Best ready-made sluice

Question for the sluicing experts: What sluice to use for the occasional few bags of dirt I bring home from prospecting trips. I was really looking at buying a ready made unit, preferably something that's under $500. I've never sluiced before so some pointers in the right direction would be a great help guys.

G'day
One of your best choices for an off the shelf unit is a sluice and pump package from the Miners Den. Very popular and in your price range

Cheers

Chimpy

Are you running concentrates or overburden?

And how big are the bags? The other point which will come up is, your not allowed to remove and take home dirt, personally I couldn't give a dam but if you get caught there's a nice fine you'll have to pay! In my opinion for the occasional bag of dirt Just pan it, you will have to pan the end results anyway! If the bags hold a ton of dirt that's a different story.
Cheers
Chris.

I thaught it was legal to remove 10 kilograms of mineral-bearing material in NSW ?

Providing you can argue the fact that it is only "Heavies" recovered from your sluicing efforts and your only taking it home to recover the gold/ gems/ whatever.
May be wrong!

Maka, it's only overburden. I got my wife to scrape out the dirt from a small area between schist bars where I picked up several dozen small nuggets. Since I could only detect down to sizes of about 0.05 grams, I thought there would be more that I hadn't detected. It's a bit too much to pan off. Nearly killed myself carrying it all to the car.

Chris, I'm in WA ATM with a Section 20A and therefore allowed up to 20kg. In NSW I have permission from property owners.

Chimpy wrote:G'day
One of your best choices for an off the shelf unit is a sluice and pump package from the Miners Den. Very popular and in your price range

Cheers

Chimpy

Spot on! cheers

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Mini-Mini-highbanker-only-24-long-6-wide-spraybars-concentrator-sluice-/250923738365?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a6c3864fd
Maybe something like this one.. A good allrounder for small quantities, riffles, carpet etc. ribbed matting catches almost everything worth catching, the carpet will do the rest..

G'day Nebuchadnezzar!

A few simple thoughts here:

If you have the detector to find the "Larger Gold" streamside, why not take this bank run material that you are considering removing and classify it down to, oh, say, smaller than 2, 3 or 4 times the largest sized Gold size you feel is in it? By rejecting oversized material the volume (and weight) of your removed material should reduce substancially. If you remove, by size using a classifyer and water, all the rocks, roots and gravel will not have to be 'dealt with' later. If you can only remove 20 Kg at a time - would you want to remove the larger 'stuff' as part of that 20 Kg or just take a full 20 Kg of ""the good stuff""

Maka's reference to the ebay Mini Mini seems to be a great find. It should work quite well to process already classified material. Some folks don't use Miners' Moss - but I have used it to great advantage to recover substantial quantities of small to extremely small Gold.

One other thought:

You had mentioned "off the shelf". If you wanted to expand that into very easy to make DIY construction, do a websearch for "Rain Gutter Sluice". A meter of flat bottomed rain gutter, a meter of ribbed matting (ribs crosswise to the flow) the width of the bottom of the rain gutter and glued in place with silicon or some other waterproof adhesive and you have it. A garden hose to supply a slow, constant water flow and a small scoop to provide a constant, slow input and you're "cooking!"

Just remember to drop the bottom of the RGS only enough to have the non-Gold concentrates process through. Just input slowly and at a relatively constant rate.

Joe