You are on the right tract about fine gold . Think of your plywood analogy . I usually use the sheet of paper in the wind analogy and it is gone to. Crumple up that same sheet of paper into a ball and it does not go far If you go wide for the alberta gold dispence with the expanded for most of the whole distance . The old timers that were experienced with flour gold of the cotton wood and fraser in a bigger operation did not use large swaths of water as the gold rush boys .They used just enough to create an exchange of material that was it. One even said he knew if the gravel water mix was right by the distinct sound he heard coming from the sluice . As you have said the golden fleece works very well for flour gold . That is because it does not create large turbulences to create the sheet of paper in the wind effect . The fibers in the wool caught the small flat gold as it moved in the flat position along the bottom of the classified gravel . Found 1/4" screened gravel worked well for Saskatchewan river gold as well as the cotton wood . It works so well that as per the picture I sent you it had approximately 3 grams of gold in it on a piece of wool ( same wool I sent you) that was only 9"long X13"wide on a 24 degree angle. One will notice that flour gold far from source will be always flat . James Gibbons basically perfected Saskatchewan river gold recovery in the 1800s using only a old wool blanket on a steep 24 degree slope in his grizzly . It worked very well because I used an exact replica of that grizzly . 95+% efficient and it could handle all I could shovel with pumped water . Kyle Your understanding of what you are working with will get you a better sluice box and people will clammer to get a copy of it once zeroed in . Great video
You are 100% spot on here and have touched on so many topics that can be expanded on. Lots of factors go into how a sluice works and how efficiently. Flow (width/depth/velocity), pitch, recovery material all have a specific setting for the gold and material you are processing. Hard part is finding the right system! Thanks for talking about the importance of classification. It’s absolutely key for recovering the most gold possible.
There is a guy named Ray in Juneau alaska, he used to focus on beach mining sand and did a workup on a long tom sluice on super fines. He showed that for that kind of material in a 12 foot sluice it would just keep capturing diminishing amounts of gold all the way to the end. Might give something to consider. I personally got a sump system from Keene, mine is for a 6 inch mini with a sump box at the bottom without about 1/8th inch wire mesh arranged so that it is slightly under water in operation and there is a 2 inch suction hose that runs off the auxillary water outlet on the pump. It picks up all the fines and runs them through a much slower secondary box. This allows a higher rate of flow for throughput and a slower rate of flow for the fines in a secondary box. The mini 6" dredge is 3 stage so in the middle there is s drop out for the fines as well that then runs under a plate and thereby limits flow rate for the fines out of the faster box. That secondary stage also drops out into the fines sump. So there are two ways to speed up throughput and capture fines. Wandering Buffalos has a video of this style of setup, though I think their box isn't a 3 stage. So in a nutshell you can run more material while still recovering fines by limiting flow under a plate, increasing the length of the box, and adding a sump with secondary slower sluice. As far as width goes running wider won't make fines fall out, esp in richer ground. As all of the areas we mine get mined out we need to move material AND capture fines, since they often compose the majority of the remaining gold. The main trade off with pulling fines is slowing throughput, the reason I would argue that simply going wider is not as good a solution is that you end up trading throughput for fines capture. Would prefer to do both. Fines only fallout so fast, and if they are flat little fines it has to be in a slower sluice imo. not sure if I can link in the comments but you can look this up "3/4 OUNCE OF GOLD IN 6 HOURS: Keene 6" Super Max Dredge in Alaska" P.S. if you talk to Mark Keene there is a particular spacing of wire mesh and diameters that can systematically slow down water flow beneath while allowing faster water to go over the top.
I've watched a ton of Ray's videos. Great info. ruclips.net/video/BrvWD3rExhc/видео.html The keene screened sump is the best fine gold recovery potential I've seen in a small scale suction dredge, great concept!
I've enjoyed watching your journey as you progress through the learning curve.👍 Some say it never ends. Classification down to 8 to 12 mesh without mechanical means at shovel rate isn't easy to do. Mechanical Classification of course adds weight, cost and complexity. Ideally I'd want a vibrating deck spray wash to classify oversize down to about 3/4" minus that then feeds into a trommel with an 8 to 12 mesh screen sprayed again from the outside at about 9 o'clock if rotating clockwise. Finally I'd want to feed that undersize into the sluice via a gold cube type header that supplies ~80% of the sluice water and forces the material down then up slightly and into the sluice from the bottom. As for the sluice I'd want low coefficient of friction, low profile drop riffle similar to the letrap. I might consider magnetic repulsion to keep those heavy black sands moving. Looking forward to your results with the new highbanker design. I do have some concerns with the rocks getting stuck in the screen potentially effecting water flow into the sluice but only time and running material will tell.
