You're doing an outstanding job. I can see the need for such type of equipment. Need to perfect the electrical dredge for production. Keep up the work and advise the prospecting world of your advancements.
It looks to me that you are using a drop riffle type system. I really like that window of plexi-glass to observe the dynamics of fluid in relation to the s variety of particulate of different density and sizes. Good work Kyle. Now.....if only we could use that system in Alberta.
Most awesome video-I can see that as a permanent fixture in my living room! I currently have a blue bowl setup with two 5-gallon buckets, an old dead car battery/trickle charger/bilge pump, and I also have two gutter sluices I experiment with! Nothing better than being nice and warm processing cons, watching TV, and drinking beer over the cold, dark winter months! Sweet shop too!
It will work, I tried the same. That said, the recovery rate for fine gold depends on a lot of factors like water velocity, sluice inclination lateral and longitudal, width difference between feeder hose and sluice compartment, riffle overload, material grain size and the fact that the sluice tube moves quite a lot when you work and occasionally pull the sluice farther, Better feeding in a bucket with a modified vortex separation (like the vacuum cleaners). You need a classifying sieve in front of the entrance nozzle to keep an optimal grain size for the sluice riffles. Edit: Who has a 3D printer, like you, has a clear advantage! Edit 2: Well done!
Nice experiment! Good to see those subsurface sluice boxes gaining more attention nowadays. I remember there were some of those systems around in the 2000s but never saw much of them out in the rivers.
Yeah, I'm surprised you don't see them as much any more... They do have some fundamental design constraints when it comes to fine gold recovery, which I think makes current surface designs better for that. Sub-surface has clear advantage for suction efficiency though, so I'm hoping I can bring the fine gold recovery up to acceptable levels with a little work and see the best of both worlds!
You are the Master Rock Washer! Since you are designing and experimenting with the whole system including the riffles, would it be possible to extend the length of your sluice to accommodate 3 different riffle sections in line from coarse, medium, and fine riffle sections and run everything in one pass? You could experiment with different riffles as fast as you can think and make them and see if one design is losing, or capturing more gold over the other, you could also switch the riffles from course to fine, and fine to course at the head of the box to verify if one way is better than the other? You may need to incorporate a 2nd water source as I do with the longer sluice as I do with my blue bowl and gutter sluice system and a hose siphon to keep the 5-gallon bucket water levels equal. Just a thought. That's a pretty cool setup you made!
Been following along, watching your progress on this. I like the idea and the application for this. I personally run a trommel sluice but find it a pain in the butt to get all the material off the top of bedrock or hard clay with a shovel. I spend a lot of time with a hand dredge trying to get everything, and this looks like a great way to get it all without breaking the bank. I'm excited to see how it all comes together in the end. So far I say great job, it takes some trial and error and revisions along the way. The only thing I can advise you on, is to up your flow rate on your 3d printer when making the riffle sections slightly to reduce the gaps in the print. For example if you pause the video at 15 minutes, and look between the riffles slightly to the right, you can see some very small gaps in the printing that looks to be holding very fine gold. Not 100 percent sure it is gold, but possibly a place for very fine dust to settle. I realize this is a work in progress and it doesn't matter as much right now, just something to consider down the road. Good luck and I look forward to seeing this evolve into something great
Watching this in action on a good producer will be neat.... Nice proof of concept 👌 Add all the ripple styles. People can find what works for the material they're working. Just swap as needed 😁
Get a cut-away view from a different axis and use a high speed camera setting to follow precisely how the gold falls and settles. Then create your sluice slots to better enable better separation.
I thought "drop riffles" on most other designs ( being basically half of a rectangle) are used at a four percent or greater drop during use. That effectively makes them a Hungarian riffle of sorts given the effective angle. YES on miners moss LOL I agree VOODOO!
What if you took a page out of the Gold Cubes book and instead of a flat sluice you had levels that switched back and forth, with larger dips in between level changes to catch nuggets? It might not be appropriate for a typical dredge but it could be considered an underwater highbanker, where you're just working a single spot and not moving it around. If you kept it lower in the water you could have less suction loss and potential use a longer hose right?
Sieve your head grade black sand say 5kg into i.e. 30, 50, 70 and 100 mesh, weight and show percentage by size, run all mesh sizes with the bulk black sand so all size samples are a uniform weight, i.e. 1 kg - recovery can then be a simple decision - location sieving is critical to optimize best milling efforts. Especially for fine black sand gold. Thanks for sharing your videos.
Hey Kyle, love your channel. Just thought I'd let you know, I use a bilge pump and battery for my sluice as well, and bought a 12v small remote off amazon for $25 to turn the pum0 on and off. It works great and is easily set up.
Get a baseball size hollow plastic ball and let it float over the suction. It will stop the vortex from sucking air into the pump. We did this when drafting water for firefighting. Great video! Well let me add, we used blow up beachballs for the fire department but the concept is the same on smaller scale.
Love everything about the video. I take the Plexiglas Version with the mose and the riffles. Sry for my bad english. In switzerland we are not aloude to use motors, Batterien, engines or picks. Only shofel.
Cool.... when do we get to see a 6 inch nozzle configuration? PS.. I can tell you about the 6" subsurface dredge I designed, SUPER simple and cheap, great recovery... I built it to dredge DEEP water that standard dredges can't get to.. like 50-60ft.. cost me less than 100 bucks...
I think a big question to ask: Is there a real benefit from this system? Seems quite complicated for a process that already works well. I am not sure if you'd be able to move the same amount of material.
To clarify your question, do you mean what is the benefit between this sub-surface dredge and a surface dredge, or between this and a shovel in highbanker? As far as sub-surface advantages, it takes much less power to get the same suction as a surface sluice. As to the highbanker vs dredge, it's for different situations. You could easily out shovel this size of dredge, but the dredge could clean up bedrock faster than the shovel and get into tighter crevices.
@@UtmostOutdoors hey man I am sorry I read the title and didn't put together this was a dredge. Disregard my comment I don't know shit about dredges, I thought you were testing some form of high speed fully submerged sluice lol.
Absolutely. Love your research and development of this item. It looks like an awful lot of gear. I am 60 years old. I can't walk very far. I don't see how I could get all this into a backpack and be able to carry this Up the hill where I go gold panning. How would you carry that to your site, in a wagon, or take several trips Especially the power pack, it looks pretty heavy. That's a good thing you? Are young and strong to be able to carry all this equipment
Good video as usual. I would however remove the "support" in the dropriffles so you only have one long riffle, and then i would also make the riffles wider. And as long as you see some material in the riffles it doesn't matter if you see the bottom, it just get's rid of the shit material :D Oh and i also think for the "normal" riffles with the moss etc i think the riffles are too close to each other.
Interesting... I specifically added those longitudinal dividers to help the sluice perform better when it is not perfectly level. I was aiming for several narrow sluice runs side by side to prevent a small tilt in the box scouring out as much material. I'll for sure test riffle spacing in future videos, I just copies the expanded metal's tight weave for the first prototype. It's going to be fun to actually test all this stuff and see how it performs!
@UtmostOutdoors i think those do more harm than they help actually but one never know without actually testing. As for the space i would say atleast 4-5 cm between them but i guess that depends on the height also maybe. I'll check what it says in the book I have.
Yeah, I'll have to do some tests on that linear divider idea to demonstrate (or disprove) their effectiveness... I remember the Clarkson riffle study with angle iron tested 1" angle iron with a variety of spacing. I think they determined that when the 1" riffle was spaced 1" appart, it worked fine, but resulted in less active area thus could reduce total throughput. I think they settled in on 2" spacing for the 1" riffles as a good balance, based on visual assessment only. Since the "expanded metal" riffles I made are 5cm tall, perhaps 10cm spacing would be a similar comparison, but I will absolutely do some tests on this in 2025 and see if there are any noticeable differences in recovery.
All I know right now is that big rocks make it though the sluice and out the back end. When I open it up after the riffles still look the same level of full as when I was just doing this test with classified material. I suspect that these traditional "sub-surface" sluices are not as good at the fine gold as their wider surface counterparts, but am hopeful that it will do OK on most of coarser "fine" gold. The extremely fine flat flour gold will require a more specialized solution I'm working on. The use of an electric bilge pump makes the use of this style of sub-surface recovery appealing, because it takes much less energy to create the same suction when you don't need to lift the water above the surface. Fine gold recovery may be the trade off for now... I haven't really been able to test this in field conditions just yet, other than this sort of tub test. The more real world feedback I can get, the better!
What I did for my surface setup was add a screen to the first section of riffles to prevent some of the larger rocks from ending up in them and allowing a healthy amount of water to still flow over them. A sort of self-classifying setup. Seems to allow the first riffles to catch the finer gold and utilize their space correctly instead of filling up with chunks of heavies. You could try to a coarse 8 mesh lifter over the first section to see how that works for fines. ruclips.net/video/frv2Bl3FGwo/видео.html
I don't think there is any oil on the plastic at this point... I think the air bubbles are just getting sucked in occasionally by the nozzle and are running in along the top of the sluice. I don't see them affecting the riffles.
