How to Make a Gold Catching Sluice Box. Build your own sluice, get better gold recovery

hey i'm chris ralph the professional prospector and today we're going to talk about how you can make your very own gold catching sluice box and even if you own one how you can customize it and make it and get better recovery so building your own sluice box customizing one you might already have if you're interested in that stay tuned because that's what we're going to be talking about today now sluice box is a very handy tool to have i mean literally for most guys most folks getting into prospecting a loose box is the second tool you get after you get a pan and this loose box right here we're gonna be taking a closer look at it today and and getting into the nuts and bolts of it this loose box i bought over 40 years ago it's like a 1977 or 78 keen model sluice box i've made a few customizations on it to get better recovery we're going to talk about those and how you can get really great recovery out of your sluice box or if you want to start from scratch how you can build one for yourself they're really not that hard this is a level of a a project that most people could handle now the key to designing your own sluice box is understanding how they work and the truth is a properly designed sluice box properly set up in a stream or creek they do really good job i mean they'll do an excellent job if you run them right of catching both coarse and fine gold and if you understand how they work you can set it up right and you can operate it right and of course you can design your own now i'm not gonna lay out a plan oh get a piece so many inches long and do this you know exact plants because the different folks have different needs i mean you may want to design for yourself a little small sluice box that you can easily backpack into the high country to get a gold deposits that maybe haven't been worked so over so hard or you may want something bigger than this i've got a sluice box i built out in the garage that's like seven eight feet long and it's it's about two feet wide so it's a really big so you could just shovel all kinds of material into that so depending on what somebody wants is the kind of design they're gonna make so i'm not gonna give you one design because there's no one design that fits all instead we're going to look at how loose boxes work understand the concepts understand why they catch gold so well and then you can take those ideas and design one for yourself that meets the needs of what you want in a sluice box now something i want to emphasize is i'm not a dealer i don't sell equipment i've never sold this loose box in my life i bought a couple of them but that's it i i'm a guy who knows about sluice boxes i'm not a dealer so there's no bias i'll buy this brand by that brand use this super duper matting don't use that super duper matting you're not going to find that kind of bias in my videos because i'm i'm a user not a dealer so let's get started talking about sluice boxes now sluice boxes are a basic piece of extraction equipment that are used in gold mining plants all over the world i mean they've been used since ancient times my sluice box here i have some stuff in there called miners moss it's a plastic material that's the matting underneath the riffles ancient miners used sheep fleece as the equivalent of miners moths but way back thousands of years ago they were using things like sluice boxes the 49ers and the old-time miners in the western u.s and elsewhere in the u.s and other places in the world they use them too you can see by old pictures that they were extremely popular they were just a basic piece of equipment that virtually every miner had to have one and they've improved some today and they're still used all over the world in modern placer mining you can see them on tv shows you can see them being used in the yukon and elsewhere loose boxes have been used for thousands of years and the reason that they're used for thousands of years and still being used because they work great if you use them right so you're going to understand by what we're talking about today how they work how to make them work great because they do work really well the basic concept of a sluice box is you have a flow of water that allows the lighter material to wash away and the heavier material to remain behind so materials that are very dense like gold but also like iron oars like black sand and any trash lead and bullets or other things like that that might happen to be in the material that you're shoveling in it'll capture heavy stuff oh garnet that's another one that's heavy but anything that's heavy sapphires if there's any sapphires present heavy stuff gets caught in the sluice while it allows the lighter stuff the lighter rocks and quartz and that sort of thing to wash on through that's the basic concept heavy stuff gets caught light stuff moves on out and goes out in the waste pile now the water flowing through your sluice box does the work of separating the lights and the heavies and there's all different kinds like i say different sizes i mean the old-time 49ers used to make ones hundreds of feet long because they thought somehow they were getting better recovery by having you know 300 foot long sluice the truth is they recovered very little gold in the latter part of the sluice even with their poorly designed sluices that they had they still caught most of it up in the front part only a little tiny bit would catch in the back so but they