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Dredge
Clean-up
By Jim Foley
You
may already know this info. If you do, bear with me, If you don't,
enjoy. I use a 5" triple sluice Keene and this
clean-up method will work with anything 4" and over. After
you have emptied your sluice into a suitable tub, screen the cons with
1/4" screen into a five gallon bucket. Only
screen 2-3 scoops at a time so you can carefully check what is left in
the screen for large nuggets. (grin) This process will take less than 5
min. I use a 4' metal sluice with armor weave expanded metal over
ribbed carpet which I fasten to the end of my dredge sluice. You can
fasten it with vise grips but be careful to get it straight or it will
funnel water to one side more than the other.
Be careful that there are no leaks between the two sluices. Start
your dredge and let it idle, you should be able to adjust the incline of
the sluice with increased or decreased water flow. If you cannot get it
right, place some rocks under the sluice. I like to have the vee where
the water necks down in the sluice about 3" downstream of the place
where the expanded metal begins. You can test it with some lead shot. My
setup never allows gold to travel any more than 4-5" down the
riffles. I feed the cons into the dredge sluice well upstream of the
secondary sluice (make sure
the carpet and riffles are removed from the dredge sluice. You can feed
it in with a small scoop while watching to make sure that the expanded
metal in the secondary sluice does not load
up. This works very well for me and gets rid of most of the heavies,
(mine are magnetite and garnet) Now you can empty what is left in the
secondary sluice into a bucket, it should be less than 1/4 of a standard
gold pan. The amount that you now have will be the heaviest of the heavy
material. This also can be very hard to pan down so I have made an even
smaller sluice out of a three inch square conduit channel the only thing
I put in the bottom of this sluice is black ribbed rubber matting. I
then set it in the dredge sluice and feed the remaining heavies into it very
slowly, this will leave very little to pan down. Like most instructions,
this seems like a long process but I can do a dredge cleanup in twenty
minutes. Hope this has helped someone......
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