@leylinewalker8729 Ah cool! I wonder if that's air comming out of the hollow section of infill inside the riffles, or if it's just a mater of scuffing up the surface a bit... another mystery to solve! :)
@@UtmostOutdoors if you haven't ran a Gold Cube before a similar scenario occurs during first startup. Microbubbles form and stick on the matting which causes gold loss as they prevent the matting from catching and holding onto gold. It's recommended to scrub the mats after you've started the cube up to dislodge/pop all the bubbles. It might be worth it to test taking a brush to the surface of the riffles after you submerge them and then attach them. Could be just a necessary step to ensure greater capture rates.
There will definitely be smaller riffles for the "flour gold" version of this, but this version is actually just after the less fine stuff. I used the flour gold in this test because it's what I had laying around, but I don't expect a normal sub-surface sluice to hit good recovery numbers on gold this fine unless I made some substantial changes...
I wanted to test the dredge in real world conditions where the nozzle is able to suck all sizes of rocks. Classification needs to be done in a secondary system to work with a dredge. If you classify at the nozzle, you'll never move enough material.
You're doing an outstanding job. I can see the need for such type of equipment. Need to perfect the electrical dredge for production. Keep up the work and advise the prospecting world of your advancements.
Thank you!
It looks to me that you are using a drop riffle type system. I really like that window of plexi-glass to observe the dynamics of fluid in relation to the s variety of particulate of different density and sizes. Good work Kyle. Now.....if only we could use that system in Alberta.
Most awesome video-I can see that as a permanent fixture in my living room! I currently have a blue bowl setup with two 5-gallon buckets, an old dead car battery/trickle charger/bilge pump, and I also have two gutter sluices I experiment with! Nothing better than being nice and warm processing cons, watching TV, and drinking beer over the cold, dark winter months! Sweet shop too!
Lots of variables there... was most interesting to see the moss alone sorting, something I've been wondering about. Thanks for sharing😊
YES!!! wow that looks great!.. You have done some great work to get this so refined. Always look forward to your videos!
Thanks! Much appreciated!
It will work, I tried the same.
That said, the recovery rate for fine gold depends on a lot of factors like water velocity, sluice inclination lateral and longitudal, width difference between feeder hose and sluice compartment, riffle overload, material grain size and the fact that the sluice tube moves quite a lot when you work and occasionally pull the sluice farther,
Better feeding in a bucket with a modified vortex separation (like the vacuum cleaners). You need a classifying sieve in front of the entrance nozzle to keep an optimal grain size for the sluice riffles.
Edit: Who has a 3D printer, like you, has a clear advantage!
Edit 2: Well done!
Nice experiment! Good to see those subsurface sluice boxes gaining more attention nowadays. I remember there were some of those systems around in the 2000s but never saw much of them out in the rivers.
Yeah, I'm surprised you don't see them as much any more... They do have some fundamental design constraints when it comes to fine gold recovery, which I think makes current surface designs better for that. Sub-surface has clear advantage for suction efficiency though, so I'm hoping I can bring the fine gold recovery up to acceptable levels with a little work and see the best of both worlds!
You are the Master Rock Washer! Since you are designing and experimenting with the whole system including the riffles, would it be possible to extend the length of your sluice to accommodate 3 different riffle sections in line from coarse, medium, and fine riffle sections and run everything in one pass? You could experiment with different riffles as fast as you can think and make them and see if one design is losing, or capturing more gold over the other, you could also switch the riffles from course to fine, and fine to course at the head of the box to verify if one way is better than the other? You may need to incorporate a 2nd water source as I do with the longer sluice as I do with my blue bowl and gutter sluice system and a hose siphon to keep the 5-gallon bucket water levels equal. Just a thought. That's a pretty cool setup you made!
Been following along, watching your progress on this. I like the idea and the application for this. I personally run a trommel sluice but find it a pain in the butt to get all the material off the top of bedrock or hard clay with a shovel. I spend a lot of time with a hand dredge trying to get everything, and this looks like a great way to get it all without breaking the bank. I'm excited to see how it all comes together in the end. So far I say great job, it takes some trial and error and revisions along the way. The only thing I can advise you on, is to up your flow rate on your 3d printer when making the riffle sections slightly to reduce the gaps in the print. For example if you pause the video at 15 minutes, and look between the riffles slightly to the right, you can see some very small gaps in the printing that looks to be holding very fine gold. Not 100 percent sure it is gold, but possibly a place for very fine dust to settle. I realize this is a work in progress and it doesn't matter as much right now, just something to consider down the road. Good luck and I look forward to seeing this evolve into something great
Watching this in action on a good producer will be neat.... Nice proof of concept 👌 Add all the ripple styles. People can find what works for the material they're working. Just swap as needed 😁
i cant wait for summer. I have been searching for someone to print this for me.
