The Hand Sluice Box

There are a lot of different ways for prospecting gold. Many people dry wash for it, others dredge for it, while others prefer to use metal detectors. One of the most convenient ways of gold prospecting and recovery is done by using a piece of equipment or tool that has actually been used for hundreds of years. This device is called the hand sluice and it is still very used today as it is one of the best gathering devices that exist on the market.

In the past miners used to build sluice boxes at the mining site location out of materials they had with them such as logs and heavy wooden planks. The current of the river was sidetracked through the sluice boxes so that the gravel that had gold could be processed much quicker than having to use the typical hand panning technique. 

In the past the sluice boxes used to be lined with lifted barriers (what we now know as riffles) that were put in a vertical position to the flow of the current. When the gravel was dumped into the higher end of the sluice box, the water flow took the material down the length of the sluice box. The gravel that was lighter would then be taken in suspension down the whole length of the sluice and was then gotten rid of. The metal that was a bit heavier like the gold or other metals and black sands, would then drop to the bottom of the box and they would get trapped by the riffles.

After the riffles gathered a big amount of concentrated black sand, they would clean it up. The flow of the water through the sluice was then reduced by a sort of water gate. The riffles would then be taken off and this would allow the heavier materials to run through. The material or concentrate that was left over many times had all the values that accumulated to a great amount of gravel that had to then be tiresomely panned.

The important thing about mining is to have equipment that is portable. A good number of gold deposits that can be reached no longer have any gold in them and this means you will most likely have to take a good stroll in order to find areas containing the precious metal.

In the times of the Gold Rush, sluices were at first used to work on the very rich bench deposits that lined the banks of a lot of Mother Lode Rivers. However, as time went by it was pretty obvious that sluice boxes could also be used for working on other types of material that had gold such as old river channel deposits that could be found hundreds of feet above the stream beds that were there.

The prospectors these days use sluice boxes on almost all types of gravel that has gold in it and on places where suction dredges cannot be used in. Sluice boxes have been efficiently used to process gravels that have gold that is located in deserts as well; these are used with water that is trucked in and re-circulation systems.

These days there are many places in which prospectors use sluice boxes to work in areas that are adjacent to streams that are flowing. Often times people who have suction dredges take sluice boxes that do not weight a lot to sample the gravel bars they might decide to dredge on afterwards. If they see that a gravel bar does not have the amount they thought it would have they avoid having to go through all the trouble of carrying a large dredge.

For those that do not know about how to use sluice boxes we will get into explaining how they can be used. It is not a very complicated process and it is possible for anyone to become good at using sluice boxes with just a little bit of practice at it.