come in all different lengths i mean even modern ones you know maybe i i've seen little tiny ones that are no more than a foot long i i've seen plenty of ones like this that are maybe four feet long i've seen plenty of ones in commercial applications where they're doing commercial mining that might be 15 20 feet long the 300 foot ones are kind of rare but that's what the old time miners used and they're still in great application today because they work so well the idea being that you're letting the water do the work for you of washing the light stuff away and keeping the heavy stuff caught now how we're going to achieve that how are we going to achieve keeping the heavy stuff without washing the heavy stuff out along with the light well there have been a lot of weird sluice designs over the years i mean the old-time miners there's even sluices and some of those really long 300-foot ones that they would use pebbles and rocks as the material in the bottom of the sluice they figured that you know cracks and crevices in the riverbed worked good to catch gold they knew that from their panning efforts um so they figured pebbles and rocks some of them used uh you know branches from trees but instead of going across the sluice box like we do with our riffles today they would sometimes run them long down the length of the swiss blocks anyway a lot of weird designs we're going to try to avoid the weird designs and go with the designs that are efficient and capture the gold now i mentioned weird designs and i bring that up because i want to make the point that it's important for you if designing your own sluice or if you're customizing an existing sluice to think about the things that you want in your sluice box okay to think about what's important to you is it well i'm going to be going after mostly just really fine gold so i want to emphasize catching fine gold in my sluice box design or i want a sluice box like i mentioned before that's super portable so i can carry it into the back country or i want a sluice box that i can just shovel massive amounts of material into into the sluice box you know i can have four guys shoveling in all at once and it won't overload my sluice box you know there's all different characteristics like that you could say hey i'm designing a sluice box that i want to be able to use it as a river sluice and i want to be able to use it as a high banker sometimes and where i could use a pump to pump water in you know that's a that's a a great thought and so those kinds of things you should take some time to think about that and write it down so that you know your priority of what you want to see in this loose box and don't just write well i want it to do everything perfectly you know i want it to be able to take four guys shoveling into it but to only be uh eight inches long and weigh four ounces and you know it doesn't work that way and think of it kind of like a race car um or any kind of automobile you could say hey i want a car that carries my family of eight okay uh you can get a car like that or i want a car that i can go race at the the track at the weekend well you could probably get something like that but it's not the same as the car that carries the family of eight or you could say i want a car that gets 45 miles to the gallon you know okay good you can get that too but you can't get the 45 mile per hour per gallon car that carries eight people and does the quarter mile in 12 seconds or 10 seconds or something like that you have to kind of choose and compromise what you want and so when we're designing our sluice box when you're designing your sluice box then think about what's important to you and and kind of prioritize those things because there's no such thing as having one size that's perfect for everybody it doesn't work that way that way you can customize this loose to be what you need it to be and meet your needs the best you know when you go to a dealer or store you buy what they have to offer you know and they may have a couple different models but you know you can take it that's the thing too is you can take what they sell you and customize it which i did with my sluice box here this is like i say a very old keen sluice box that i modified we're going to go over that but you can make it fit more what you want so let's talk about the basics of how sluice boxes work now you can see mice loose box here it has a y-shaped feed area and this brings water in and helps kind of concentrate it into the recovery area this is where i would put material in and what happens in this because it's bigger sized it has a chance for the uh it has a chance for the materials to start working their way through the light stuff starts going down and and the heavy stuff starts moving slowly through this because this is smooth it's not going to catch the heavy stuff will start moving slowly through as the light materials are already washing away the clays and the sand is already washing away and the heavy like the gold and the black sand is working its way down to the bottom of this this slick sheet this basically this flap area flat smooth area at the entrance now it gets to here and this is actually a customization that i added this is a little bit of ribbed rubber matting that i glued into the bottom of this loose just to catch these things are really handy and a lot of times the noose loose boxes now will have this ribbed matting glued in in the front it's there to um it basically catches a lot of the really fine gold will