Low, slow and wide. great advice for AB gold. Laminar flow can be tough in an active system. One needs the energy to activly move the debris and yet capture the smallest of the heavies. I think uniformity, or screening is very important pre sluice. Not only do you wash and presoak material, but you lesson the energy required to move the debris. But this is a time and energy sacrifice. Still liking the pop and son, with smaller expanded for more cells and less turbulance, but ur and drop riffles seem to be doing great jobs with less flow and material, but is there a sacrafice in losses, volume and throughput. Goldthief also has some great ideas in reducing MM volume of materials but I see losses on his wash end posssibly. It boils down to efficiency. test and run only good ground and do a good job at it. Leave the rest for the gold gods great talk..thanks for the fodder
Excellent information that I have self processed many times over the years. Something that should be understood also is the multiple classifications that it takes to make this all work properly according to mat aggression, water flow, and degree. Great point made on vortex workability!
Interesting topic. Thirty plus years ago, some of the most popular and successful highbanker designs in the Edmonton area were 12" wide, 2-3 mm V matting, often with the width expanding as it reached it's 3 foot length. The material was screened to about 1/8 -1/4 inches and the sluice worked with a fairly mild flow rate. The Canadian version of the original Le'Trap came out and also became popular with good gold retention due to it's unique design (a topic in itself). As the years passed, highbankers became longer, sometimes wider and more powerful water pumps were utilized to make the large riffles function properly. Bigger, more power was the mantra. Riffles were of a great interest, and many theories floated around which and why certain ones were best. I also believe that BC had an influence on an increasing aggressive system influence in Alberta due to their more chunky gold. Using your analogy of Alberta gold and it's characteristics, the designs 30+ years ago were much more effective with gold retention. In this case, the tortoise won the race. The later units with more aggressively designed highbankers had people shoveling gravel into the units like crazy, probably losing plenty of gold and coming home with pails full of concentrates which had to be processed to remove the fine, Alberta flour gold. We currently live in a time where there are many more choices of designs for highbankers. It really is a requirement today to ask a lot of questions and do some research before you go out and buy or build a highbanker to be used in your environment.
Thanks for the shout-out Kyle!! The current site I am at is a odd deposit where we dont have a lot of fine gold . You can do 10 pans and not find a single spec of gold but once it is highbanked or processed through the trommel it shows up. It is all fairly large gold, so that 1 piece in the 11th pan, is like averaging 10-15 pieces per pan. I have mined on the swift river in the past and my capture rate was 70%-80%. At that time I was running 40 yph and was finding a lot of flour gold in my tailings..... I had to dial the washplant back 25% to 30 yph on a 6 foot wide box just to get to an appropriate 75% capture rate. Like a lot of people say in the comments, a person just finds an appropriate loss to gain ratio and goes with it. I know I've said this before but your always so comfortable on camera.
Just remember me when you hit 100k subs Tyler!! You're videos are great 👍. It's kinda crazy if you were to go after that bonus 20 or 30% in a fine gold area you would need 40 feet of sluice width to keep up with 40 yards per hour if you followed pop'n'son beach gold specs. I remember seeing a New Zealand beach 4" dredge with what looked like a 3 level 4 foot wide sluice... running 12 feet of recovery width on a 4" dredge. The lengths we go to... haha! I wonder if a screened sump system very similar to what keene uses on their 6" super max would be worth trying on your next fine gold containing claim... just try pulling the sub 1/8" from 12" of your sluice run through a 3" dredge hose into a 4 foot box or something... would be a neat mini experiment but not sure how much it would be worth the hassle vs just an extra few feet of normal sluice run. Anyways, I'm looking forward to your next videos and the 2023 mining season!
For fine gold.. the wider the better.. especially at high rate of feed. Layering screens will help catch smaller gold also because it gives deeper catches and slows the material down
@@MrSmilinghuman sadly there is only 1 or 2 videos that i have found and they are both made by Shell,more of a demo video than anything. They dont go into very good detail on there classification process.
