PurpleGolds Gold Prospecting Journal

[KevinInColorado]

That Bazooka looks fat and happy - good job!!
Hope you are pleasantly surprised by the gold in those cons and never need to buy salted cons again!

 

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[GoldpannerDave]

I never see the small Colorado gold on the skid plate of my 30" Sniper. You have to pan the cons to see if you have some gold.

 

[goldenmojo]

With that flow you can put 50 shovel loads through it in a very short time. Don't sweat it about shoveling cobble onto the skid plate. The biggest cobble will fall off the shovel on the ride up and the rest just toss it all up there as fast as you can. Knock the big stuff off over the grizzly with a hard smack of the shovel and back to it. The key is to move as much material as possible. Of course your top rock will have to go. It is a cool way to do it and I do sometimes but shoveling as much as possible as fast as possible is the way to go. Your Bazooka is a giant classifier. After about 50 shovel loads you can dump the trap and pan it out in a couple of minutes. If you learn how to tap your pan you can pan down and while still having blondes in the pan knock almost all of the gold to one side of the pan and see what your take is. Then dump it in your go home container and continue on or shovel in a different place if your take is not enough. The best workings are to shovel within reach of the box. Good Luck.

 

[goldenmojo]

I never see the small Colorado gold on the skid plate of my 30" Sniper. You have to pan the cons to see if you have some gold.

Dave the secret is to get your eye much closer to the plate.......

 

[GoldpannerDave]

Dave the secret is to get your eye much closer to the plate.......

But it is harder to shovel that way!!

 

[PurpleGold]

I panned the cons last night from the Saturday 2-20-16 outing and I was hoping for more. I didn't bother trying to weigh it because it is very small. I am stoked on how fine the gold is that the Bazooka trapped. That leaves me very optimistic that all I need to do now is find my own honey hole and keep digging! I respect all your input above and I will ditch the top rock on my next outing and just keep shoveling when I'm on the gold. Even though its tiny, gold in the pan never gets old.

It is so nice panning in really warm water with music playing and a nice cold one. I classified everything down to 1/8".


There was a ton of black sand in the pan. I was impatient and did the entire 30" sniper bgt clean out in one pan.



I know I should be classifying my cons down to probably 100 mesh and panning small amounts at a time from each size class. I think I will start cleaning up my cons with more patience as I know my prospecting skills improve and I have more gold in the trap from more productive outings. I learn so much on each trip and from hearing from y'all afterwards that I know my cleanouts will improve. Cheers to better future cleanouts

 

[PurpleGold]

I'm also going to change the way I take home my cons. I've been using a home depot 5 gal bucket with the Royal Manufacturing Industries screw on bucket lid. It is a perfect stool and amazingly comfortable to sit on when out on the river bank. The outer ring that snaps onto the bucket has a lip inside that catches heavies that for life of me cannot wash out of it. If you saw me refilling and splashing around and pouring quickly trying to get it all you would've laughed. I thought about using a turkey baster to suck it out, but I gave up on it since I know I'm not into tons of gold yet. I keep learning and it feels good. Has anyone else been annoyed by this or is there some super easy trick that I'm missing?

 

[mytimetoshine]

Haha. I have the same lip on my 2gal bucket. The only way to get that last bit of sand and gold out is to spoon it out and then snuffer the last little bit


Oh and you can either use the snuffer or what I use a garden sprayer to flush water up into the space while the bucket is right side up to dislodge any thing that is stuck in there. Works pretty good but I probably got a half gram stuck up in there lol. Who knows..

 

[goldenmojo]

Nice work on the gold recovery. You will be onto more and larger gold in no time.

 

[KevinInColorado]

PurpleGold's Gold Prospecting Journal

Use a folgers coffee container for your cons. Much easier to clean out and the lids stay on quite well.

PS if you add just one classifier, make it a 50 mesh. Makes a huge difference in panning!

PPS Read my blog entry about finish panning at www.findinggoldincolorado.com to get all the tips relevant to Colorado concentrates

 

[PurpleGold]

Use a folgers coffee container for your cons. Much easier to clean out and the lids stay on quite well.

PS if you add just one classifier, make it a 50 mesh. Makes a huge difference in panning!

PPS Read my blog entry about finish panning at findinggoldincolorado | Finding Gold in Colorado ? historic sites and modern honey holes to get all the tips relevant to Colorado concentrates

Thanks for the advice. I think I will get myself a 50 mesh classifier. Your blog on cons cleanup is awesome.

 

[PurpleGold]

Kevin, in your cons cleanup blog you have a step to remove black sand under 1" of water with a rare earth magnet and swirling to allow all nonferrous material to fall out. I am totally looking forward to trying this. I always seem to struggle with getting that flour gold out of the black sand. This step along with classifying down to 50 mesh is going to elevate my game, I know it.

 

[PurpleGold]

I purchased a 30 and 50 mesh classifier online. Amazon had the 14" bucket size 30 and 50 mesh classifiers for about $12 each. I already have a 70 mesh so I figure that should be some good separation in sizes for panning.

 

[PurpleGold]

I went out yesterday with my girl to Arapahoe Bar and had a really good time. We sampled a spot on the north bank where a large cobble stone bar is. We both had about 3 decent colors and countless flour gold in each of our pans so we immediately decided it was a good spot to work. We had the 30" Sniper BGT setup in less than 5 minutes and we were off digging.

We actually classified down to 1/8" at the dig site then loaded it into the BGT. One of us would dig and one would feed the sluice. We had a good system going.


Here's our cleared hole at the end of our 2 hour outing.


I wanted to capture how the material was clearing the zooka. What do you Bazooka experts think?


Here's my most amazing pan from the wild to date!!!! This was the first pass at all my +70 mesh cons. I did three other passes through this pan and found a little more. My girlfriend and I were just completely over the moon when we saw this. It is so gratifying to have a fun hobby that you enjoy doing that you can literally see the work you put into it. We are improving our gold prospecting skills folks.


Here is all of our sub 70 mesh. It is amazing how much and how little gold the Bazooka traps. The more I use it the more confident I get in its ability to grab the gold and hold onto it.


With a dime for reference on a small dinner plate that I dried the Au on overnight.


Total cleanout was .15 gram WOOOOHOOOO!!!!!!
I will do even better on the next outing. Thanks for looking...

 

[mytimetoshine]

Awesome job purplegold, but why were you classifying! That's the whole point of the Bazooka. Flow looks pretty good but I would say it's a tad deep. You still want to get it up just a little IMO

 

[KevinInColorado]

Flow good, feed it faster next time!

 

[arizau]

Flow good, feed it faster next time!

And.....without classifying!

 

[GoldpannerDave]

Just think, without classifying, you and your girl would have twice as much gold as you got!!

You did good, but you cheated your Bazooka of a chance to do better....

 

[goldenmojo]

Ya don't classify. If it is a long way to haul it you can pick the big cobble out. If not shovel everything onto the plate. Some big stuff will get caught up but just take your shovel and scrape it down the plate. You will get 4X the amount of gold if you are shoveling direct and 2X if bucketing. Really nice take of color. You are catching up quickly.

 

[PurpleGold]

At the time I was thinking that the classifying was essentially washing the bigger rocks clean to make sure all the fine gold is washed off. But I think you all are right that I could move double the material and maybe more just letting the bazooka do its thing. Next time I will hand wash the bigger rocks in the bucket then toss them and run everything else through the zooka. I can't friggin wait to get back out and it may be three weeks before I get another day off.