The Alaska Gold Forums

Each rod is about 300 watts. I have been running 15 of them on a 5500 watt Generac. I have needed to write up a “recipe” so this is a good time. It will take a few days. Two components you’ll have to order. The rest you can purchase here in Fairbanks

Hi, Dick The rods I use consist of nichrome wire sheathed in fiberglass sheathing and looped inside a 3' length of 1/2" electrical conduit threaded on the inside and plugged with a 3/8" galvanized plug. The wire is connected to a short length of heavy electrical cord with an electrical plug on the o...

Certainly am

I needed not only a way to hold up the drill but also apply horizontal pressure. After a few design changes I came upon a good working system and that is currently what I use in the drift. It consists of a frame to which the drill is clamped and it travels on two parallel pipes. At one end of the pi...

Leonard, thank you for the memory photos and your kind words. Yes, it was a lot of work developing the dredge site on Fourmile Creek above Boulder. Unfortunately, all that work was obliterated in a few short hours. Back in 2010 a horrific wild fire swept through upper reaches of that canyon along wi...

Ok, I'm at the bottom of a 64' deep shaft and I need to change directions and begin drifting. The old timers first used fires and then steam to run their drifts, but steam presents a host of problems, not the least of which is that you can't safely operate alone. At first I tried using my jack hamme...

Micropedes. Thawing of the permafrost takes place to a limited extent only at the surface. However, my biggest problem is, as Jim points out, melt water, not from thawing muck, but from seep from snow melt and rain. I lost my first shaft ( a reopened old peospect) to meltwater and sluffing muck and ...

Resuming where I left off. In sinking my new shaft I needed not only to make hard work easier but I also had to make a way to accomplish the task alone. I knew from previous experience that a medium size electric jack hammer with a chisel point was very effective at breaking up frozen muck. The firs...

Is there a limit on number of words in any given post?

Sorry folks, looks like a lot of my post didn’t get posted. I’ll get it figured out soon.