Met you when you were running your 24 inch wood box and your old yellow boat with a mercury prop outboard must of been 2014!! crazy how I am doing exactly what you doing so glad to see you going crazy go boy go!
Great memory, that's awesome! That old yellow boat was the best! Yeah 2014 was the year of the prop outboard, then in 2015 I put a small jet outboard on the wooden boat. ruclips.net/video/J_7-hZD5WJQ/видео.html Maybe see you out there again sometime...
Good talk. I would love to see few visual demonstrations and comparisons at some point. I'm working on my first sluice for Iowa gold that is about 19inches wide and about 36inches long. I have a new riffle design I'm making from silicone. We'll see how it all works out. My partner and our son are going with me as soon as this heatwave ends. We're going to try prospecting as a family hobby! I will try to post up some videos on my new channel as soon as we can get out there without dying of heat stroke.
I’ve noticed with the Alberta gold with my kene mini max that if I classify it down, then scoop it in I get the best results. Cheers to another season just around the corner
Seive, seive and seive... run a known size and flatness material with a known flow rate... small size gold becomes super critical to water flow rate... guessing means loosing gold... corey shape flatness counts... test pan, 10x lupe examine corey shape... do backyard homework trials before going into field... guessing means loosing gold because you don't know...
The gold I have been seeing is fine flat gold . I have noticed the because the water is not deep the gold has a tendency to get picked up by the surface water . In order to get the gold to sink it must be pushed down below that water surface .
Yup there's so many variables when it comes to catching gold. Test this try that change everything 😂It's fun getting dialed in. Funny thing is after getting dialed in now you're ready for bigger and better. Whole new learning curve lmao
I always wondered if those big operations on Gold Rush run their water too fast to capture the flour gold. When they show you their weigh-in, I don't usually see a lot of flour gold. It's usually pickers.
those guys in all honesty prob loose more than most prospectors..there about running high volumes not 100% capture...there trading running more material and bigger gold for loss of some of the flour golds...basically...
A 2 foot wide sluice is simply two 1 foot wide sluices stuck together. If you have the next shovel load ready before the 1 foot wide sluice is ready to accept it , then you need a 2 foot wide sluice. So the width of a sluice is determined ONLY by your feed rate. That is assuming that you are not limited by not being able to increase your water flow in sympathy with the increase in width.
Thanks. I see your sluice is on a similar path of running finely classified material, but you enjoy a narrower sluice run. I like your black sand separator design, it looks like it works great, but on the NSR no point in separating black sand from the sluice as about 50% of black sand here is non magnetic. And even just the non magnet sand still fills the sluice in under 50 shovels in many places. I tried a classifier like yours once but couldn't quite dial it in to keep from loosing some flakes with the jettisoned water, but it looks like you have yours dialed in pretty well! What sort of bank run feed rate does your machine keep up with? It looks like a finely tuned machine, and I like the design of your side discharge indicator mat.
Can you point me to a video of the machine running at that rate where tailings are tested on the nsr? I find your claim is far too good to be true. I mean... 5 yards per hour per foot of sluice width with great fine flat gold recovery...? No mater how well thought out the machine is, that claim defies any and all information I have ever seen publicized about any sluice. I mean, you may have reinvented the highbanker, but a sluice is a pretty basic tool and I can't see your's behaving any differently just because it's attached to a cool invention. Looks like a 30lb machine connected to any other 6" sluice? I'm sorry, I'm just one who likes to see things demonstrated with real evidence, especially when wild claims are being made is all. I might do a local meet-up one of these days, If you know someone around edmonton who wants to let me borrow theirs, I could do a real world test in a video if you like.
I think the length of the sluice is more important than width. If a sluice is wide and not long enough, gold will still tumble off the end because it lacks time to settle. If a sluice is narrow but long, you can move a lot of dirt through it and the gold will settle as the dirt washes/tumbles down the sluice. The narrow/long sluice would allow you to move more dirt through it at a higher flow rate. Obviously there are always different types of gold so you need to adjust flow rates/sluice angle to compensate
That's an interesting take. One thing to consider is that if you are running a wide and slow sluice, it takes the gold and sand the same time to travel 3 or 4 feet as it would to travel 6 or 8 feet in a faster running sluice. I would be concerned that after running for 8 hours straight without a cleanup, the long sluice may have time to slowly scour out the gold caught in the first half of the day and slowly let it work it's way down and out without you knowing. The flat gold that is. But the long sluice approach is what Ray Rusaw uses up in Alaska and seems to have pretty good success, so it might just be a matter of either approach works and you just have to pick where you put your mats.
