Gold Dredging

Gold dredging has been done with suction dredges for a very large amount of years by many people, both as recreational miners and as professional miners too. Some miners have used just about every kind which was ever built and they have found that most of these dredges work fairly well, this is naturally depending on the knowledge of the operator. The new designs of plastic construction are the most up to date improvements that have been noticed in the field. The surface kind, ABS plastic sluice box is by all means a real improvement. It gives the operator a chance to accomplish the maximum recovery of fine gold, but this weighs only two to eight pounds. This is tremendously helpful when the time for cleaning up arrives. The lightweight plastic sluice box is basically tilted to whichever side, permitting the material to flow down a built-in groove directly into your gold pan or bucket. A small number of cups of water which are thrown into the header box will speed this operation quite considerably and it can be accomplished in a few seconds at most. The time for cleaning up which is of approximately a few seconds as com­pared to fifteen or twenty minutes on the average metal sluice box is without a doubt a marvel. The ABS plastic sluice box is highly durable and is very able to resist wear, tear and rough handling to a very high degree. On the other hand, the common sense used in the care should be used with any type of box, both metal or plastic. 
There is a partiality to the surface type of sluice box due to the fact that the recovery rate has at all times been much better. The underwater type boxes do not appear to be much in use any more these days; the surface types appear to be the ones which have taken over. This is the thing that makes the use of any surface type sluice box featuring lighter weight extremely popular. There is a sluice box called the "Super Jet" which does not have need of the use of matting or other porous material to be located under the riffles. This is due to the fact that the box is constructed in one solid piece, solving the problem and hazard of dumping the box and laboriously washing out the matting, this is generally called a clean-up.

Dredge operators pour out their sluice box into the classifier, they hold it under the water to put the material in suspension directly over the large gold pan or plastic bucket, and give it a few speedy twists. They then remove the classifier from the water to examine the large rocks visually for the presence of nuggets; they also discard the remaining mate­rial, and take the smaller concentrates for later panning home. It is important at this point to note that the classifiers which contain an irregular hole size, possibly even stretched out, allow a great deal of the excess, unnecessary material to flow through, creating added labor on the final clean-up.