be caught in these little ribs up at front because the ribs are small they're only i don't know maybe a 32nd of an inch deep or one millimeter something like that they're very shallow and they work really only well for catching very fine gold tiny flakes and dust that's that's what this works best for but one of the things that it gives you is it gives you a quick look you can look in here as you're running this the sluice box and see am i getting some gold am i not getting any gold you get a quick indicator then we start the riffles here and these are of course transverse cross riffles i also have i'll show you a close-up picture i also have this expanded metal here and as originally designed this had indoor outdoor carpeting underneath it well i've replaced the indoor carpeting with miners moss it miners moss will load up more heavy material allow heavies like gold to work their way down through the miner's moss and get caught so it hasn't got any place to go now when you do big nuggets in this what i find is this very first riffle there's a kind of a step up from the the matting up to the first riffle and any big gold will just go right in there and get stuck right against this first rib the very first riffle and and even other smaller gold will mostly catch in the first riffle or two very much less by three and by the time you get to the end there's hardly any left so that's basically the basics of how this loose box works material comes in here already as soon as you put it in the light stuff is going to be starting to flow down here the clays and the sand the heavier pieces will move more slowly through the gold and the black sand fine gold will get caught here on this ribbing and give you a good indication then the ripples the gold gets caught behind the riffles or in the expanded metal little flakes and it falls and works its way into the miner's moss and gets caught and so this thing is very efficient at catching a lot of sized gold so the three things that i've added to this old timey sluice from keen is the ribbon matting up front the miner's moss underneath and then a handle there's a handle here just makes it so much easier to pick up and carry this loose it's just a lot easier to carry it around you're carrying it down to the river so those are a couple of customizations that i made and i think they make this loose work a lot better let's talk about the materials that you're going to make the trough part of your sluice box out of you can see that this my uh those boxes made out of aluminum sheet metal it's folded over and put together and in all honesty i recommend aluminum i think that's what you should use because it's light and it's durable it's tough stuff i've had this thing for 40 years probably got several more decades left in it before you know maybe i'll pass it on down to my son or my granddaughter or something anyway a lot of you guys will probably look at this and say hey you know i've never really done much with metal before and so i'd like to make mine out of wood well here's the thing you can't make it out of plywood don't even try to use plywood because what happens you put plywood in water plywood is wood that's held together with glue and you let glue sit in water all day it just comes apart and you know you'll run this loose box and maybe it'll last for a day maybe it'll last for two days by the third of the fourth day if the time you've used it it'll be so falling apart you'll hardly be able to pick it up out of the water so no plywood um then you could use plank in a regular like pine plank and that's when i made my wooden sluice box because i the reason i'm recommending aluminum i have experience making this loose box out of wood that's why i'm recommending aluminum so when you make it out of plank and that's what i made mine out of the wood gets waterlogged you put it in a stream all day long the wood gets waterlogged and by the time you go to pick up the sluice at the end of the day and you've got a sluice box full of gravel and riffles and waterlogged wood that thing weighs about a ton and uh you know one that was my first loose box was the one i made out of wood and i was probably you know 17 or 18 when i used it i used it one time it was so heavy it was it was unwieldy to use and here's the truth the old-timers used wood for their sluice boxes they used wood so why can't you use wood well here's the thing the old timers when they used wood for sluice boxes they were not portable they were not intended to be portable they would be moved only once in a great while like they they might set up a wooden sluice box and and use it you know for six months before they moved it and that's the thing if you intend to use like like i use this loose box i take it in some place i use it for a day or two or something like that and and then you know i'm on my way or i use the day go out come back go out come back you know take it and use it use it as a portable thing you don't want to use wood the wood will get weak and start falling apart nails will come out even if you use screws it won't stay tight the wood will want to swell and get like i say super waterlogged so unless you're gonna use it like the old timers did where you put a sluice box in someplace and you're just gonna leave it for six months um you really you want to go with metal now some of you might say iron and you know there are some commercial types loose boxes that never move again that are made out of iron but iron rusts and even if it's galvanized