Other rocks made it to the sluice box but hung up in the first section of the sluice and were tossed out to both sides. The only pre-screening that took place was often done by hand in older operations as larger rocks that would not wash to the sluice box were stacked aside. While many ingenious riffle designs have been tried singly or in combination to deal with the problem, there is no perfect solution and processing all material through a sluice box with no pre-screening often results in substantial gold losses. Larger placer operations often bypassed or overlooked a few yards here and there, having been inconsequential in the scale of the original operation but can provide many days or weeks of returns for those operating with very small-scale equipment.Īttempting to capture small gold while employing enough water force to move large rocks through a sluice box or high-banker is problematic. Most small-scale prospectors and miners look at old mine workings and tailings in a much more limited way, looking for small portions of missed virgin ground. Quite often there is a large hole in the ground nearby that represents the original source of the material. ![]() Placer tailing piles can be much more readily reworked profitably, having been already excavated and even stacked up, ready to process. If the material is rich enough, it can easily be located with metal detectors or more simply with a crack hammer. Lode or hard rock tailings and mine dumps can be very productive sources of gold specimens, as many times good material was often accidentally discarded with the mine waste. ![]() Some tailing piles contain fortunes in lost gold values if identified and properly reworked with modern mining methods. Many old-timers and even more modern miners lost a remarkable amount of gold in their mining operations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |