Blue bowl

[Dirk Pitt]

I have been prospecting for about six months now and have bit of a problem. In the area I go to, there isn't much gold, and what there is isn't very big, mostly 20 mesh or smaller. I built a miller table but it doesn't work all that well, so, been thinking about buying a blue bowl. Anyone have any advice on this before I buy one?

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska - Grab it through Amazon!

[LP13]

Yer welcome.

Now for the funny thing about it. I designed the Gold Well on principles that I fully understood... I thought. It appears now that there is a lot more complexity to it's 'simple design and function' than I thought originally. I had a discussion with a man who worked for Boeing who did Computation Fluid Dynamic modeling, and it appears that the gold is being 'forced' to the bottom of the spiral gold wells and not merely settling due to gravitational forces. This was a surprise to me actually. He explained that it was similar to vortex generators placed on the surfaces of aircraft to eliminate boundary layer parasictic drag. And although I don't have 500mph fluid flow, he reminded me that water is 800 times as dense and so does in reality approach that super high speed equivalent of an aircraft. I had pictured the process as a mild vertically oriented vortex keeping the material in the pockets in motion, thereby not allowing a stable surface for gold to move across. Quick sand so to speak. But it appers in reality that it is actually creating sufficient force to push the material down in the pocket, gold being heaviest, and the gold is then unable to rise back out of it. This explains then why even very fine gold is being trapped so well, and not just flushing out of the sluice like a normal sluice system. In the most simplistic of terms it then has some similarity to a centrifuge. Centrifugal flow is what a blue bowl uses also. So in a most basic way you could imagine my sluice as a drop riffle sluice and centrifuge in one device. Although it is yet a bit more complex even than that.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Diving for Pleasure and Treasure - Grab it through Amazon!

[Ultimacloud123]

This answers a lot of questions I had about blue bowls. I have about 30+ pounds of dirt I need to classify. I am a rookie to the whole prospecting thing and while panning my dirt saw very small fine gold that just doesn't want to stay in the pan or is to difficult and time consuming to collect.

 

[SGTDirk]

So what I am hearing is that your sluice is a concentrator like a regular sluice, except that it concentrates better. It isn't for seperating like a blue bow,l it just makes it so you have less concentrates to run in the blue bowl. Is that correct??

 

[LP13]

That's about it. No matter what you process through it, raw material or concentrates, what you end up with is about half a cup of original material with all the gold in it. Example: You have 2 gallons of concentrates from your dredge. Processing 2 gallons in a blue bowl or spiral wheel or panning takes a while. Maybe an hour or two ... or more. Also loses a fair amount. Panning is a poor method of separating gold from black sands. Great way to lose really fine gold. So you put it through my sluice in 2 or 3 minutes, now you have instead of 2 gallons of concentrates, you have 1/2 cup. Now pan it, blue-bowl it or put it through a spiral wheel or whatever. Takes far less time and you lose a lot less gold. Less processing less losses. Put all that aside and when you run a few more batches, then re-run it all through the sluice again, recapturing most of the gold that got past your final stage. You put 10 buckets of classified dirt through it, you get around 1/2 cup of concentrates containing all the gold you had in the dirt. But, unlike a regular sluice, walk away and leave the water running for a day and come back and your gold is still in the sluice. Try that with a regular sluice. You will have nothing left. Does that answer your question adequately?

 

[wa-au-nut]

Nobody in their right mind would walk away from any sluice or whatever and leave it, cause it wouldn't be there when ya got back. If your magic sluice is as geat as you say it is loan a few out to T-net members and let them try them and wright a review. You sale car too?

 

[LP13]

Where I live coyotes don't have much interest in gold Actually Gold Cube has been here and seen it operating in person. Terry Solomon is supposed to be here this month and take a look and try one out. That good enough for ya? But if I 'loaned' one on every 'prove it' challenge, I would be broke

 

[specksandflecks]

Sounds good to me. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a short video would be worth a thousand bucks. I just use one of those crappy plastic LeTrap sluices. Think it cost me $85.00 new.



Good luck with your project.

Thought this thread was about the Blue Bowl? Anyway I also have one of those, they work well for the price. They will lose a small amount though, just keep your concentrate tailings.

 

[LP13]

It was about blue bowl. I just indicated that the amount of material that needs to be put through a blue bowl could be drastically reduced in a very short period of time (did anyone mention blue bowl is slow?) and thereby reduce the overall time to get your prize separated from the black sands. Just so happens that my sluice is a nice fit there. But it also has the function of being able to process bulk material rapidly as well, making it a fit that finishing devices can't match. And there are videos I posted of it.

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/gold-prospecting/332677-gold-well-drop-riffle-vortex-sluice-action.html

 

[LP13]

Thought this thread was about the Blue Bowl? Anyway I also have one of those, they work well for the price. They will lose a small amount though, just keep your concentrate tailings.

And so it was about blue bowls. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Here is a picture of a pan of gold one of my customers brought me this morning. Source of the gold: 1 1/2 gallons of concentrates already processed through a blue bowl. Recovered from being lost by running that material through the Gold Well. Time it took: <10 minutes to recover. Quantity approx. 1/2 gram.