The bulk of our dredging is with a 2.5 inch Proline dredge.
We don't use it very often simply because we have larger dredges we can use. It has a rod clamped over the nozzle which limits how big of rocks you can feed through it, but it eliminates clogs. This small dredge is very good at catching the really fine flour gold. (looks factory produced anyway) It has the deep V groove rubber mat under miner's moss. The highbanker hopper is only about 8X10, so we have just used it for dredging. My buddy Tom has a quality homebuilt 1.5 inch suction dredge/highbanker combo. Our gold is dust.ĭoes the fineness of the gold affect how often you should clean out the dredge sluice? Most of the other guys I pan with who have panned for years may only have one or two pickers. I have only found one picker so far, and it was so small that I could barely pick it out of the pan. I'm in central Ohio, and out gold is very fine flour gold. Or should we look at it that even if we lose some gold out the tailings, by dredging longer periods of time we should be sucking in more than we are losing? Now that we have the equipment ability for both guys to move some dirt, I wonder if we can get away with not cleaning up so often. Switching places and doing frequent clean outs was fine when it was two guys sharing one dredge, but now I have a highbanker with a dredge attachment, and Tom got a bigger dredge too.
My buddy Tom got me into panning, and he had been taught that people often don't clean out their sluice often enough - it gets loaded up with heavy sand, and then your gold washes right on out the tailings. It breaks up the routine nicely, and is a good way to spend time with a friend, but it seems like we spend a lot of time doing cleanout. We normally have one guy dredging, while the other guy keeps the tailings pile knocked down with a shovel and the 2nd guy also pans down his concentrates from his turn dredging.
I've been panning and dredging off and on with a buddy since 2003. How often should you clean out your suction dredge?
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