Capture Fine Gold With A Simple River Sluice Modification - Aussie Bloke Prospector

what you're looking at is some super super fine gold and i'll put this into perspective for you there's the tip of my finger so we're looking at some extremely small gold what i'm going to show you today is how you can very easily and very cheaply modify your standard sluice which will enable you to catch this super super fine gold [Music] this gold has gone through a 100 mesh screen and i'll put this into perspective for you there's the tip of my finger that just shows you how small this gold is i'll zoom out that's the size of the pan so we're looking at some extremely small gold right now it's sitting all over the pen so from this distance it's hard to see but if i do the old tap tap we'll then be able to appreciate as you can see it's all now walking together just how much there is this superfine gold is the product of some experimentation that i've been conducting over the last few weeks gold this small generally will not be caught in a standard sluice setup i've worked out a way that i can modify my sluice box to catch gold even this fine the question of course is how did i catch it and the answer is this so what i'm going to show you today is how you can very easily and very cheaply modify your standard sluice into a vibration bed and an extremely effective one at that which will enable you to catch ridiculously fine gold these four buckets here are tailings these tailings are all minus 30 mesh and i got some outstanding results i'll show you a photo some pretty good results and as good as they were i know that there's still fine gold in this material now my setup that i used was a conventional sluice it was a good setup and what you saw in that picture is everything that are caught but this being super fine material means that there's still going to be some super super fine mustard type gold still sitting in this material so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to get a scoop of this material i'm going to put it in a pan and i'm going to show you what's still in it random scoop in the pan let's go and have a look at it okay i've managed to isolate most of it right up the top of the pan okay i've bunched it up and there it is there now obviously we're not talking about huge amounts of gold here but it just goes to show that's just one scoop and there's real fine mustard gold still on this material so that got me thinking here's my clean sluice box and even though this sluice box is a great sluice box it still wasn't able to catch that real fine mustard stuff still some gold was getting through and that's because this thing's not built to catch extremely fine mustard gold that material needs to be treated differently so i thought i need to modify it and this is what i came up with this here is a concrete vibrator 70 bucks of ebay and obviously runs off 240 volts if i want to catch superfine gold i mean all the gold that was missed there's a few things that i need to adjust firstly i need to decrease the angle of the box secondly i need to decrease the amount of water thirdly the speed of water and fourth i need to introduce a completely new dynamic and that's where the concrete vibrator comes in and i've had the opportunity to watch a few professional sapphires run their pay dirt through massive wet plants and one of the things that they use is they use what's called a vibration bed and essentially what i've done here is the same concept the vibration bed on a sapphire plant causes movement of the bed which the sapphire wash goes over and causes all that heavy stuff ie sapphires to go straight to the bottom and all the lighter material continues over now this is obviously assisted by water as well so i thought why not incorporate something like that to my standard sluice so that's what i've done now right now i'm just in the experimental stages but i can tell you i've already done two test runs and i'm extremely pleased with the results i need to reduce the amount of water now this little setup here is the same bilge pump that i used on my video how to get fine gold out of crushings using limited water and it's a very small pump which means automatically for a sluice this size i'm not getting the normal amount of water that i would in a conventional setup so right there i've got the reduced amount of water that i need and of course assisted by this regulator which i can adjust if needed now going on to the angle of the box the angle of the box normally when i have my sluice box set up for a conventional run as i did when i originally ran this material here i had it sitting probably further up there like around about another good inch higher at the head i generally run my sluice boxes anywhere between sort of one in eight to one in six and from experience i've found that seems to give me the best results and judging from those earlier pitches i did i got great results however i need to reduce the angle of the box for this setup because i want the water to tarry in this box and the reason why i wanted to tarry is i want to give this little device time to do its job which is by vibrating we're causing an incredible amount of now introduced additional displacement so now having less water and less angle the water is now going to move slower than it normally would which in conjunction with the vibrator causes that superfine gold to get trapped now the angle of the box i've got here i've just written it on the side of the box i measured it is 11 to 1. so for every 11 inches forward the box drops one inch down the vibrator is sitting on the plate which actually came with it which is used to smooth out your concrete and i thought that's a great bit of kit to serve as a mounting plate so what i did is i just ground down the corners cut them away folded them over either side and they now become the brace where i can attach it to the sluice drilled a couple of holes on both sides point to note though