@@UtmostOutdoors Hmm, I wonder if you might think of the chances of a flat flake settling instead of behaving like a sail as an expression of statistical chance?. It doesn't settle evenly, so the chances of it settling are still lower in a wider box with a lower flow. The wider and slower flow would be a better drop rate on gold of course but it's a flat peice flipping through the water flow you need it to get more tries to plant itself. That might be the way the long narrow boxes work. Also the way that ultra fine gold distributes down a long tom to the very end is very evenly distributed and diminishes the deposit size at each riffle. Each riffle that the gold passes over it gets another chance to flip in such a way that it plants. In fact your sheet analogy works just like that, you can't predict the number of twists in the wind it will turn before it plants as long as there is enough force to keep it airborne, but once it plants again it much harder to pick back up.
Boulderboy is right. I've watched guys using Beach boxes 24" wide and 4 feet long in Nome slow feeding shovels in it and they lose all kinds of gold because you don't have enough length for the material to tumble through in time to displace the fine gold through gravity. Gold Hog has a 13 feet Super Hog and it has 98+% capture rate even with sub 100 mesh gold in the mix running 6 to 7,000 GPH . Its widest spot is 18" but you can literally shoot 4-5 yards an hour through it (if you're humanly capable of shovelling that much). If you go look at the history of Nome beach mining, you'll see a picture of ALL of the gold miners running LONG TOMS . 15 feet sluice boxes 12 to 15" wide. As far as running 8 hours and worrying about gold building up and skirting over the top of material after a while....example.. You run a super hog and you keep your eye on the last section. Once you see gold forming in the riffles in the last section...its time to turn it off and clean out your mats, because one of two things are happening. You have a CRAP TON of gold in your sluice...or...something is wrong in your set up (i.e. angles, feed rate, water flow) and you need to address it. If I ran a highbanker for 8 hours I'd stop and clean the mats out after 4 hours just redundancy.
Yes, I have a couple ready to go, but I'm away from the shop right now and so I put the inventory to zero until I return home. If you're interested in one, email me and I'll get back to you once I'm back. Cheers.
@@UtmostOutdoors Thanks, Ill probably send you an email on a few weeks once I have the money. How many buckets do you think you could put through it before having to do a clean-out?
Sounds good. I personally just run until I'm done. In my full size highbanker I did a few runs of 6 hours with full speed shoveling into the same style of matting and it still seemed to be well over 90% recovery with almost no scouring losses when run empty between shovels. Perhaps clean up more often if you're in a really hot spot or start seeing a lot of flakes near the bottom lip. I suspect for bulk sampling runs I would just cleanout once at the end of my dig.
it is all a compromise, (weight and portability is one thing), (More Volume vs recovery % is another thing). % of recovery you are happy with, [100% of nothing is]? 70 to 80 % of something is? [a percentage is something is better than 100% of nothing] then we figure the area we are working with). Ron.
It all comes down to acceptable loss rates for your production/cost ratio. The bigger u go, time becomes a factor its apples and oranges when u go from a 1 man beach operation to a full production 100yph washplant.
Gold does not change the bigger your operation . . you adapt the larger operation to accommodate the large volume . I worked with an old timer that just up scaled is hand shoveling sluice so he could use a one yard drag line filling his boiler box . I mucked for him in that boiler box . He refused to accept acceptable losses
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You are on the right tract about fine gold . Think of your plywood analogy . I usually use the sheet of paper in the wind analogy and it is gone to. Crumple up that same sheet of paper into a ball and it does not go far If you go wide for the alberta gold dispence with the expanded for most of the whole distance . The old timers that were experienced with flour gold of the cotton wood and fraser in a bigger operation did not use large swaths of water as the gold rush boys .They used just enough to create an exchange of material that was it. One even said he knew if the gravel water mix was right by the distinct sound he heard coming from the sluice . As you have said the golden fleece works very well for flour gold . That is because it does not create large turbulences to create the sheet of paper in the wind effect . The fibers in the wool caught the small flat gold as it moved in the flat position along the bottom of the classified gravel . Found 1/4" screened gravel worked well for Saskatchewan river gold as well as the cotton wood . It works so well that as per the picture I sent you it had approximately 3 grams of gold in it on a piece of wool ( same wool I sent you) that was only 9"long X13"wide on a 24 degree angle. One will notice that flour gold far from source will be always flat . James Gibbons basically perfected Saskatchewan river gold recovery in the 1800s using only a old wool blanket on a steep 24 degree slope in his grizzly . It worked very well because I used an exact replica of that grizzly . 95+% efficient and it could handle all I could shovel with pumped water . Kyle Your understanding of what you are working with will get you a better sluice box and people will clammer to get a copy of it once zeroed in . Great video
You are 100% spot on here and have touched on so many topics that can be expanded on. Lots of factors go into how a sluice works and how efficiently.
