How much wood, could a woodchuck chuck, kinda

[Slatco]

Ah, I missed that as well. Sweet setup! That floater works great for your location - push the overburden off with a cat and then sluice that beyatch!

[easy goer]

And also I’ll add after re reading this thread, I run about 200 yards per day and do a cleanup after 400 yards, three separate 24” by 16 foot sluice runs of expanded metal, a couple of nugget traps included yields about 10 gallons of minus 3/8” concentrates.

Dan

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I am pretty sure I was running too flat, I would get about that much in concentrates after about 4 hours. Extremely low water contributed to my ability to adjust the sluice and the dredge. PRO TIP: It is easier to use an 8" dredge that weighs a ton in water that is deep enough to float it! While the floats are plastic and a little slick, floating beats dragging. "That's all I have to say about that."

It became apparent fairly quickly that we weren't on the best ground and all we were finding was small gold. How small, we found one piece that would sit on 16 mesh. Yep, everything else smaller and smaller and smaller. In an effort to not lose the fine gold I didn't make any effort to raise the sluice box to shed more material. Made for fairly long clean ups. I would like to think I will do better moving forward.

Easygoer

[Joe S (AK)]

EG, to process larger quantities of cons I started using, and you might consider, a simple, narrow, very portable and short mini sluice. Sluice boxes (within reason) can process (I have read as much as) 10 times the volume of material compared to hand panning. As long as they aren't over fed they will re-catch the originally retained heavy Gold while passing almost all the lighter cons.
I found that when I was producing larger volumes of cons (years ago with Expanded & Moss) I would just save the cons for a while and then, when convenient, haul the few 1/2 buckets back to camp in my wheeler ("Sally the 6 Wheeler" didn't mind at all). My, my my that was nice to run them, in blissful comfort, through the small sluice back in camp.
Later I evolved into using a Gold Hog product (a Multi Sluice) and accomplished the same task with better control and speed over using my "throw together" small sluice box. Yes, it's something else to haul in to the camp but the saving in time and effort, while retaining only a little black sand (with virtually all the Gold) sure won me over.

As to low water - sounds like a carefully designed recirculating system could possibly help that. Failure to provide good water flow could result in sluggish clearing of fines and that situation often results in compacted riffles. Better a little too much than too little water, especially with expanded over moss. When, that does occur, fines 'skate' over the compacted riffle field and then some (or a lot of) the Gold is on it's way downstream towards the ocean.

Joe