Vac Mining

The vac-machine is a wonderful recent innovation created for gold mining not so long ago. Actually, it is a gas-powered portable shop-type vacuum cleaner with enough power to suction rocks, sand and gravel. It is an excellent tool to clean the contents of cracks, crevasses and bedrock irregularities completely. It is many times referred to as “dry land dredge.” A vac-machine can be used for bedrock clean ups, to suck materials from the different gold traps or for mossing operations.

This unit is becoming very popular particularly among small scale miners that want to get more gold for the effort, but do not want to use an underwater suction dredge. Materials are sucked into the vac deposit cube, the material is then taken to water to be washed or it could also be passed to an artifact for concentrates or a sluice box.

If your vacuuming and washing somewhere and you are not succeeding to accumulate a reasonable amount of gold, what you have to do is move to another place where there are some signs of gold you might be more lucky. Use your knowledge on placer geology and apply it there, then continue trying different places until finding a ground that can produce the amount of gold that you wish for. This is the basic procedure for sampling.

One of the best things of using a gold pan as a tool to take samples is that it is easy to carry and can be moved from one place to another until finding the right place without any additional effort.