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I thought I would post some pics of the gold panning operation. I went out today to pick up a couple of things from the local supply store and saw a really nice sluice box I just had to have, so I bought it and brought it home. Here it is set up in the creek.
For those that do not know what this does for you, it allows you to process a lot more material than panning does. What you do is get your sand and dirt, I run it through a classifier which just a round tool that fits inside a bucket with mesh in the bottom. You drop in your dirt then rinse it through the mesh. Anything big stays there, rocks and what not and the sand goes through. Then you take this sand and pour it into the sluice. The water rushing through it washes the sand through and the gold collects behind small ridges in the box.
As you can see in the pic there are a couple of sizes of ridges, the larger ones create eddies behind them where gold will fall and collect. Then there is the expanded metal that will catch anything that makes it by. Under both of these is a carpet that holds the material. After running the material through the box you rinse all the parts out in a bucket, collecting everything it caught and pan it out.
What you end up with is this.
Now some may say that it isn't a lot gold, and it's not, but I got that in less than an hour with less than a gallon of classified material, that's not bad at all. This is a hobby that can make you some money down the road, just collect it and let it build up. We spend a lot of time at the creek as it is, this just gives me something else to do.Here's the real reason we go to the creek.
For those that do not know what this does for you, it allows you to process a lot more material than panning does. What you do is get your sand and dirt, I run it through a classifier which just a round tool that fits inside a bucket with mesh in the bottom. You drop in your dirt then rinse it through the mesh. Anything big stays there, rocks and what not and the sand goes through. Then you take this sand and pour it into the sluice. The water rushing through it washes the sand through and the gold collects behind small ridges in the box.
As you can see in the pic there are a couple of sizes of ridges, the larger ones create eddies behind them where gold will fall and collect. Then there is the expanded metal that will catch anything that makes it by. Under both of these is a carpet that holds the material. After running the material through the box you rinse all the parts out in a bucket, collecting everything it caught and pan it out.
What you end up with is this.
Now some may say that it isn't a lot gold, and it's not, but I got that in less than an hour with less than a gallon of classified material, that's not bad at all. This is a hobby that can make you some money down the road, just collect it and let it build up. We spend a lot of time at the creek as it is, this just gives me something else to do.Here's the real reason we go to the creek.
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