it was fairly flimsy so i realized that if i want optimum transfer i need to brace it up a bit so i put this little wooden frame on it and now it's nice and rigid and sturdy which means i'm getting full transfer of vibration onto the sluice box now i was thinking about putting it up here putting it down here but i thought you know what i'll put it right in the center so the whole box can get the effect of the vibrations and with a couple of test runs that i've done it's worked beautifully so having worked out how to secure the concrete vibrator to the sluice box my next problem was how am i going to get the sluice box to not walk and this was my fix so normally what i do is i'll put the end of the sluice box on a block of wood like this and another block of wood up the top but this time i'll put a thinner one here because i need to reduce the angle so all i simply did is i got this piece of timber here and i've got a couple of clamps on either side and to hold the actual box on the piece of timber i just put a g clamp in the center of it so what this does is it stops this timber moving and it stops the box moving at the front so i thought okay i won't get any backwards forwards movement anymore but i thought what about sideways movement and my fix for that was is i simply got my drill and i drilled a hole through these two bits of timber down through the bath and simply just dropped a bolt into the hole like so and of course i did the same on the other side so i thought how am i actually going to stop the sluice box moving from side to side so what i did is i simply drilled another hole there got a long screw with a couple of nuts and just drop it in the hole same on the other side and that now stops any sideways movement so now the sluice box is secure so it can vibrate as much as it wants and it's not going to move the final thing i did was is i needed to adjust the levels and to get the right level i just use my spirit level here and there it is sitting between two lines so even left and right at the end right there where the bucket is slightly off to the left from the way i'm looking at it now however it's between the lines so i'm happy with that so she's pretty well good to go now and i've got those four buckets over there waiting so what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to run just one bucket through and show you guys how this thing works at the end of that we're going to process what's caught in the sluice and what's caught in the bucket separately i want to be able to determine whether or not this setup is working and the best way to do that is to pan this to see how much gold gets through one thing i should also add before we get going this being a 240 volt device i have my generator set up and the bilge pump being a 12 volt device will run off my auxiliary battery via this anderson plug okay so i've got the water going now here she's going into the bucket coming out at the head of the sluice a slight adjustment just to get it into the center and see it's pretty well good to go now go and turn on the generator [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so there's our empty bucket we've switched her off and this is what she looks like now and you can see there's a build up of material in and around each riffle interestingly enough this is hard packed all through here it's hard packed at first i was wondering about that but it doesn't really concern me if you've ever carried a bucket of dirt home from the bush in your car you've traveled 100 kilometers or so you'll find that when you get home what's in that bucket is going to be hard pack and that's exactly what's happened here because of the vibrations the material has become hard packed and that gold has gone right down into the bottom of it so we're going to find out now just how much gold ended up down in this tailings bucket so this is the tailings bucket and it's just on half a bucket of actual tailings i've got a tub set up and a pan ready to go and see if there was any gold that got through now considering what we saw out of that one scoop if this isn't working then there should be lots and lots of little dust but we don't want to see any that will indicate that she's working i can see a couple of little specks i don't know if you can see them that's all that got through i'll now do the second pan out of the tailings back and we'll see what the result is we'll reduce this second pan down and we'll see what we get and i can see one or two little specks there nothing right home about so i'm really happy with that so one full bucket of material around about five six specs of gold got through so she's working and she's working well so now we're going to clean this out and we'll see how much fine gold we actually caught now bear in mind this dude's already been through a sluice a conventional setup which is why i put this set up together because i want to catch the fine gold that escaped the conventional setup and it's still in those buckets and i reckon this could be a good fix we're about to find out okay so this is the material out of the sluice around about half an inch material on the bottom of the bucket i'm gonna pan it off and see how much gold we caught alrighty let's have a look but there you go we can see it if you have a look at the top of the pan you can see a tail right across the top of the pan which would indicate that we've caught some extremely fine gold indeed if i'm going to do this properly i need to be super super meticulous because i really do want to get a true picture of how much fine gold we got out of that one bucket so what i did is i took all the material and then two handfuls at a time whacked it into a pan and meticulously pans it off and i've now reduced it to that so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to tip this into a pan and this will give us a true picture of just how much fine gold was in that one bucket of material very very cloudy material so