1864hatter;4273 wrote:My sluice cost me nothing to make, My old man is a slainless steel engineer so he bent me up a chanel but the rest is made from stuff lying around home and in the shed. Its much like Kiwijws old sluice with wooden riffles. Usually i shovel material into a bucket and cart it to the sluice, i sort out any bigger rocks as i go but really dont do much of that. Then i just throw the whole lot in my sluice in a few lots and pick out anything thats too big for the water to move. No clasifiyng required! I have checked my tailings and there is virtually no gold in them. Perhaps id get some more fine gold if i did classify my material but its not really worth the effort. Also where i go there is no black sand so the riffles etc dont get filled up with crap. There seems to be a lot of hype out there about all these different recovery systems but lets face it, gold is extremely dense and hard to move. Simple crevices and hollows in rivers get filled with gold so why do we need elaborate systems? Its got a lot more to do with water flow, basically you have to have the balance right between moving the material effectively and recovering your gold. Thats my 5 ents worth anyway. Hope it helps those that require it.
Hatter
G'day Hatter, Mate I couldnt agree with you more. People just get too caught up in trying to re-invent the wheel. You cant beat the tried & proven basic sluice box. The only things you can change about them is the size of riffle, the spacings of the riffles, the number of the riffles, the angle of the riffles, the length of the box, the amont of water flow & velocity & steepness of the box in the river. You can muck around with expanded mesh, carpet, miners moss, astro turf, ribbed rubber matting, length of slick plate etc. But all these different things are dependent on the material you are going to be working & the size & density of the gold you are targeting or is in the area you are working. eg flood gold, flakey gold, chunky gold or fine gold. Or maybe a mixer of all. Clay can be a problem, & there is nothing worse for robbing your box of gold than clay.
It acts like putty & just rolls on down your box as a clay ball picking up any gold that it rolls over & on out the end of your box. You must totaly brake clay up before putting it down your box.
As hatter said, for a cheap to no cost sluice box. Wooden riffles will do the job. These ones in my first box were just 1 inch by 1 inch square & spaced about 1.5 inches apart to form a riffle ladder. Worked fine. Box was 1200 long by 250mm wide bent up aluminium sheet but you could just knock it up out pf ply.
I just did the same as Hatter & if I was digging away from my box set up in the rtiver then I would bucket the material to it of just shovel straight in to it if I could. Didnt worry about classifying & just rinsed any bigger rocks in the sluice & chucked away & racked on any other material that was struggling to wash on through.
Happy hunting
JW :)