Flow (width/depth/velocity), pitch, recovery material all have a specific setting for the gold and material you are processing. Hard part is finding the right system!
Thanks for talking about the importance of classification. It’s absolutely key for recovering the most gold possible.
Classification is as you say key as well as building for shape of gold
There is a guy named Ray in Juneau alaska, he used to focus on beach mining sand and did a workup on a long tom sluice on super fines. He showed that for that kind of material in a 12 foot sluice it would just keep capturing diminishing amounts of gold all the way to the end. Might give something to consider. I personally got a sump system from Keene, mine is for a 6 inch mini with a sump box at the bottom without about 1/8th inch wire mesh arranged so that it is slightly under water in operation and there is a 2 inch suction hose that runs off the auxillary water outlet on the pump. It picks up all the fines and runs them through a much slower secondary box. This allows a higher rate of flow for throughput and a slower rate of flow for the fines in a secondary box. The mini 6" dredge is 3 stage so in the middle there is s drop out for the fines as well that then runs under a plate and thereby limits flow rate for the fines out of the faster box. That secondary stage also drops out into the fines sump. So there are two ways to speed up throughput and capture fines. Wandering Buffalos has a video of this style of setup, though I think their box isn't a 3 stage.
So in a nutshell you can run more material while still recovering fines by limiting flow under a plate, increasing the length of the box, and adding a sump with secondary slower sluice. As far as width goes running wider won't make fines fall out, esp in richer ground. As all of the areas we mine get mined out we need to move material AND capture fines, since they often compose the majority of the remaining gold. The main trade off with pulling fines is slowing throughput, the reason I would argue that simply going wider is not as good a solution is that you end up trading throughput for fines capture. Would prefer to do both. Fines only fallout so fast, and if they are flat little fines it has to be in a slower sluice imo.
not sure if I can link in the comments but you can look this up "3/4 OUNCE OF GOLD IN 6 HOURS: Keene 6" Super Max Dredge in Alaska"
P.S. if you talk to Mark Keene there is a particular spacing of wire mesh and diameters that can systematically slow down water flow beneath while allowing faster water to go over the top.
I've watched a ton of Ray's videos. Great info. ruclips.net/video/BrvWD3rExhc/видео.html
The keene screened sump is the best fine gold recovery potential I've seen in a small scale suction dredge, great concept!
@@UtmostOutdoors we love Rayzer
I've enjoyed watching your journey as you progress through the learning curve.👍 Some say it never ends.
Classification down to 8 to 12 mesh without mechanical means at shovel rate isn't easy to do.
Mechanical Classification of course adds weight, cost and complexity.
Ideally I'd want a vibrating deck spray wash to classify oversize down to about 3/4" minus that then feeds into a trommel with an 8 to 12 mesh screen sprayed again from the outside at about 9 o'clock if rotating clockwise. Finally I'd want to feed that undersize into the sluice via a gold cube type header that supplies ~80% of the sluice water and forces the material down then up slightly and into the sluice from the bottom.
As for the sluice I'd want low coefficient of friction, low profile drop riffle similar to the letrap. I might consider magnetic repulsion to keep those heavy black sands moving.
Looking forward to your results with the new highbanker design. I do have some concerns with the rocks getting stuck in the screen potentially effecting water flow into the sluice but only time and running material will tell.
