THE GOLD WELL SLUICE IS BACK

[AzViper]

I recently received a PM from Bernie the designer and owner of the Fabulous Gold Well Sluice. Many of you know that someone within his company took his idea and tried to produce it in Canada with mix results. I can see there are lots of new faces in the TN forums. If your after a sluice that will withstand the test of time, capture gold like no other sluice then look no further. Yes its expensive but if you have seen the sluice firsthand then you see why its priced as it is. It's made to last a lifetime, not made of plastic, not made of .065 aluminum. Picture below is the top of the line model 12" x 60" that can handle more than most can dump paydirt into to it. The 6"x 36 or 48" is all that is needed. A few season ago this model below was used on Bering Sea Gold. Visit Bernie's website at, GOLD WELL SLUICE

Please everyone welcome Bernie back as he has had a really tuff go at getting back on his feet. BERNIE GLAD TO SEE THAT YOUR BACK!!!!

One of the better videos of the Gold Well by Reed Lukens.

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[LP13]

Hey thanks Viper. Been a long time since some other people got in and muddled things up for me, long hard road back. But during that time I kept up my support of all the people that had purchased one in the past, and tbh, I actually enjoy talking to my customers a whole lot. Without them I think I wouldn't have been interested in bringing back the product. To me they make it all worth while. Some people thought I was trying to become a gazillionaire out of this. But actually big $ isn't what I was ever after. I was after the best product I could come up with (and it will continue to improve because I am never satisfied), something that I could be proud of and that others would appreciate, and that might last longer than the cheap stuff we have become accustomed to purchasing. When was the last time you went to a store and bought something and said to yourself 'wow ...this is going to last me the rest of my life and may even my children's lives after I am gone' ... never ... more than likely it was 'Yep, another piece of crap. I hope it at least lasts the year it's warranty is good for (if it has one.) I will continue to try to improve it in every way I can think of, so my customers have something that they can feel proud to own again.

 

[russau]

Most people have NO IDEA what it cost to R&D a piece of equipment. and then to get it into production! NOT TO MENTION MAKEING A PROFITT FOR YOUR TROBLES! and then people try to beat you down on the price!

 

[AzViper]

Bernie its great to see that your back on your feet and producing the finest sluice on the market. Like Russ mentioned above the amount of R & D involved to go to market is ridiculous,
the quality is second to none. Clean out is a breeze compared to other gold capturing devices.

 

[LP13]

Well, just to come up with the concept and design took me every free evening and weekend for about 1 year while I analyzed standard hungarian riffle sluices and Le Trap drop riffle sluices, how material flowed in them, how water flowed, when gold was lost and when it was not, what kind of gold was being lost (shape and size,) etc. Fortunately for me I got it right the first time with the prototype. Since then I have had 5 major revisions of its design, but not the plates. The only new plates are for the huge custom commercial ones. Though I am working on a plate that will help fine crushed ores to flow better and faster without losing much gold. So yeah R&D is a big thing. And people just imagine that I am a multi-millionaire making bank off them. Not true at all. I would be embarrassed for anyone to see where I live and how I live. The costs of doing business eat up all the profit when you are really small. People should remember I am not a large corporate entity with millions in the bank to work with. I'm the lemonade stand down at the corner with the freckle faced kid sitting in the hot sun trying to make $1.98 for that new comic book! Haha. Through the past year while I have been out of production, I continued to support everyone who had one of my sluices anyhow. To me the customers and people I have met have been really good people, and worth all the grief that I have gotten along the way.

 

[Oregon Viking]

Will you be designing a Gold Well specifically for this? This -100/250 stuff is a major PIA.

 

[LP13]

Will you be designing a Gold Well specifically for this? This -100/250 stuff is a major PIA.

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We have several people using the Gold Well sluice, as currently available, that are processing beach sands and other fine materials. I can't tell just by looking at a picture how well that material would process through our sluice, but so far it does extremely well, better than most other methods, and most likely a lot faster. Here is a video from a guy in Alaska working beach sands. His recovery is very good, though his technique is a bit unusual. But it seems to work well based on the gold in the bucket near the end.

Here is a photo of gold we get from our hard rock mine, taken through a microscope, and another with a bunch of it in a pan. The line in the photo is a human hair measured with micrometers at .003" (3 thousandths of an inch.) As you will see there are a lot of particles in there that are less than 1/6 of the thickness of that hair, putting them in the 10-20 micron range. That's really small! Mesh that would be roughly 1200 mesh!

Now of course we do not recover 100% when gold gets this fine, and recovery would depend a lot on the particle shape as well as the size, but we get around 80-85%, with water flow and angle set properly to optimize recovery and the proper feed rate. Then when we finish we re-process the tailings at a different angle (steeper) and stuff it through as fast as we can, and get another 5% or so.

Here is the video of Wade Hoek near Juneau, AK processing beach sands.



We have run Nome concentrates which people tell me is about as bad as it gets (loaded up with magnetite and garnet) and had little difficulty with it. We processed it on the AU Grabber in the first season of Bering Sea Gold. About the only thing you have to watch with heavy material is not to feed it so fast as to build a sandbank on the flats of the sluice between pocket rows. If you do overfeed it, a few seconds pause on feeding and it's ready to go again.

So I'm guessing that it might work pretty well on that stuff in your pic too without any modification.

 

[russau]

Im impressed with the quick recovery of the sluice has the man in the video overfed the GW sluice (to me) and still had the fines gold recovery that it did have! yep, it is costly BUT if it works as stated , the recovery of your investment and your back should come quick also! He reruns his cons the same way I do. why bring home more than you need to! id say a man would have a hard time finding another sluice with as quick of a clean out as this! Being a F.O.G. I find all these attributes a major plus for it!

 

[LP13]

If the particles are able to separate from each other relatively well, then you can run a virtual mud flow through the sluice, because the gold will quickly get to the bottom and get caught even with that much material moving through the sluice. It would be like a heavy marble rolling along in a whole bunch of lighter marbles. In just a very short distance it would hit bottom. But if you had a lot of very sticky clays, I wouldn't push it like that. Testing is the key. Run it how you would like to run it and then test to see if the majority of the gold is being captured. If not then make an adjustment in feed rate, angle or water flow. Doesn't take long and you will zero in on the sweet spot. I am sure Wade has tested his tailings to be sure he's not losing much.