The Alaska Gold Forums

Laminar flow; The common method of recovering fine gold using a sluice box includes riffles and a variety of means and methods of lifting and rolling the flow of water in an attempt to get fine GOLD to settle in place. A more subtle approach involves taking a view of the concepts used in recovery me...

Frog's Fur; There are well known methods used to recover fine GOLD that have been around for quite awhile. One rarely seen method is the "cleangold" method. http://www.cleangold.com The challenge for gold miners and prospectors comes not from fine gold but the new world order that is driven by a pro...

An Oxymoron; Fine Gold recovery is an oxymoron. The terms are incompatible. In the real world where GOLD recovery by means of GRAVITY separation takes place, the force of gravity becomes insignificant as particle sizes become smaller. That's just the simple reality of physics. In our small minded wo...

Pickaxe, You come across as being more intellectual than the average placer GOLD miner. Welcome! :) All too often in placer operations, the weakness is in being haphazard. Success is found as in other endeavors, in what would on the surface appear to be a simple process and the process becomes more ...

Doing the fine GOLD math; Given a 12 inch sluice with a water pump running at 2 gallons per minute... Randy Clarkson recommended a 30 percent slurry. That's 30 percent solids in the sluice. At 2 gallons per minute = 120 gallons per hour, the sluice should run 40 gallons of solids per hour. One cubic...

The voice of experience: I went out on a limb during the 2007-2008 financial crisis to prove a placer miner could mine enough GOLD in Alaska to feed his or her family. I designed and fabricated three wash plants and shipped 'em up to Alaska. The Maxi Bankers; The Maxi Bankers were constructed of an ...

The balancing act; Prevention is the best solution... Suction dredging requires a balance between "flow rate" and the "weight/volume" of the material being dredged. It's a trade-off. Often times, a dredger will throttle back the pump to reduce the flow in the sluice box. On the other extreme, I have...

Easy goer, Unless you are expecting a GOLD nugget larger than say two or more inches, use a guard on the nozzle to prevent large rocks from getting into the hose. A guard can be fabricated using several different methods. Weld it yourself from appropriate size bar stock or have a welder fabricate a ...

We are surrounded; We are surrounded by a potentially deadly force known as "gravity". Gravity can lead to our early demise most frequently when we venture above the surface of the earth or below the surface of the earth. Even on the surface of the earth, we must beware! We may become a victim from ...

Howdy Guys and Gals, It's probably about time for discussion on the subject of underground mining. Because it is by virtue of the nature of mining that excavation of the earth is a necessity, a "hole" in some fashion becomes a part of what we do. The objective in prospecting is to make a discovery a...