Low, slow and wide. great advice for AB gold. Laminar flow can be tough in an active system. One needs the energy to activly move the debris and yet capture the smallest of the heavies. I think uniformity, or screening is very important pre sluice. Not only do you wash and presoak material, but you lesson the energy required to move the debris. But this is a time and energy sacrifice. Still liking the pop and son, with smaller expanded for more cells and less turbulance, but ur and drop riffles seem to be doing great jobs with less flow and material, but is there a sacrafice in losses, volume and throughput. Goldthief also has some great ideas in reducing MM volume of materials but I see losses on his wash end posssibly. It boils down to efficiency. test and run only good ground and do a good job at it. Leave the rest for the gold gods
great talk..thanks for the fodder
Excellent information that I have self processed many times over the years. Something that should be understood also is the multiple classifications that it takes to make this all work properly according to mat aggression, water flow, and degree. Great point made on vortex workability!
Interesting topic. Thirty plus years ago, some of the most popular and successful highbanker designs in the Edmonton area were 12" wide, 2-3 mm V matting, often with the width expanding as it reached it's 3 foot length. The material was screened to about 1/8 -1/4 inches and the sluice worked with a fairly mild flow rate. The Canadian version of the original Le'Trap came out and also became popular with good gold retention due to it's unique design (a topic in itself). As the years passed, highbankers became longer, sometimes wider and more powerful water pumps were utilized to make the large riffles function properly. Bigger, more power was the mantra. Riffles were of a great interest, and many theories floated around which and why certain ones were best. I also believe that BC had an influence on an increasing aggressive system influence in Alberta due to their more chunky gold.
Using your analogy of Alberta gold and it's characteristics, the designs 30+ years ago were much more effective with gold retention. In this case, the tortoise won the race. The later units with more aggressively designed highbankers had people shoveling gravel into the units like crazy, probably losing plenty of gold and coming home with pails full of concentrates which had to be processed to remove the fine, Alberta flour gold. We currently live in a time where there are many more choices of designs for highbankers. It really is a requirement today to ask a lot of questions and do some research before you go out and buy or build a highbanker to be used in your environment.
Well said!
Thanks for the shout-out Kyle!!
The current site I am at is a odd deposit where we dont have a lot of fine gold . You can do 10 pans and not find a single spec of gold but once it is highbanked or processed through the trommel it shows up. It is all fairly large gold, so that 1 piece in the 11th pan, is like averaging 10-15 pieces per pan. I have mined on the swift river in the past and my capture rate was 70%-80%. At that time I was running 40 yph and was finding a lot of flour gold in my tailings..... I had to dial the washplant back 25% to 30 yph on a 6 foot wide box just to get to an appropriate 75% capture rate.
Like a lot of people say in the comments, a person just finds an appropriate loss to gain ratio and goes with it.
I know I've said this before but your always so comfortable on camera.
Just remember me when you hit 100k subs Tyler!! You're videos are great 👍.
It's kinda crazy if you were to go after that bonus 20 or 30% in a fine gold area you would need 40 feet of sluice width to keep up with 40 yards per hour if you followed pop'n'son beach gold specs. I remember seeing a New Zealand beach 4" dredge with what looked like a 3 level 4 foot wide sluice... running 12 feet of recovery width on a 4" dredge. The lengths we go to... haha!
I wonder if a screened sump system very similar to what keene uses on their 6" super max would be worth trying on your next fine gold containing claim... just try pulling the sub 1/8" from 12" of your sluice run through a 3" dredge hose into a 4 foot box or something... would be a neat mini experiment but not sure how much it would be worth the hassle vs just an extra few feet of normal sluice run.
Anyways, I'm looking forward to your next videos and the 2023 mining season!
For fine gold.. the wider the better.. especially at high rate of feed. Layering screens will help catch smaller gold also because it gives deeper catches and slows the material down
Really good knowledge! Love watching these videos and actually learning something. Thank you !
My pleasure!
Shell Dredging,they are badass dredges.
Shell dredges have a dynamic classification process that enables them to run the smaller sluices.
I am really curious about that dredge classification system they use, I don't suppose you have found any videos that cover the Shell dredges?
@@MrSmilinghuman sadly there is only 1 or 2 videos that i have found and they are both made by Shell,more of a demo video than anything. They dont go into very good detail on there classification process.
Met you when you were running your 24 inch wood box and your old yellow boat with a mercury prop outboard must of been 2014!! crazy how I am doing exactly what you doing so glad to see you going crazy go boy go!
Great memory, that's awesome! That old yellow boat was the best! Yeah 2014 was the year of the prop outboard, then in 2015 I put a small jet outboard on the wooden boat. ruclips.net/video/J_7-hZD5WJQ/видео.html
Maybe see you out there again sometime...
