home made cleanup/concentrate sluice questions

Lycof said:
Fill a 5 gallon bucket, time it, do the math. My water level is less than a foot below the outlet, so I get 1080ish gallons per hour, not much back pressure.

Sluice is 10 inches wide, divide the gallons per hour by that.
Click to expand...
137 gallons per linear inch cubic inch...none of that jives to me.

I'm not understanding what part of the process it is a metric for..or how your applying it to your tuning. Not a criticism I just don't know how to make it relevant.
So I'll stick with volume of flow. GPH and GPM

What size material are you running?

If you are getting 1080 gph your getting 18 gpm. 5.5 is sluicing pitch 1 to 3 would be miller table pitch. A regular highbanker running grizzly classified material is 40 gpm and up.

In your video for running sand. you have WAY to much flow and WAY to much drop. Even flat that water is too fast for the type of gold recovery you are working on..

 

I had the pitch way too high in that video, lowered it to 3 and found tons of tiny tiny gold.

I am talking GPH per inch of sluice width. The wider your sluice is per the same amount of water flow, the shallower and slower the water runs. It is a crossover calculation from my experience building waterfalls and streams for ponds. It is used to make sure that the stones that you place are not going to get washed out of your waterfall or stream and down into your pond. Also to make sure that you get the visual effects that you are looking for.

Take the Raptor Flare 2.0. 9 inch main sluice deep strong flow. Then you flare and flatten it out to 14 inches, the same amount of water is flowing over 64 percent wider matting. Pump head pressure aside, say it's a 5000 GPH pump running the Highbanker. You have 555 Gallons flowing over every inch of width per hour in the 9 inch wide section. Once that water gets down to the 14 inch wide section, each inch of sluice width has 357 gallons flowing over it per hour. That translates to slower, shallower water with lower pressure at the same pitch. These are physical "constants" that I can tweak my setup from. No matter the angle of the sluice, you will always have the same amount of water traveling over it, the pitch just determines the depth, speed and turbulence of that water.

If you increase your pitch, that same 555 or 357 Gallons per hour will flow faster and shallower raising the speed, pressure and turbulence. Lower the pitch and the opposite happens. BUT no matter the pitch, the actual gallons per hour flowing over the sluice is the same.

I am using Gallons per inch ONLY as a measure of pump size to sluice width.

I apologize if I am not able to explain it in a way that makes sense to anyone.

Anyone can tell you that 10,000 GPH is too much for a 10 inch sluice. But why is this true? Because it blows everything out. But why does it blow everything out? Because there is 1,000 gallons of water flowing over every inch of width of the sluice ever hour.

All I did was put a number to what everyone already knows, that's all.

Gallons per Hour / Width of sluice = Gallons per inch of sluice width

Apply this to your equipment, it's kinda cool. At least to me, the new guy :)

Yes I am new to prospecting, but have tons of experience with water flow, head pressure, flow rates, blah blah blah. Been working with ponds and waterfalls for years.
 

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Maybe this will help...

Known fact in the pond community is that 3.1 GPM/186 GPH per inch of width of the waterway makes water flow ~1 inch deep. Doubling your water flow rate to 3.2 GPM/372 GPH per inch of width of the waterway only increase the depth of the water to 1.66 inches. The .33 left over from the doubling of water flow gets added to the actual speed of the water. The same is true of cutting your flow in half.

For example:

A ten inch wide waterway needs 1860 gallons per hour to be 1 inch deep. If you double your water flow to 3,720 gallons per hour, you get 66% deeper water that flows 33% faster. If you cut 1860 in half to 930, it is 66% shallower and 33% slower.

Hope this helps :-)
 

Lycof said:
Maybe this will help...

Known fact in the pond community is that 3.1 GPM/186 GPH per inch of width of the waterway makes water flow ~1 inch deep. Doubling your water flow rate to 3.2 GPM/372 GPH per inch of width of the waterway only increase the depth of the water to 1.66 inches. The .33 left over from the doubling of water flow gets added to the actual speed of the water. The same is true of cutting your flow in half.

For example:

A ten inch wide waterway needs 1860 gallons per hour to be 1 inch deep. If you double your water flow to 3,720 gallons per hour, you get 66% deeper water that flows 33% faster. If you cut 1860 in half to 930, it is 66% shallower and 33% slower.

Hope this helps :-)
Click to expand...

Thats cool I was wondering why you threw in that sort of metric.

It is good insight for you to have. Gives you a good heads up on hydraulics for sure. Once you are dealing with classified concentrates...not so much.

I know that regardless of pitch you have the same volume if you don't change the inflow.The reason you change pitch is you have reached max flow and have no other option, in order to maintain throughput and optimal recovery. That's why I said set pitch leave it adjust flow.8-)

The factor you need to consider, and study. Is hydraulic equivalence. How flowing water affects different material of similar size based on density.The key to why you classify when running cons.

The reason I showed the black magic video is to show how much less flow is used than in your set up.

If you use a wheel, blue bowl, miller table or any other widget. You classify and run minus 30 as one run. You find fine gold in the tailings and have to re run to get the fly poop, and flighty gold.

Same machine pare down material by size, adjust water volume as needed....never re run tailings again.
 

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These are not concentrates that I am running, it is just straight beach sand. It would take me all day to process one bucket with a bowl or miller table.

I am trying to learn the fastest efficient way to pocess large amounts of beach sands. Couple tons per day.
 

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oh ok now were getting somewhere. my bad I thought mochlips was a person and you just happened to have some of his beach sand.

You still need to classify. Is the sand from a beach that is known for gold? Seems like a dumb question .....But?

You should still classify based on the average size of gold your getting. For beach sand production you're going to want wider than ten inches. If you really want to run tons
 

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I am planning on getting the Raptor 2. It has 3' of 9", then 2 sections that are 3' by 14". Including the flare section, it comes in at just under the ten foot limit. Just having trouble with matting configurations. I don't want to have to run as much water as the Yukon mat requires. I think I want to run Motherload and UR, but I don't want to screw with expanded raised. So I dunno. Email contact reply person through gold hog hasn't given me the warm fuzzy feeling I like to have before dumping that kind of money.
 

guys - here a simple calc for volume, flow rate and gpm:

One cubic ft per sec = 448.8 gpm

Divide each sluice dimension by twelve then multiply the answers together to get cubic ft

10” / 12” = .8333
48” / 12” = 4
2” / 12” = .1667

.8333 * 4 * .1667 = .5556 cubic ft of volume in sluice (at one sec flow rate over entire 4 ft)

If you want the flow to cycle your volume over 4 seconds then divide by 4 (1 ft per sec which is a common flow rate)

.5556 / 4 = .1389

448.8 * .1389 = 62.3 gpm or 3740 gph

This does not account for pitch.

If your pitch increases the speed to 3 seconds then .5556 / 3 = .1852
448.8 * .1852 = 83.11 gpm or 4987 gph

If gpm input stays the same velocity increases and height of water decreases
 

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BTW Snake River Products is the North American dealer for the authentic Cleangold products - we are in the process of getting all the products online. We have a couple 6" cleanup products that do really well in even 100% magnetite. I will be putting up our two new products with video on our website.

We are also capable of retrofitting your current system to a Cleangold system. Finally as stated before we also have full vortex and Cleangold/vortex systems available for the Keene A52. No modifications to the sluice!

Check it out - Cleangold ? Snake River Products and click our products page for ordering.
 

NL -

Just covering use of the word Cleangold - The matting you can purchase online is not the same.
I just don't want people to confuse off the shelf products with the authentic Cleangold mat.
 

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