Sluice Boxes

For those that are attracted in a different technique of getting gold out of the ground in faster ways then by panning, you will be interested in finding out about a sluice or a rocker as this will help to get to the bottom of your problem. Panning yields most of the gold in a shovel full, but it is not a quick method.

Sluicing is much faster, nevertheless the only problem is that it causes the little flakes of gold to be lost and a lot of water is necessary if you are going to be doing it this way. Rockers are not as quick as sluicing but they are still faster then panning and the benefit you have with them is that you do not misuse as much water as you would with a sluice. You are still going to need to use your pan in order to search and once you have established a good spot, you should set up the rocker or the sluice and start throwing dirt.

A sluice is in general defined as a synthetic canal through which causes flow-controlled quantities of water. In gold placering, the sluice is made up of sluice-boxes that build up the gold by a diversity of configurations of riffles, corrugations, mats, expanded metal, etc that then catch the heavier specks and particles while it at the same time permitting the waste to pass on through.

An indispensable component of any sluicing operation is the water supply it has to have, and if you are working in an area where there is not a plentiful amount of water, then pumps, pipelines, or even dams with special head gates possibly will be necessary.

Small-scale sluicing by hand methods has been called in a very suitable way: shoveling into-boxes. On the other hand, in ground sluicing, usually a more proficient operation, most of the digging is accomplished by the action of water flowing openly over the materials that are going to be mined. In whatever case, the materials go through a sluice, where gold is obtained behind riffles. A variation of the sluicing technique, where water is accumulated and let out adjacent to or diagonally from the materials sporadically, is known as booming.

The sluice-box in its simplest structure can be a 12-foot-long board of 1- by 2- inch pine lumber, and the sides that are normally around 10 to 12 inches in height, are nailed with braces held at a number of places across the top. Larger sized sluices can be made with strips of wood to cover up joint in between boards where the gold could fall out, and with support built around the outside part of the box for enhanced firmness.