Building a highbanker

[roadrunner]

30 feet higher might be the old ancient river bed.
That is where the gold is, maybe not down in the new creek.

 

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[kazcoro]

Honestly, it looks like layers of old river bed on top of layers of old river bed on top of layers of old river bed. It really goes on and on. It's an oxbow, and has been shaped for a LONG time. There are pounds of gold waiting in that one area for sure.

 

[roadrunner]

Whats your Gb do around that area?
I would be using that and a pan first before I spent a lot of time dredging and drywashing.

 

[kazcoro]

That's a good point. I haven't tried it out there yet. Woe unto me, there are plenty, and I mean PLENTY of open banks with exposed river gravels to try it on. Next time, I will bring it with.

 

[kazcoro]

Well, I spent literally half of last year out of town for work and didn't get much time to test out my contraption. I did get a chance to do some more testing weekend before last. I found out that at least half of my water and the same of my 1/2"- material was never getting down the sluice. This last time I ran the machine, I idled the engine and pump back to idle, no more. This helped BARELY, but of course, made plug ups more common. So, I set about modifications. I purchased some dowel, and some flat stock. I had to buy steel, because I can barely weld, and I mean barely weld, steel. I welded up a grizzly, and cut out the slots that I had previously cut into the header box. I welded(again, not pretty welding) a flat bar to the top of the dowels that will hide under the header box, and welded one dowel as a cross bar almost at the end of the grizzly dowels as a support. This cross dowel hopefully doesn't cause many foul ups on the grizzly bars themselves. I will be going out tomorrow to test run it again. I will get some photos up Sunday morning of the modifications I made, and hopefully some gold.

 

[kazcoro]

Well, I got it in the creek, and it works a hell of a lot better. Gets better than 80% of the water down the sluice, and virtually 100% of the half inch minus. Got a good slurry depth going now, too. Somewhere between 3/4 and 1" depth. Just what the Doc ordered!

My next mission is to decide if I should put some expanded metal over Doc's mats. Doc says on his web site that I have it right, so I think instead, I will look at adding a 14" flared secondary sluice after my primary sluice. That seems like money better spent. Also, if I don't have space, I can just run the primary sluice. It looks really good running, with only about 1/2" of material stacking up behind the riffles in the matting. Clears out quickly, and I believe I have the right pitch. I caught some small flakes yesterday, and I have yet to run the material through the table, so I will see how small I caught.

Also, I need to work on adjusting the pitch of header box. I had to do a bit of clearing of the grizzly, and I hope that by raising the angle, I can avoid some of that.

Also, I found that I need to install a flare at the outlet pipe for the header box. If I let it simply pour into the box, it splatters considerably, and has a faster velocity out of the back of the header box, and pushes more of my good material out the back as well. But, when I put my fingers over the outlet hose, it boiled nicely in the front of the box, and slowed down the velocity considerably. This allowed a lot more of my good material to hit the sluice. I found a large rock that sat perfectly on the outlet tube and flared out the water. It worked so well, that I actually found some of the smaller rocks sitting in the biol zone for quite a bit of time. That seems like a very good thing to me!!!
So, I will work on using some aluminum and maybe a trucker's mud flap or some old tire to make a flapper.

Wish me luck!