Very interesting, a lot of fantastic information not just for beginners but also for advanced people, really enjoyed it 🇦🇺⛏️🤠
Glad it was helpful!
Good talk. I would love to see few visual demonstrations and comparisons at some point. I'm working on my first sluice for Iowa gold that is about 19inches wide and about 36inches long. I have a new riffle design I'm making from silicone. We'll see how it all works out. My partner and our son are going with me as soon as this heatwave ends. We're going to try prospecting as a family hobby! I will try to post up some videos on my new channel as soon as we can get out there without dying of heat stroke.
I’ve noticed with the Alberta gold with my kene mini max that if I classify it down, then scoop it in I get the best results. Cheers to another season just around the corner
Seive, seive and seive... run a known size and flatness material with a known flow rate... small size gold becomes super critical to water flow rate... guessing means loosing gold... corey shape flatness counts... test pan, 10x lupe examine corey shape... do backyard homework trials before going into field... guessing means loosing gold because you don't know...
The gold I have been seeing is fine flat gold . I have noticed the because the water is not deep the gold has a tendency to get picked up by the surface water . In order to get the gold to sink it must be pushed down below that water surface .
Yup there's so many variables when it comes to catching gold. Test this try that change everything 😂It's fun getting dialed in. Funny thing is after getting dialed in now you're ready for bigger and better. Whole new learning curve lmao
So true
Happy Easter everyone! Here's a 👍 for all of you!
Happy Easter! 👍
I always wondered if those big operations on Gold Rush run their water too fast to capture the flour gold. When they show you their weigh-in, I don't usually see a lot of flour gold. It's usually pickers.
those guys in all honesty prob loose more than most prospectors..there about running high volumes not 100% capture...there trading running more material and bigger gold for loss of some of the flour golds...basically...
A 2 foot wide sluice is simply two 1 foot wide sluices stuck together.
If you have the next shovel load ready before the 1 foot wide sluice is ready to accept it , then you need a 2 foot wide sluice.
So the width of a sluice is determined ONLY by your feed rate.
That is assuming that you are not limited by not being able to increase your water flow in sympathy with the increase in width.
probably a good question for Freddy Dodge..
140 long 30 wide and 13 high with 10 - 11° angle with 5 water intake. Is a bit wild on water, but works for me. Yeah we are cm here.
“5 water intake “ I don’t understand, care to explain? Thanks
@@deshte that would be a 2 inch pump intake and output i was in centimeters 😆
I always knew house Lannister is especially fond of gold
You are on the wrong track but I do like your crazy drive for gold keep up the hard work.
Thanks. I see your sluice is on a similar path of running finely classified material, but you enjoy a narrower sluice run. I like your black sand separator design, it looks like it works great, but on the NSR no point in separating black sand from the sluice as about 50% of black sand here is non magnetic. And even just the non magnet sand still fills the sluice in under 50 shovels in many places. I tried a classifier like yours once but couldn't quite dial it in to keep from loosing some flakes with the jettisoned water, but it looks like you have yours dialed in pretty well! What sort of bank run feed rate does your machine keep up with? It looks like a finely tuned machine, and I like the design of your side discharge indicator mat.
2 1/2 yards per hour on nsr
Wow! That would be cool to see in action. If it recovers well at that feed rate, I'd say you have a winner.
@@UtmostOutdoors it is lots of years of thinking
Can you point me to a video of the machine running at that rate where tailings are tested on the nsr? I find your claim is far too good to be true. I mean... 5 yards per hour per foot of sluice width with great fine flat gold recovery...? No mater how well thought out the machine is, that claim defies any and all information I have ever seen publicized about any sluice. I mean, you may have reinvented the highbanker, but a sluice is a pretty basic tool and I can't see your's behaving any differently just because it's attached to a cool invention. Looks like a 30lb machine connected to any other 6" sluice? I'm sorry, I'm just one who likes to see things demonstrated with real evidence, especially when wild claims are being made is all. I might do a local meet-up one of these days, If you know someone around edmonton who wants to let me borrow theirs, I could do a real world test in a video if you like.