much fine sultanate and of course a lot of fine cold right looks pretty good so now we're going to get a true picture of what was in that bucket let's have a look look at that line of color coming up on the top of the pan now goodness gracious me so much fine gold have a go at that and it's all through this material you can just see it's just like dust check that out there right here i'll bunch it up again just with my fingers tap tap there it is walking together now look at that there just an incredible amount of dust and the old tap tap just brings it together and you can see a definite cluster of fine gold there but there you go check that out how fine is that gold just super super fine then bearing in mind that this was material that had already gone through a conventional setup so i'm actually super stoked incorporating a concrete vibrator onto a standard sluice reducing the level reducing the water flow and the speed of water seems to work quite well and this is really only my first run through so i'm pretty sure that if i tweaked it i'd get even better results that is just ridiculously fine gold super super fine mustard gold and it just goes to show how gold like this can get through a conventional slew setup so i'm super super stoked but i've come up all the way a fairly simple way too that i can recycle my tailings and catch this otherwise unattainable gold yeah it might not represent much in weight but you know it's an experiment i'm always experimenting always trying to work out new ways to catch gold and i'm just really really happy that this has actually worked as well as it has so can't wait to put these other three buckets through and see what our total show of color will be right over fast forward three buckets later through the wet plant clean out pan off the cons and with the help of a blue bowl this is what we got now this includes the first bucket this is the total amount now it doesn't really look like that much but when we put it in the pan that's actually going to look pretty good so knowing just how fine this gold is and knowing what to expect i'm going to put a couple of drops in this pan of good quality dishwashing detergent that'll serve to break the surface tension of the water so we'll now tip in the little bottle and you can see the color there and i haven't even got it together yet just so much fine colour righty-o virtually the whole bottom of the pan is painted it's like someone's got a a paintbrush dipped it into a can of gold paint and just painted the bottom of the pan and it is so fine it just doesn't want to move off the bottom of that pan so the old tap tap here we go good old tap tap gets it all together again and just have a go at that my word have a go with that fine gold now that is all gold that i missed when i did my first sluicing of the fine minus 30 mesh material and i put those four buckets aside suspecting there was a lot of fine gold that i missed and i tell you what i wasn't wrong have a go at that that's a lot of fine gold and i'm tipping if i weighed that i'd probably be getting at least two grams maybe three grams of gold that i otherwise would not have got so now you know the process that i went through to end up with this and over here in this tub is some already pre-mixed superfine crushing this material on this tub was 8 to 30 mesh and i then put that aside onto tarps redried it and this is now the result of recrushing it that material went through the rc-1 four or five times and has effectively been ground down to 100 mesh 200 mesh so super super fine material i haven't changed the angle of the box the angle of the box is still 11 to 1. you may have noticed however in the trial stage that this corner here was fairly loose so what i've done is i've put some larger fasteners in place so that is now very very firm now that's important because that now means that i'm going to get 100 transference of vibration from the concrete vibrator to the sluice box so it's going to work even more effectively the other main thing through trial and error is i believe the water was still slightly too fast so what i've done now is i've closed this regulator valve a little bit more and that's because i want to reduce the flow of water i want to slow the water down i want it to stay in the box even longer than before which just gives more time for those vibrations and that now introduced displacement to do its work in conjunction with specific gravity and as previously during my testing i have a bucket at the end to catch the tailings and that's there for one reason one reason only so i can do a quick test pan of what ends up in that bucket to see whether or not we're missing gold and hopefully now that i've made these few slight adjustments and repairs it should be very very minimal if anything negligible so we're ready to go we're going to start her up we're going to put this material through [Music] so [Music] okay so i'll put one bucket through and now we're going to quickly check a few scoops of these tailings here to see whether or not any gold got through once i've done that i'll do a quick clean up of this sluice here put it into a tub and i'll give you a sneak preview of what we caught and then we'll crack on if i'm happy with everything with the rest of that dirt so here we have our bucket of tailings and what i'm going to do is i'm going to get one scoop of this put it into that pan i'm gonna see if there's any color but as a comparison what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna grab this pan here this is the stuff we're putting through the sluice and i'm gonna grab one scoop of it right now and i'm gonna put in the pan and we're gonna see how much color is in this material that hasn't even hit the sluice yet and the reason why i want to do this because this will give me a really good idea of what's getting through this setup so let's go do that now one scoop of tailings one scoop of material before it hits the sluice now gonna