it won't last forever galvanized will make it last longer so you end up with aluminum now one of the things about aluminum using it is you don't have to build it all as one piece you'll note that i have this y-shaped piece here and then there's a long straight shaped piece well these are actually two different pieces of metal and they're joined together with what they call pop rivets there's several of them right here you can see them on the inside right there but that'll be close enough here i'll take a i'll give you a close-up picture of that pop rivets are really handy they can be used to join pieces together so you don't even have to have the the trough section be all one piece this one is all one piece but you could make a trough section with several smaller pieces put together and sheet aluminum like this it can be bought at places like home depot and you can bend it on using like a couple of two by fours you could bend it on a good vise so you know a trough material made out of aluminum is really not beyond your reach you just got to think about it how you're going to do it but it's it's doable so let's talk about the riffle system in your sluice box how you're going to catch the gold you know having a little bit of smooth area up here at the start is good but you've got to have some sort of ripples in there some sort of matting or something to catch the gold now this particular one was built with a series of metal riffles and honestly to make metal riffles i i understand you need a welding setup i have a welder so i can make riffles you can make hungarian riffles you can even make riffles that that are attached you know you might think you can make riffles that are attached other ways metal but metal is good for riffles simply because it's durable it'll take the abuse of gravel running over it but there are in this day and age plastic rubber silicone type mattings that you can just line your sluice box with that material literally you could you could buy for whatever width of trough that you make you could buy a matting that's the the length and width to match what you've created and uh you can just lay that and attach it in the bottom now i recommend you have some sort of attachment on the side even if you use these rubber or silicone mattings and not just uh glue it to the bottom because the the trick is is that if you glue it it's going to be 10 times harder to clean the thing out when you're done at the end of the day this thing is great because there's a little wing nut here the whole riffle system just all pulls out you can wash it into a bucket it's easy if you have some sort of side system that holds down plastic matting or something like that or rubber silicone whatever type matting hold it holds it down on the sides and then you can pop that up or or release it at the end of the day then great you can just roll up the matting and put it in a bucket and wash the whatever material remains in the trough wash it into the bucket too again easy to clean so you want to think about the easy to clean part of it when you're doing this this little matting up here that i glued in it's kind of a pain to clean when that's one of the downsides of gluing something in like this is it makes it a pain to clean so lots of different mattings there's a dream mat with the swirl there's you know various you know different makers uh gold hog and other ones that that you know have different kinds of mattings some of these mattings that get sold as being super duper are all they are really is a specialized conveyor belt type of material that's been taken and used so you know that most of the mattings work really well that the trick with gold is it's very heavy and it's not that hard to catch in this loose box as long as you have the flows right you know you have some sort of an irregular material on the bottom i've got uh expanded metal here that's another good thing i'm literally expanding metal uh cut to size over the top of indoor outdoor carpet or like this miners moss that in and of itself is a great sluice bed material um and with uh with the material with expanded metal if you get a bigger size this is a very small size but you can get a quarter inch that's or eighth of an inch or whatever that's been expanded makes for a great bottom and that's an alternative to the different kinds of silicone or or rubber or whatever mattings that that go on the bottom of these things but gold's not that hard to catch an irregular surface like this the riffles the expanded metal the miner's moss or other super mattings that you buy you know it catches gold and and they they do a good job the biggest thing like i say is knowing how to run it right not putting it you don't want the water such that if you put your material in the material just sits there and goes nowhere you want to put your material in and then you see pretty quick the light stuff starting to work its way down and then maybe the little pebbles and little things working their way down and and they they work their way down with a reasonable speed you don't the other alternative is you don't want to put it in and have a go everything just goes right through it's all gone because if you're getting so fast it all goes through like that if you're getting the material move so fast that it looks like that the water's too fast and the fine gold that's in there will also go out the back so a medium speed you put the material in it works its way down it works its way down through the sluice and