Gravity dredging 1/2 success

NuggetN8

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Mar 13, 2012
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Northern California
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Today I took my new gravity dredge setup out for a test run. It's 50 ft of smooth clear 3 inch dredge hose. It worked REALLY good. Too good. I think there was about 6 ft of drop or so. I sucked the creek completely dry in about 15 seconds. I ended up grabbing a flat rock and sticking it on the end of it to stall the suction so my hole would fill back up. I only sucked out one small area because the water was too low. Wish we would get some more rain so the creeks would get going better. Somehow I managed to get half a gram out of there so it was worth the amount of time I was there.. One other problem I had was the water was blasting out of the other end of the hose too hard. I have a feeling I washed most of the fines out of the sluice. Only half of the sluice had gravel in it when I was done. Any ideas on how I can prevent that?
 

Simple flap just like a dredge box works just mighty fine. Hope you have a long sluicebox or even 2 as sluice riffles have a hard time with much increased velocity-John
 

Simple flap just like a dredge box works just mighty fine. Hope you have a long sluicebox or even 2 as sluice riffles have a hard time with much increased velocity-John

I've never used a normal dredge before so I'm not familiar with a dredge box but ill look around on the Internet to get an idea to make something for it. My sluice should be good for it if I make one of those. My sluice is a little over 3ft long with 25 rows of riffles in it.
 

mo'mo'mo' say what 25 into 36" is jus' over a inch apart w'd'll' ya runn'n??? Width EXTREMELY important.. Look at black headerbox as that big ol rubber flap on the front is the difusser-it slows down the flow--spreads it out more even and helps to deaireate the mix for much better faster recovery...John hahah so much camo ya can barely see the flap--2nd pic by my hand is a much better pic
 

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mo'mo'mo' say what 25 into 36" is jus' over a inch apart w'd'll' ya runn'n??? Width EXTREMELY important.. Look at black headerbox as that big ol rubber flap on the front is the difusser-it slows down the flow--spreads it out more even and helps to deaireate the mix for much better faster recovery...John hahah so much camo ya can barely see the flap--2nd pic by my hand is a much better pic

Thanks for sharing those pics! That helps a lot. Pretty simple solution.
 

mo'mo'mo' say what 25 into 36" is jus' over a inch apart w'd'll' ya runn'n??? Width EXTREMELY important.. Look at black headerbox as that big ol rubber flap on the front is the difusser-it slows down the flow--spreads it out more even and helps to deaireate the mix for much better faster recovery...John hahah so much camo ya can barely see the flap--2nd pic by my hand is a much better pic
..........last pic.........I have that dredges identicle twin
 

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