If I find a good amount I take a sample and pan it when I get home. If there is gold I go back.
Funny thing is, I live in the worst part of a “No Gold” state.😝
Just 1 quick question what direction should the angle cut be facing, towards the top or bottom?
Hi mike, I'm finding that the angle works best facing toward the top of the sluice or upstream. I'm still trying to figure out the best angle. In my video on the drop riffle tests 20 degrees worked out quite well. I now have a sluice with 30 degree angle cut but I haven't had a chance to run it yet. The 20 degree pitch seemed to give more action than the straight up and down and the material coming into the trough would get stockpiled toward the back and eventually make it to the front where it would be processed. I'm working on a new video on this but I'll let you know ahead of time, round the nose on the bottom of the slick plate so it dumps the material down into the first trough. I'm finding that gold hits the bottom of the slick plate and follows it right along until it comes to the end. if the end curves down into the trough then that's where it will end and the lighter material just over shoots it. Set your water flow to catch all of the Black sand and gold into the first trough. There is gold in that black sand and people who try to wash it out are losing a lot of gold. When the trough fills up with black sand, do a clean out. How to process the black sand is one of 7 videos I'm currently working on. Takes time to test these ideas out as to whether they work or not. :-D
@@utahavalanch Once again sir your info is great and thank you, keep the videos coming.
@@MichaelJohnson-ux7pe
Thank you. I'm trying but I have too many ideas coming in for the time I have to work on it. :-D
What size is the PVC for spray bar?
soap on a rope
On the sluices I use 3/4" to get more water flow and 1/2" on the Miller Tables as they don't need much flow. Thanks for watching.