eventually the light stuff goes off the end that's the trick just loses and and there's a lot of options for what goes on the bottom of this loose and a lot of them work great as long as you're running this loose right feeding the material in properly you know one of the things too about a lot of guys times guys will screen material and unless your gold is super duper fine you know screening is is well screening it to pebble size is probably okay if you have you know big fist-sized chunks of rock big small cobbles and that sort of stuff yeah you don't need to put that in the stick the cobbles are not there they're just going to mess things up so you know just take out the big rocks sometimes you know when i feed stuff in here if there's any big rocks i just pull the big rocks out because what happens is the big rocks will go in up here and they won't move through you have a normal speed that moves sand and gravel through here at a normal rate yeah you put in uh you know a cantaloupe sized cobble up here it's not going to go anywhere so you got to pick the cobble off wash it off a little bit toss it aside anyway i hope that that gives you kind of a better idea that yes you can go out and make a sluice box for yourself or you can take an existing sluice box that you have like i had this one and make it even better it's part of understanding house loose boxes work you understand how they work you can make them work even better so i recommend that you sit down and write down the things that you want to see in your sluice box the things that you think will make your sluice box work the best the things that meet your needs as far as how much to process or how portable this loose box is you know that's that's or what you're going to use it for you to use for a high banker too you know that sort of thing those those considerations should go into your design of the sluice box and and when you sit down and write it down then you really have a chance to think about it and understand what it is you want to make for yourself or you know what you want to do to your existing sluice box to customize it so my recommendation is get out there and do it you know you can think about it a lot writing it down that's good but you reach a point where you need to start taking some action and once you get something built once you've created that sluice box that you you thought about and you know spent some time building for yourself once you've got it built you got to get out and start feeding that rich gold bearing gravel into it making yourself some gold now the one thing about sluice boxes is they won't tell you where to go to find gold and they won't even tell you you know if you go to a rich gold bearing stream they won't tell you where to dig for those sorts of things you need the skills of prospector you need to understand how the gold lays in the stream where it's deposited where to dig and then when you feed that gravel through your sluice box will recover it for you but you need to know where to dig you need to understand you need to have the skills and and prospecting it's it's like a trade skill you learn what you need to know to be successful and if you want to gain those skills of being a better prospector and knowing how to find gold when you're out in the field i wrote a book about that and i'm going to tell you a little bit more about my book about finding gold right now so let me tell you a little bit more about my book it's called this full of gold and i wrote it because i want you to be able to go out and find for yourself this full of gold and uh you can see that it's a an encyclopedia with all kinds of information pictures and that sort of thing it's not in color but uh the color would have cost me a lot more to have printed and so the book would have cost a lot more it's for sale on amazon and you can pick it up i'll put a link in the description below i also serve as the editor for a prospecting magazine it's icmj's prospecting and mining journal and honestly you should check that out we got stories and information legal stuff everything you know to increase your skills as a prospector i write articles in this every month and a lot of other very experienced prospectors contribute to the magazine as well so check the magazine now also i have a website and the website is uh at nevadaoutbackgems.com i'll put a link for it in the description below but there's gobs of information there that you will find useful in your prospecting efforts finally i want to say that i really appreciate your comments and thoughts and even a positive criticism don't come on there and just toss out insults because i'll just delete your comments but if you've got uh helpful things to say and questions to ask do write and and put those in the comments because i answer my comments to people and uh you'll hear from me in you know in responding to you uh so if you've enjoyed this video and you like what you see and you're interested in uh finding out more well then sign up subscribe and hit the uh the notification bell so they'll let you know when i post new videos and you know like it and share it if again you you see stuff that you really are excited about and i'll be coming out with lots more new videos and so we'll see you again real soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 78,864

Keywords: sluce box, gold catching sluice, fnding gold with a sluice box, Gold sluice operations

Id: Rm7FA__blKo

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020