sluice box advice

[JOHNM]

got my 1st box.  its a 48 inch stansport.  need to know if i should use the slightly v shaped riffles that come with it with fine classified material or just the expanded metal and the fine carpet that came with the box?  i do have a courser miners moss and extra deep v mat. which one to use for what size of material?    i am using the atwood pump sold by stansport also.    thanks in advance 

[homefire]

Pretty much would depend on your Gold situation.  Here in New Mexico the gold is on the fine side so the Moss is sorta a must. 

[chrisski]

A rule of thumb I like is the water should be at least twice as deep as the riffles or expanded metal.  Seems you have a recirculating sluice or at least are using a pump for this.

 

Reason I bring it up is my first sluice I used the riffles that came with it and a 1000 GPH pump, which did not provide enough circulation for the sluice.  The sluice was just too wide and the water flow did not even come above the riffles.

 

If you know the width of the sluice and the GPH or GPM rating of the pump, you may be able to get an educated guess.  I was able to get my sluice to work with the 1000 GPH pump, but only with the 3/8" expanded metal or ribbed matting, otherwise I did not have enough water depth.  When I got it dialed in, I could tell because the material would "dance" inside the expanded metal or in the ribbed matting.

 

Also, I found that with the expanded metal only or ribbed matting only, I really needed to classify.  1" classification was much to big and the rocks would not flow down, so I went down to 1/4 inch or 1/8 inch.  When classifying that small, digging a single bucket and classifying would take up to an hour, so not very efficient.  For my Area, when I classify to 1" I lose about 1/2 to 2/3 of the material to bigger than 1".  As I classify smaller I lose half that material.  So if I've dug 1 bucket of 1/8 material classified, I may have classified out up to 16 buckets, or about a half ton.

 

Also, for the wet recirculating, for every 5 gallons of material I ran, I had to muck out 1 gallon of mud.  The dirt was so dry, I could also pout two to three gallons of water in each bucket.  I had a 30 gallon reservoir to run this off of, and I would take at least 50 gallons of water out.

 

I am in the Pheonix valley also, so what you read above may apply.

[chrisski]

I was told when I started the only way to move material in the desert is a dry washer.  After a couple years of playing around with wet systems, I now agree.

 

I do enjoy taking the sluice to California to West fork of the San Gabriel where I can just put it in the stream.  The GPAA used to have a claim on a river that would run a few weeks a year around here, but they dropped it.

[Hoser John]

Go to politics forum as I believe it was reclassified to some insipid monument status recently in 2016 and hands/pans or some such insipid bs. GOOGLE is good on these things. That's why claims dropped, it was in their magazine I glanced at in a friends place, some posts here also about it under Obama signs a bill in politics...positive about it as coffee kicks in hahahaha-John...

Edited January 29, 2017 by Hoser John

[chrisski]

HJ--

 

I forget the name of the claim, but it was the one at the hairpin turn in the Agua Fria, by Rock Springs by Shop at the Black Canyon City exit.  This one was simply not leased by the owner to the GPAA.  The only GPAA claims left there is very hard to get to.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 29, 2017 by chrisski