Commercial Sluice Boxes

Commercial sluice boxes bought in shops have a big advantage over those homemade wooden sluice boxes. Firstly, they are made of light aluminum, making them easier to transport. Likewise, it will sink when put in water, instead of floating like the wooden ones. They come with an excellent set of quick-release latches keeping it under the riffles. This makes it easier and faster to clean. Many of these models are manufactured with a flare positioned at the head of the sluice, which is designed to canalize the waters through the box. This means that the sluice box can be used in creeks with more calm streams of water and even then work properly.

The flares also come at hand when a miner wants to place more than one additional sluice box in places where very rich grounds are being exploited. Also, models bought in shops generally recover lots of gold or may be conditioned to do it only with some minor changes. Some of the first sluices where made by the early California miners, who would dig trenches until the bedrock and would sometimes even cut through a canal. Then they would be able to canalize water along the trench and over the natural traps of the bedrock. The material of the bed would be shoveled into the creek’s flux of water allowing gold, which is heavier, to fall in the irregularities of bedrock (riffles). Lighter waste materials are washed out of the stream of water. The method is called “ground sluicing” and it was developed by the early miners that were looking for a fast method to recover gold from materials in the bed without using a gold pan.

The ground sluicing idea was originally based on the principle that if the bedrock had irregularities that could trap gold once, why they could not do it once and again.

The method is still used in some developing countries. Recently, I have witnessed a substantial operation of ground sluicing in the Osa peninsula in Costa Rica. Natives were using a 3 inch dredge to clean the bedrock at the end of every production term.

Along with years many different type of riffle systems have been tried out, all of which trap gold up to a certain point. This is because the yellow material is so heavy that the large pieces are easily trapped.