Recirculating fine gold sluice

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Goldtarget said:
You never know mate you might go from prospector Pete to Miner Pete!
I think it's going to be more along the lines of "that crazy bloke who collects rocks and makes lots of loud noises in his shed, gets frustrated and kicks the dog then builds sand castles in the garden with the crushings" Pete :lol:
It keeps me out of trouble at the very least.

Hey RS thanks mate, that was exactly my point with that post. I hope by sharing what I'm doing others will comment so I and others that are interested will learn from this post, I got the ideas from other peoples posts so it's great learning from each other. If I hit a good patch you guys will certainly know about it because you've all helped contribute to me finding it.

Take care,
Pete
 
G'day Pete,
I know what you mean - I went out on the weekend and brought a couple of buckets of gravel from the river for processing at home. At least I'll be able to fill a few more potholes in the driveway!
Cheers
TD
 
mate i take my hat off to you for even getting them crushed.... i've got rocks stacked up here there and everywhere and just cant ever find the time to crush them..... problem is even when i do crush a bit i cant remember where it came from...
 
Trying to wrap my head around these advertised flow rates before I build a black sand cleanup sluice - that 3700 gph of your bilge pump converts to approx 14000 lph - how much of that do you think you actually have flowing down the sluice after plumbing restrictions are taken into account?? I only ask as I have a couple of pump options laying around, but the smaller option has a timed bucket fill of 900 lph so would only be sufficient for a much narrower sluice than yous; I am just trying to work out how much narrower and if it would be worth the bother.
 
that sluice that petes running is 200 wide and i reckon hed be running at most about 1500-2000gph? would that be about right pete?

for cleanup its a case of the slower the better but you ahve to have enought water to keep a flat profile...it a real battle sometimes that why ive never produced a commercial cleanup unit because i'm never happy with it as everyone wants the silver bullet :)

you can make a small cleanup sluice about 100mm wide and run it of of a fish tank pump... works a treat, you can even use plastic gutter instead of ally.
 
I've got it throttled back to just over half of the pumps capacity, it's not running efficiently yet due to the outlet of the pump is a weird size so the connection I made up is leaking & loosing some pressure and needs reconnecting for a better seal, the size of the holes on the spray bar would also influence the pump greatly but any smaller than what I drilled and it would just create more pressure and overspray, I made up another undrilled spray bar initially thinking I would have to experiment a fair bit but I think I got lucky from the start, I set the angle as a starting point then adjusted the spray to just cover the matting with even flow, I might experiment and reduce the angle by 1 piece of wood and increase the water flow, re-run the material and see if anything else gets caught.
After running 10 litres of cons in the current setup I'm left with about 1-2 table spoons of caught cons for clean up which doesn't feel like it's enough but it's catching fine flour gold so I'm happy with that.

Like G0lddigg@ said, you could build a smaller cleanup sluice and run a smaller pump on it, I could get away with a much smaller pump on my sluice if everything was running 100% efficient but I bought the bigger pump so I had the option of using it for other applications as well, I want to set up my AM Grubstake eventually so if I bring back any buckets of classified material I can run them through the GS with a different spray bar first, crush the material the next day and run it through the cleanup sluice before topping up the garden beds.

I think it's just a matter of experimenting with angles and flow rates, I'm no expert on it by any means but keeping the matting covered via sluice angle V's water flow and re-run the material at different settings to find what you're happy with.
 
Ok. My 900 lph might work with a bit of downpipe I have laying around. I have taken to re-running my panned out banker cons through my AM Alaskan on-site, so it is only really re-running the black sand that I am looking to do so volume will be nothing like you are needing. Thanks for sharing all the advice guys.
 

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