Get a cut-away view from a different axis and use a high speed camera setting to follow precisely how the gold falls and settles. Then create your sluice slots to better enable better separation.
Better yet, how about a plexiglass bottom with an underwater camera set up to see it from the bottom and when you really need to do clean up?
I thought "drop riffles" on most other designs ( being basically half of a rectangle) are used at a four percent or greater drop during use. That effectively makes them a Hungarian riffle of sorts given the effective angle. YES on miners moss LOL I agree VOODOO!
What if you took a page out of the Gold Cubes book and instead of a flat sluice you had levels that switched back and forth, with larger dips in between level changes to catch nuggets? It might not be appropriate for a typical dredge but it could be considered an underwater highbanker, where you're just working a single spot and not moving it around. If you kept it lower in the water you could have less suction loss and potential use a longer hose right?
Hum... Food for thought. It would certainly not be as low profile of an option, but some sort of multi level could make it into future tests.
Sieve your head grade black sand say 5kg into i.e. 30, 50, 70 and 100 mesh, weight and show percentage by size, run all mesh sizes with the bulk black sand so all size samples are a uniform weight, i.e. 1 kg - recovery can then be a simple decision - location sieving is critical to optimize best milling efforts. Especially for fine black sand gold. Thanks for sharing your videos.
Hey Kyle, love your channel. Just thought I'd let you know, I use a bilge pump and battery for my sluice as well, and bought a 12v small remote off amazon for $25 to turn the pum0 on and off. It works great and is easily set up.
Thanks for the tip. What's the link, or what should I search for to see the remote you found? I'll give it a look.
Hopefully that works
Get a baseball size hollow plastic ball and let it float over the suction. It will stop the vortex from sucking air into the pump. We did this when drafting water for firefighting. Great video! Well let me add, we used blow up beachballs for the fire department but the concept is the same on smaller scale.
Love everything about the video. I take the Plexiglas Version with the mose and the riffles. Sry for my bad english. In switzerland we are not aloude to use motors, Batterien, engines or picks. Only shofel.
Another great video, thank you! I just started my own page, thanks for the example. Merry Christmas and be safe.
Cool.... when do we get to see a 6 inch nozzle configuration? PS.. I can tell you about the 6" subsurface dredge I designed, SUPER simple and cheap, great recovery... I built it to dredge DEEP water that standard dredges can't get to.. like 50-60ft.. cost me less than 100 bucks...
Kyle you're back home? Very cool
@mrkus-nc7od quite possible
I'll be in Canada until Jan 22, then back "home" to Australia :)
I love this video. Thanks for sharing this info.
Very cool!
Looking good! would like to have a super portable, fully submergible, to use along with sniping, just to catch any fines that may wash away.
Fantasticly interesting!
It's not flour gold certified yet, but I'll keep working on it! 😀
@ right on 👍🏻
I think a big question to ask: Is there a real benefit from this system? Seems quite complicated for a process that already works well. I am not sure if you'd be able to move the same amount of material.
To clarify your question, do you mean what is the benefit between this sub-surface dredge and a surface dredge, or between this and a shovel in highbanker?
As far as sub-surface advantages, it takes much less power to get the same suction as a surface sluice.
As to the highbanker vs dredge, it's for different situations. You could easily out shovel this size of dredge, but the dredge could clean up bedrock faster than the shovel and get into tighter crevices.
@@UtmostOutdoors hey man I am sorry I read the title and didn't put together this was a dredge. Disregard my comment I don't know shit about dredges, I thought you were testing some form of high speed fully submerged sluice lol.
Absolutely. Love your research and development of this item. It looks like an awful lot of gear. I am 60 years old. I can't walk very far. I don't see how I could get all this into a backpack and be able to carry this
Up the hill where I go gold panning. How would you carry that to your site, in a wagon, or take several trips
Especially the power pack, it looks pretty heavy. That's a good thing you? Are young and strong to be able to carry all this equipment
Hum... I'll have to weigh everything at some point, I think it should be fairly manageable I think.
Stiletto Titanium Hammer. Excellent choice. :D
It sure helps take the weight off your belt!
Can you downsize it for a one inch hose?
And maybe two thirds to water flow or half the water flow, I don't know which would be better.
I mean... I was thinking of going bigger next, but of course a smaller version should be possible.
Good video as usual. I would however remove the "support" in the dropriffles so you only have one long riffle, and then i would also make the riffles wider. And as long as you see some material in the riffles it doesn't matter if you see the bottom, it just get's rid of the shit material :D Oh and i also think for the "normal" riffles with the moss etc i think the riffles are too close to each other.
