Question for the bazooka fanatics

[CA Gold Hunter]

I'm on my phone right now so I can attach a pic later. Have you guys ever ran in to fast of water? I never had a problem till today I just cleaned out and there was literally nothing in the trap. All got blown out, I did get a large and a small flake of gold though so it is obviously working somewhat but I just thought it was strange there was so little material. I ran about 33 gallons through it. I'm kinda wondering if it was to steep and fast moving water but I've always heard to run them that way. Any of you guys ran into this? Wish I would taken a pic of the sluice before I took it out :/

 

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[arizau]

I only have a similarly designed homemade zook so take my answer for what it is worth but it makes sense to me.

My thought is that you ran it at too steep an angle and the fast flow compounded the problem. The more the box is tilted the less perpendicular the back and front edges are and the less effective capacity the bottom of the box has due to the exit port. Not only that but the effective box bottom now becomes vee shaped in relation to stream flow or horizontally. High speed water flowing in through the grizzly can and probably does scour most of the material out of the now shallower box over the much less than perpendicular back edge. Also when the box is tilted the grizzly becomes more horizontal and fast moving material can be just washed over it before it has a chance to drop into the box. Draw a picture of the box and adjust to different angles to illustrate what I am suggesting and think about how things happen. Hope this helps.

Good luck.

PS: If I were ever to build a new one I would change the angles of the back and the bottom to compensate for the conditions described above.

 

[Goodyguy]

The smaller the zook the more sensitive it would be to too steep of an angle especially with an already fast flow.
But the gold you did recover is a testament to how well the trap holds what it does catch.

With a fast flow I would not recommend a steep angle on any size zook but many do anyway just to help keep the grizzly clear.

The steeper the angle the less material the trap can hold. At a 45 degree angle you literally cut the traps capacity in half! Not to mention a reduction in it's efficiency due to the scouring caused by an increased water flow over a smaller surface area of material, compounded by the effect of the downhill flow.

In other words, a flatter trap is more desirable because it creates more surface area of material in the trap for the incoming gold to have a chance to settle into.

Crude drawing but you get the idea......


GG~

 

[CA Gold Hunter]

Thanks for the explanations, that makes sense. I was using my prospector and I've always had a fill pan of material. This was the first time using it at this river and first time I've had that much flow. It was also steeper than I've ever ran it.

 

[KevinInColorado]

Yes, yes. It's fairly hard to overwhelm the fluidbed but I have had it happen with exactly the same result...very little material retained. With fast water you do want to reduce the slope on the box. (I love the art GG, very explanatory!) The easy way to know you aren't overdoing it is to throw a few shovels of material in then then peek in the box to see if it's holding the normal amount.

PS when this happened to me just last month, I put the box back in place at a flatter angle and reran my tailings catching quite a lot of gold after all but still I was kicking myself for making a rookie mistake. After hundreds of hours running Bazookas you'd think I'd know better. My only excuse is the heavy spring run off made conditions different than usual in a stream I've been to many times and I just didn't think about it at first.

 

[CA Gold Hunter]

I checked it while I was running it and it seemed fine with the finger test. then I left for a bit to kinda explore the area. When I got back decided to call it a day and couldn't believe it, well at least I got a few flakes with it still haha.

 

[KevinInColorado]

I checked it while I was running it and it seemed fine with the finger test. then I left for a bit to kinda explore the area. When I got back decided to call it a day and couldn't believe it, well at least I got a few flakes with it still haha.

That's interesting...suggests it got scoured out while you were exploring huh? Bummer indeed.