Sieving a great topic!

Sieving great topic! Panning unless you know how to gravitate the sieves than I recommend you don’t use them! The reason been if there are any nuggets present amongst the gravels you will not see them sure you may flick through the gravel but you can and will miss them you must gravitate it’s the only way to be sure. These are just my thoughts, and the advice I would give if asked.
As for sieving into a HighBanker hmmmm, let us look at the feed rate and see who would come out on top working average river or creek wash that is showing 20 colours per pan. Say it takes two minutes two sieve a shovel of wash into a bucket, a total of 5 shovels and the operator is looking at ten minutes pulse another 4 minutes to put it through the unit he is using. 14 minutes all up! Now I can put 10 shovels full of wash through my unit in two minutes 50 shovels in the same ten minute period with an extra 20 in the time the first guy is putting the concentrate through his unit.
Sure it may coast me an extra 50 cents a day in fuel but any thing over 40 meters away from your work face, you must work to your pumps speed. Which it needs to push the water any thing under and I can drop the extra 50 cents my pump is strong enough to do it at idle.

The above is only a guide with all things been equal at the work area.

4 hours work.



© J. B 2011

Good post James. Thats called working smarter not harder!
I mentioned using a sieve with any type of sluicing! Sieve was the wrong word, I was meaning classifier. Same thing different bucket in my book, but I see how people would miss read my meaning!
I see so many open sluice box's with no gates of any form, being worked straight from shovel to sluice. My mind boggles at the idea? The amount of fine gold lost would be huge!
All that time and effort to then put the gold back in the water!
The next guy would come along and test pan these new gravels and say you beauty, look at all the gold?

someday wrote:Good post James. Thats called working smarter not harder!
I mentioned using a sieve with any type of sluicing! Sieve was the wrong word, I was meaning classifier. Same thing different bucket in my book, but I see how people would miss read my meaning! I see so many open sluice box's with no gates of any form, being worked straight from shovel to sluice. My mind boggles at the idea? The amount of fine gold lost would be huge!
All that time and effort to then put the gold back in the water!
The next guy would come along and test pan these new gravels and say you beauty, look at all the gold?

Mate your above statement is so true, I classifie in my unit it saves so much time. As they say ... You only get back from the amount you put through.
cheers mate

yes it does make me chuckle when at the end of the day ppl look into my pan and see how much more gold is in it than theirs!! "oh you must be a Guru" and other such exclamations !!!! no im not a so called Guru but the amount of gold in my pan is relevant to the amount of shovelfuls of dirt I have processed through my Banjo!!. Given that you have tested as you went in the gutter you can approximate the gold you will have over a given time! and it is usually very close to my calculations at the start of the digging .
It has been noticeable in this forum that there has been an increase in newbies taking up prospecting ,im sure it has something to do with the gold price but I have also seen this increase out in the field of wet prospecting and im sure you ppl who swing the wand will agree that it makes prospecting just that little bit harder as these newcomers find a little bit of gold or two say in the middle of a run but dont know enough how to prospect the whole line and then walk away and in so doing disturb the finding of the rest of the run !! same in wet golding !! Im finding that ppl are going off like scatter guns all over an area --piling tailings everywhere -- no holes or gutters coutured ,let alone filled in saw it all before in the early eighty's and as before "when the going gets tough---- the tough stay"

To true but it's a fact of life! I see it as a good thing, sortof ? For the people who don't no how, gives us a hiding cover to the better finds? If you understood what I just said!

someday wrote:To true but it's a fact of life! I see it as a good thing, sortof ? For the people who don't no how, gives us a hiding cover to the better finds? If you understood what I just said!

it dose work

So are we sieving or classifying here! If the later, I say go with 10 mm holes! So what about the big one that might get away? "Keep your eyes open"!
The reason I say 10mm holes, is so you can slow the process down! Rather than having a torrent of water having to wash rocks out of your sluice! the bonus is you can reduce the angle of your sluice to almost 0 deg? How many set ups do we see, running at ridiculous angle's? What happened to the 1" per foot method as a starting point!

Sieving or Classifying it’s one of the same. You sieve to classify.