Interesting... I specifically added those longitudinal dividers to help the sluice perform better when it is not perfectly level. I was aiming for several narrow sluice runs side by side to prevent a small tilt in the box scouring out as much material. I'll for sure test riffle spacing in future videos, I just copies the expanded metal's tight weave for the first prototype. It's going to be fun to actually test all this stuff and see how it performs!
@UtmostOutdoors i think those do more harm than they help actually but one never know without actually testing. As for the space i would say atleast 4-5 cm between them but i guess that depends on the height also maybe. I'll check what it says in the book I have.
Yeah, I'll have to do some tests on that linear divider idea to demonstrate (or disprove) their effectiveness...
I remember the Clarkson riffle study with angle iron tested 1" angle iron with a variety of spacing. I think they determined that when the 1" riffle was spaced 1" appart, it worked fine, but resulted in less active area thus could reduce total throughput. I think they settled in on 2" spacing for the 1" riffles as a good balance, based on visual assessment only. Since the "expanded metal" riffles I made are 5cm tall, perhaps 10cm spacing would be a similar comparison, but I will absolutely do some tests on this in 2025 and see if there are any noticeable differences in recovery.
I sooooo wanna test it out lol!!!
In a creek, youre going to be sucking a lot of stones and small boulders. Have you got any tests if they'll knock all the good stuff out the riffles?
All I know right now is that big rocks make it though the sluice and out the back end. When I open it up after the riffles still look the same level of full as when I was just doing this test with classified material. I suspect that these traditional "sub-surface" sluices are not as good at the fine gold as their wider surface counterparts, but am hopeful that it will do OK on most of coarser "fine" gold. The extremely fine flat flour gold will require a more specialized solution I'm working on.
The use of an electric bilge pump makes the use of this style of sub-surface recovery appealing, because it takes much less energy to create the same suction when you don't need to lift the water above the surface. Fine gold recovery may be the trade off for now... I haven't really been able to test this in field conditions just yet, other than this sort of tub test.
The more real world feedback I can get, the better!
i like vortex matting for flour gold on my mini sluice i made
also you need a negative angle on the back side of your riffle to make a low pressure zone for the heavies to stratify.
What I did for my surface setup was add a screen to the first section of riffles to prevent some of the larger rocks from ending up in them and allowing a healthy amount of water to still flow over them. A sort of self-classifying setup. Seems to allow the first riffles to catch the finer gold and utilize their space correctly instead of filling up with chunks of heavies. You could try to a coarse 8 mesh lifter over the first section to see how that works for fines.
ruclips.net/video/frv2Bl3FGwo/видео.html
Didn't have time to watch the whole video, but those air bubbles are a problem. Is there an oily release agent still in your slice
I don't think there is any oil on the plastic at this point... I think the air bubbles are just getting sucked in occasionally by the nozzle and are running in along the top of the sluice. I don't see them affecting the riffles.
I think they may be referring to what looks to be micro bubbles on the edges of the riffles. You can see them at 6:00.
@leylinewalker8729 Ah cool! I wonder if that's air comming out of the hollow section of infill inside the riffles, or if it's just a mater of scuffing up the surface a bit... another mystery to solve! :)
@@UtmostOutdoors if you haven't ran a Gold Cube before a similar scenario occurs during first startup. Microbubbles form and stick on the matting which causes gold loss as they prevent the matting from catching and holding onto gold. It's recommended to scrub the mats after you've started the cube up to dislodge/pop all the bubbles. It might be worth it to test taking a brush to the surface of the riffles after you submerge them and then attach them. Could be just a necessary step to ensure greater capture rates.
@@leylinewalker8729@ leylinewalker8729 The air bubbles and scrubbing them off are just a part of every re-circulating system.
Suggest making the openings WAY smaller, as it seems you’re after fine particles, not nuggets.
There will definitely be smaller riffles for the "flour gold" version of this, but this version is actually just after the less fine stuff. I used the flour gold in this test because it's what I had laying around, but I don't expect a normal sub-surface sluice to hit good recovery numbers on gold this fine unless I made some substantial changes...
Where abouts are you going to stay when you come down here ?
I'm moving to the central coast north of Sydney.
Classic mistake of not classifying. Rocks in the riffles blocking gold from dropping 🤙
I wanted to test the dredge in real world conditions where the nozzle is able to suck all sizes of rocks. Classification needs to be done in a secondary system to work with a dredge. If you classify at the nozzle, you'll never move enough material.
A ball in the bin will stop the vortex noise ping pong ball would work