Hi everybody. A couple of days ago, I made a post about the gold prospecting I've been doing in my home state of Pennsylvania. It mainly introduced you all to my peculiar hobby and talked a little bit about panning for gold. If you'd like to check it out and catch up, the post can be found here: Gold Prospecting in Pennsylvania - Panning for Gold.
^^^My grandfather "feeding the sluice"!
Now that I had my panning technique down pretty well, it was time to look into getting a sluice. Gold prospecting, no matter which way you cut it, boils down to digging up a lot of dirt then refining down to smaller and smaller particles in a series of steps, until you're left with the smallest and heaviest stuff at the very end. Until this point, all I had to use to sort the soil was a series of sifting screens. Basically, a big hoop with screen on the bottom. The first one would have 1/2" holes, the next one would have 1/4" holes, the last would have 1/8" holes. You would put the largest size screen on a bucket, shove some dirt from a creek bed onto it, then shake and pour water over it until all the smaller stuff falls through the screen. Then repeat the process several times until you're left with the 1/8" or smaller particles in a bucket. THEN I would pan that material, one scoop at a time. A sluice, however, would cut out a lot of that back-breaking work.
Around the same time of me getting into gold prospecting, my birthday rolled around in early May. Kylene asked what I wanted as a gift, and viola, a perfect opportunity to get a sluice! I found one I wanted on Amazon and two days later it was at our door. Look at this beaut':
^^^My folding 50" sluice box by Royal. It folds down to fit in a 5 gallon bucket!
In a nutshell, a sluice is a device made to to process a lot of soil quickly. You position the sluice into an area of the stream with decent current, or attach a hose and pump to pump water down it's length. You really just need to sift your dirt with only the 1/2" sifter size now, just to get rid of any large stones that the water can't move. Once your sluice is set up in a creek with water flowing over, you dump one scoop of soil at a time onto that black area right bellow the "V" shaped top (look at the photo above for reference). The black stuff is a rubber pad with ribs going across. Being that gold is the heaviest natural object you'd find in your dirt, the larger pieces will settle into these ribs and you'll see it right away! After that, the soil gets washed over the series of metal bars running across the sluice; these are called "riffles". They are basically little ramps that shoot the flowing water and soil into the air for a split second... but again, with gold being so heavy, it will want to just tumble over the metal ramps and fall straight down. Under the metal bars is expanded metal, which acts like a thousand even tinier little ramps that do the same thing. Finally, under the metal lathe, there is an artificial carpeting material that captures even the smallest specs of gold in it's mesh.
^^^An ideal setup for the sluice. Notice how ripply and choppy the water is going over the metal bars. That's exactly what you want.
Now it's important to say that you don't want your water to be TOO strong/fast running down your sluice. If that happens, all of your material AND gold will just get blown down your sluice and out the bottom. On the other hand, if the water is moving too slow, ALL of your soil and pebbles will just sit where you pour it and jam things up. You just want a nice even flow that washes your scoop of dirt away in about 2 or 3 seconds. Two other tips is to have your sluice be as level as possible in the left to right direct, so you get a relatively even layer of water, and to also have the exit end of the box above the stream's water level. If the exit of your sluice is IN the water, it will create a bit of an eddy there and slow down your material from leaving.
^^^I gave my grandfather a bad case of "gold fever". His job was to feed the sluice. He loved it. :)
So after running a bucket of soil through the sluice, you put something like a 5 gallon bucket over it's end and start to take the layers of parts off. First you rinse it all to wash any loose, heavy material (hopefully gold!) into the bucket. Then take off the metal bar riffles and rinse them. Then the metal lathe and rinse, then finally the carpeting material and rinse and squeeze. After all parts have been rinsed, everything that the sluice caught is now in the bottom of your bucket. This material is called your "cons", short for "concentrates". This is what you pan. If you want to practice panning, or just want to pan for gold without all the digging and hard work, some companies from gold-rich states sell bags of these cons... but you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes a ton of gold, sometimes nothing.
So how well does a sluice box work? If it's set up properly it works great! As an example, here is a piece of gold I found in a Pennsylvania creek that was trapped in my sluice. To give you an idea of it's size, it's photographed through a microscope and those fibers around it are the PAPER TOWEL it's sitting on! lol
In closing on the topic of sluicing.... as cool as it is, it STILL comes down to panning. I did not know that before I got into the hobby. Even on those Discovery Channel shows you see, where the guys have backhoes and earth movers, and machines the size of buildings... all they are doing really is dumping soil over a giant sluice like you see here. Then, the crew takes the concentrates from that sluice and pan it out by hand. Panning is the only way to get the gold out with out losing a bunch of it, AND the only way to get the tinies bits of gold that is pretty much dust, known as "flour gold". It always comes down to panning.
Thanks for reading, everyone! The next installment on my gold prospecting will be about finding where the gold is hiding in a stream or river. I hope you catch it!
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***These daily blogs showcase the natural world. It is all original content using photos, stories, and experiences from my own travels.***