pan both these off and let's look at the difference and see if any gold's getting through into the tailings so this is our material before it hits the sluice and this is just a very quick pan off just to see per scoop how much we can expect you can see the color coming up a fair bit of color so that's what we can expect for one scoop of material so now let's quickly pan off the tailings now we don't want the same result in fact we virtually want no gold in this and we'll now do a twirl let's see what we've got heck i can't even see dust in that oh look probably one one tiny little micron speck in there so that's just brilliant for one scoop of material that came out of the tailings we virtually got no gold so she's working and she's working beautifully so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to quickly clean the box out i'll give you a sneak peek and then from there we'll put the rest of the material through so here now is the cleanup from that one bucket load that i put through so basically around about an inch on the bottom of this bucket is the cons that we're left with so what i'm going to do now i'm going to give you guys a sneak and what we can expect so one scoop of it into this pan let's have a look-see and considering what we saw come out of one scoop of pre-sluiced material we should have some pretty nice color in this what have we got and yeah we've got some nice color coming up there let's bunch him up together and we got some nice color coming up there and that's just a sneak peek of what we can expect when we pan out these cons and the cons from the remainder of dirt that's yet to go through our new improvised vibration bed so after our first bucket which we tested we've now managed to empty the red tub we've got one final bucket of material to go through we're going to whack it through now and then we'll be able to do the final cleanup [Music] so [Music] all done so a quick pan off from the tailings straight out of the tailings bucket grab one scoop in the pan and we do not want to see any gold in this let's go okay and look at that not even a skerrick of color oh that is brilliant give the tap tap give the benefit of the doubt and i am not seeing a single color which is absolutely fantastic that means my now modified sluice into a vibration bed is working perfectly so here's the result half a bucket of cons from all that material and now i'm going to do something that's really going to put this set up to the test i'm now going to run this half a bucket of cons back through we're gonna see just how well it works we'll put it through and then we'll do a quick test pan of what comes out and if there's zero gold in that then not only have we now reduced the amount of cons but we've also proven that this is an extremely effective vibration bed [Music] [Music] so this now will be the ultimate test to see whether or not the tailings of the cons are still holding gold now let's see if there's any gold in it [Applause] okay let's see if there's any color in here oh there is nothing i can't even see a single spec that is awesome that's better than i thought you know i wasn't going to put the cons through but i thought it's the ultimate test to see whether or not it's going to catch all the gold from concentrates and it has so i am super super stoked this just proves how good this simple modification can be on the standard sluice box let's now go and do the pan off done the cleaning it and this is now the cons of the cons so it's time now to head up whack him in the blue bowl and let's see what we got so what i've done now is i've come up and i've started panning off the cons and i'm going to do that as you can see with the assistance of a blue bowl so what i've just run through here now is the minus 100 mesh material so i classified it out and just have a go at the color around this rim that is insane super super fine material so now i'm going to go on to the minus 30 mesh and this is the minus 30 plus 100 mesh material having now just gone through the blue bowl and we've got some really really nice color there so what we're going to do is we're going to put it all together clean it up get rid of all the black sand and iron filings and we'll see how much we've got some really really nice gold there and super super fine stuff just so fine got to be happy with that so here now is the result of our final pan off that being the result of those five or six buckets of re-crushed material put through the vibration bit i'm going to weigh it up now and we're going to see what it came to so remember this is more gold i was able to recover from that already previously crushed material and that comes to 6.13 grams so that's another 6.13 grams i was able to recover out of that previously crushed material and then re-crushed again but now put through a vibration bed which enabled me to capture that super super fine gold and not forgetting back in the experimental stage i even put the originally fine crush material through again without recrushing it and was able to recover more gold simply because the vibration bed can catch that super super fine stuff so i'm really really happy with this result that's another six grams i was able to recover using this method a very very effective method and cheap very easy to make thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Aussie Bloke Prospector

Views: 62,553

Rating: 4.9172821 out of 5

Keywords: gold prospecting australia, gold panning australia, aussie bloke prospector, gold prospecting, how to pan for gold, gold sluicing, gold panning, finding gold in australia, sluicing for gold, how to find gold, how to get gold, gold panning techniques, prospecting australia, prospecting, gold mining, panning for gold, finding gold, australian gold, River Sluice, Sluice modification, Vibration Bed, Fine Gold Recovery, Convert a Sluice box, Make a vibration bed, Shaker table

Id: kMLD-SwRLpE

Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021