ideas on small alluvial processing

G

glot

Greenie
Sep 8, 2014
11
7
Rockhampton
Primary Interest:
Prospecting
I have access to small amounts ( bucket full or so at a time) of dirt with very fine powder gold in it. A friend has a blue bowl that works well on it but only after a lot of time spent classifying way down. I am looking for ideas on something I can use at home to concentrate it a bit rather than just panning. Thinking of a small recirculating sluice but want to keep it simple (cheap) and home made. I imagine there are a lot of options. I am thinking of classifying with 3mm first. There is a lot of very fine suspended dirt. In our state, only hand tools are allowed and there is no water in this location. Dug out of a hill side. Once home, I have more freedom.
 

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For fine gold I recommend a small recirc sluice with vortex matting. Classified to 1/8" you could run a 5 gallon bucket in minutes and be left with spoonfulls of super cons.

A 6" sluice, 2' long, homemade made from scraps $0, 600-800gph bilge pump $25. 12"x12" vortex mat(cut in half and taped together) $5-$8, 5' of 1" tubing $5, plus about $5 in pvc fittings and you good to go. For $40 or less you'll get a very high percentage of the dust on the 1st pass. second run will get the rest.
 

Sounds like what I want. I happen to have a 1100 gph pump anyway. I guess I just needed my thoughts reinforced by someone more experienced. I have made a Miller table just for the fun of it and works well. Just takes me too long to pan down to that level. This stuff is just barely visible in good sunlight to the naked eye. Then again, I just can't see the invisible stuff. The way it drags and colour, it is definitely gold and also it comes from a known area.
 

ive found that screening it all down to specific sizes and slowly feeding the screenings seperatly will increase your pulling the fine gold out of you cons effectively! running the Miller table is my easiest way to get the fine stuff.
 

I forgot to mention that for 6" wide don't go over 800gph or it'll clean everything out, use a valve to regulate the flow....and not a cheap ball valve. They're not designed for flow regulation, only all on or off. Very hard to make fine adjustments. Instead, use a gate valve. And the sluice should be set between 15 and 20 degrees for best results.
 

I use stackable screens: 1/2, 1/4, 20, 30, 50, and 100 mesh. I classify at the site to -1/4". I finish at home with a garden hose, and spray the material while it is in the screens. This gets rid of the silt and mud so that the material is clean before I sluice it. I separate the cons by size, and use a mini-sluice to wash the lighter stuff away by working through the material one size at a time. I have a blue bowl for the -30 to -100 cons. I use a pan for -20. It has worked well for me so far. I am going to build a Miller table, especially after seeing AZviper's project. I like the blue bowl, but I can see that I can save time with a table instead.
 

glot said:
I have access to small amounts ( bucket full or so at a time) of dirt with very fine powder gold in it. A friend has a blue bowl that works well on it but only after a lot of time spent classifying way down. I am looking for ideas on something I can use at home to concentrate it a bit rather than just panning. Thinking of a small recirculating sluice but want to keep it simple (cheap) and home made. I imagine there are a lot of options. I am thinking of classifying with 3mm first. There is a lot of very fine suspended dirt. In our state, only hand tools are allowed and there is no water in this location. Dug out of a hill side. Once home, I have more freedom.
Click to expand...
I understand only hand tools but can you set up a battery powered recirculating concentrator/sluice system onsite or nearby? This way you could probably run more total material in a day and only bring concentrates home for final gold separation. Another thought is to do wet classification, in a tub, onsite or nearby. This could wash any clinging gold off the stones and give you more quality material to bring home. Along the same line you could rough pan in a tub close by your dig site but make the goal of the panning efforts only to reduce overall volume and eliminate some of the larger stones and a lot of the lighter dirt, etc. Again you only bring home more quality material/concentrates.
Good luck.
 

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With regard to my above post, I should have said ARiZAU instead of AZViper. Sorry about that....
 

Tonto said:
[snip] I am going to build a Miller table, especially after seeing AZviper's project. I like the blue bowl, but I can see that I can save time with a table instead.
Click to expand...

Especially if you build an auto-feeder for the Miller table.
 

You said flour gold...If all the gold is flour gold I would NOT use a sluice of any kind.
If you did sluice I would not waste my time with the blue bowl, just pan the sluice cons. This is because the bowl is many times more efficient than the sluice. If the gold is all flour then a large fraction of it, mostly the finer particles, will wash right on through the sluice.

If it is all flour and the particles are no bigger than salt grains, I would screen to about 20 mesh, toss the oversize and bowl the rest. Make sure you wash it good to dissolve all the dirt then rinse until its clear. Cement mixer works good for this.

A miller table would be peachy :thumbsup:
 

Bonaro, that sounds very good advice.Thanks.

Although blue bowls are slow they have their uses some times.Screening also takes time but it is a must for fine gold recovery.
 

Another product that is getting rave reviews for fine gold is the Gold Cube. You have to ask yourself if the amount you will recover is worth the cost. If you want to go cheap-cheap, building a recirculating sluice out of stuff (drain pipe for the narrow sluice) you can get at a Home Depot is somewhat effective.
 

Ach, another unstarted project lol... Yay winter!
I need to get on the ball, I have most everything I need.

Except the gold of course haha!
 

glot, I am in a similar situation as you are. Within the last month I started a thread kind of asking the same thing. What I've settled on so far (nothing physically, but idea-wise) is to pick up a Keene A52, a header box, a 1200-1600GPH pump, and a few other odds and ends to make a recirculating sluice setup for using in my garage. At this point, it seems like the most practical idea for me. There are some spots available to claim here that are still on streams capable of running a sluice, but a lot of them require backpacking it into the woods quite a ways and I feel gold prospecting is typically back-breaking work enough as it is, without the addition of strenuous hiking with all of your gear. There are lots of other gold-bearing areas that are open to claim but have no source of water close by, so that's where transporting the material home and processing it there (and of course, filling it back in where you got it from or creating a topsoil pile to do so later) comes into play. Just my two cents.
 

Prospector70 said:
Ach, another unstarted project lol... Yay winter!
I need to get on the ball, I have most everything I need.

Except the gold of course haha!
Click to expand...

Too many projects too little time Arrrgh . To me Summer is where the projects starts and stops ... LOL
 

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