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JIGS
If you ever get the chance to operate a sluicebox you will be amazed at how much gold it does not recover. In the very small sizes ( less than 64 mesh ) it will get very little at all and below 200 mesh virtually none, even though there may be a large amount of gold of these sizes in the deposit. It is hard to deny the benefits of a sluice box, it is very simple to construct, it has no moving parts to break, it can be very mobile, it costs very little to build, and any person with a pulse can figure out how to operate it. In placers that have a majority of their values be of very coarse sizes a sluice may be the best overall economic choice. Very little capitol expenditure need be expended to get a working mine. Unfortunately I have never encountered a deposit that only has coarse gold, and I have mined on some of the coarsest ground in the world. I have worked with sluice boxes up to 750 feet in length and even the end of that sluice box had a lot of gold in it. When cleaned up after one season of about 1900 oz of gold the very end of the 750 feet of that sluice had 1 oz gold per foot of sluice. If you read any of the documentation of old dredge records you find that when the dredges had to mine their own tailings to travel to another site. They always paid for the move with the gold recovered from the tailings. This is what sparked my interest in the recovery of fine gold. If you have plenty of water and want to have better recovery then the approach to take is to use jigs. I have designed several jigs over the years the most notible being a 12" pulsator a 8" pulsator and the 48" duplex production Jig. 8" Backpack Portable Pulsator Jig48" Duplex Production Jig
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