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The first step to prospecting for gold in any form is having the right gold prospecting equipment for and especially the right gold prospecting equipment for the specific type of prospecting you will be doing. Placer mining is a type of surface mining, usually for gold, tin, and other metals, and gemstones. Ore, typically unconsolidated gravels, is fed into machinery that may consist of a hopper, shaking screen or trommel, which frees the minerals from the gravels. The target minerals are then concentrated using sluices or jigs. The metal occurs as nuggets or grains in rocks, underground "veins" and in alluvial deposits. Using a sluice box to extract gold from placer or alluvial deposits has been a common practice in prospecting and small-scale mining throughout history to the modern day. A sluice box is essentially a man-made channel with riffles set in the bottom. The riffles are designed to create dead zones in the current to allow gold to drop out of suspension. The box is placed in the stream to catch water-flow and gold bearing material is placed at the top of the box. The material is carried by water through the box where gold and other heavy material settles out behind the riffles. Lighter material flows out of the box as tailings. Another type of gold prospecting with equipment is hydraulic mining which is a type of placer mining used in areas where large amounts of loose gravel and sand or soil are poorly packed and may be washed away with a heavy stream of water. Water cannons are sometimes used to strip away entire hills of loose gravel, which are then run through a sluice which is a type of gold prospecting equipment that is a wooden trough with ripples. Gold, being heavier, does not move as easily as other material in the sluice. However this technique can damage the environment, causing mud in streams below the mining site and erosion damage at the site itself. The last type of gold prospecting equipment which, although mostly historical, is dredging. Some dredging is done by small scale miners using suction dredges. These are small machines floating on the water and are usually operated by one or two people. Unlike the old bucket line dredges, modern suction dredges have little to no detrimental impact on the area being mined. These machines are much more efficient at extracting smaller gold than the old bucket line type of equipment ever was. This means there is a better chance of you finding gold than ever. There are some large suction dredges used in commercial production throughout the world. Smaller ones with 2 to 4 inch suction tubes are used to sample the areas behind boulders and along the potential pay streaks, until color or gold first appears and the real fun starts and all your expense that you invested into your gold prospecting equipment starts to pay off. |