I think the length of the sluice is more important than width. If a sluice is wide and not long enough, gold will still tumble off the end because it lacks time to settle. If a sluice is narrow but long, you can move a lot of dirt through it and the gold will settle as the dirt washes/tumbles down the sluice. The narrow/long sluice would allow you to move more dirt through it at a higher flow rate. Obviously there are always different types of gold so you need to adjust flow rates/sluice angle to compensate
That's an interesting take. One thing to consider is that if you are running a wide and slow sluice, it takes the gold and sand the same time to travel 3 or 4 feet as it would to travel 6 or 8 feet in a faster running sluice. I would be concerned that after running for 8 hours straight without a cleanup, the long sluice may have time to slowly scour out the gold caught in the first half of the day and slowly let it work it's way down and out without you knowing. The flat gold that is. But the long sluice approach is what Ray Rusaw uses up in Alaska and seems to have pretty good success, so it might just be a matter of either approach works and you just have to pick where you put your mats.
@@UtmostOutdoors Hmm, I wonder if you might think of the chances of a flat flake settling instead of behaving like a sail as an expression of statistical chance?. It doesn't settle evenly, so the chances of it settling are still lower in a wider box with a lower flow. The wider and slower flow would be a better drop rate on gold of course but it's a flat peice flipping through the water flow you need it to get more tries to plant itself. That might be the way the long narrow boxes work. Also the way that ultra fine gold distributes down a long tom to the very end is very evenly distributed and diminishes the deposit size at each riffle. Each riffle that the gold passes over it gets another chance to flip in such a way that it plants. In fact your sheet analogy works just like that, you can't predict the number of twists in the wind it will turn before it plants as long as there is enough force to keep it airborne, but once it plants again it much harder to pick back up.
Boulderboy is right. I've watched guys using Beach boxes 24" wide and 4 feet long in Nome slow feeding shovels in it and they lose all kinds of gold because you don't have enough length for the material to tumble through in time to displace the fine gold through gravity. Gold Hog has a 13 feet Super Hog and it has 98+% capture rate even with sub 100 mesh gold in the mix running 6 to 7,000 GPH . Its widest spot is 18" but you can literally shoot 4-5 yards an hour through it (if you're humanly capable of shovelling that much). If you go look at the history of Nome beach mining, you'll see a picture of ALL of the gold miners running LONG TOMS . 15 feet sluice boxes 12 to 15" wide. As far as running 8 hours and worrying about gold building up and skirting over the top of material after a while....example..
You run a super hog and you keep your eye on the last section. Once you see gold forming in the riffles in the last section...its time to turn it off and clean out your mats, because one of two things are happening. You have a CRAP TON of gold in your sluice...or...something is wrong in your set up (i.e. angles, feed rate, water flow) and you need to address it. If I ran a highbanker for 8 hours I'd stop and clean the mats out after 4 hours just redundancy.
That's why they use a lot of gold cubes on the beaches
Yeah, gold cube is a solid recovery option!
Will there be any more Utmost Explorers available?
Yes, I have a couple ready to go, but I'm away from the shop right now and so I put the inventory to zero until I return home. If you're interested in one, email me and I'll get back to you once I'm back. Cheers.
@@UtmostOutdoors Thanks, Ill probably send you an email on a few weeks once I have the money. How many buckets do you think you could put through it before having to do a clean-out?
Sounds good. I personally just run until I'm done. In my full size highbanker I did a few runs of 6 hours with full speed shoveling into the same style of matting and it still seemed to be well over 90% recovery with almost no scouring losses when run empty between shovels. Perhaps clean up more often if you're in a really hot spot or start seeing a lot of flakes near the bottom lip. I suspect for bulk sampling runs I would just cleanout once at the end of my dig.
@@UtmostOutdoors Thanks!
Have you try drop riffle sluice?
Yep. I like them.
Great tutorial my friend! Get it! ✨️⛏️ #HeavyPans
it is all a compromise, (weight and portability is one thing), (More Volume vs recovery % is another thing). % of recovery you are happy with, [100% of nothing is]? 70 to 80 % of something is? [a percentage is something is better than 100% of nothing] then we figure the area we are working with). Ron.
Well said!
It all comes down to acceptable loss rates for your production/cost ratio. The bigger u go, time becomes a factor its apples and oranges when u go from a 1 man beach operation to a full production 100yph washplant.
Gold does not change the bigger your operation . . you adapt the larger operation to accommodate the large volume . I worked with an old timer that just up scaled is hand shoveling sluice so he could use a one yard drag line filling his boiler box . I mucked for him in that boiler box . He refused to accept acceptable losses
I would make it as big as a KEENE 187 highbanker…
about 187
There's a point when you should jig not sluice.