Advice needed on Tray for highbanker

Hello fellow gold diggers, after months of getting bits together to make my own highbanker i've finally come close to completion. I need some advice on what I should use for the hopper tray.
I have this cable tray the size of the rectangles are 20mmx7mm which i'm thinking might be a bit to big?


Or maybe this stuff the circles are 5mm which i'm thinking might be to small?


If none of these are suitable could someone tell me where I can get some. Also roughly how long are the legs on the banjo?
Thanks guys your feedback is much apreciated!

Hi...here in the states that part would be called the punch plate, 5mm would work fine as most of ours are 1/4 in diameter holes. One should still put in riffles after this plate to catch any larger gold that does not drop through.

I've got the cable tray in the top of my hopper and I find it is great, easy to clean out any small stones that get stuck.

Wombat

I'd be happy with the 5mm holes due to the fineness of gold where I prospect, thou the plate in your pick shows it to be very thin, anything under 1mm I wouldn't use, especially if your going to pop rivet the classifier to your hopper! Also the smaller the holes the lesser of an angle you can run your sluice.

As for the legs: You will normally set your sluice on a down hill trend, so the front legs will need to be longer than the back, also if you intend to check for lose, the height at the front of your unit will need to be sufficient enough for a bucket of what ever size to fit under.
The slope of the land will dictate how long the legs need to be! Nothing that a shovel can't fix.
My thoughts.
Cheers
Chris.

someday wrote:I'd be happy with the 5mm holes due to the fineness of gold where I prospect, thou the plate in your pick shows it to be very thin, anything under 1mm I wouldn't use, especially if your going to pop rivet the classifier to your hopper! Also the smaller the holes the lesser of an angle you can run your sluice.

As for the legs: You will normally set your sluice on a down hill trend, so the front legs will need to be longer than the back, also if you intend to check for lose, the height at the front of your unit will need to be sufficient enough for a bucket of what ever size to fit under.
The slope of the land will dictate how long the legs need to be! Nothing that a shovel can't fix.
My thoughts.
Cheers
Chris.

Thanks mate! 2 valuable pieces of information that I never considered. "the smaller the holes the lesser of an angle you can run your sluice" and "the front legs will need to be longer than the back" making this at home on a level surface I almost made the mistake of doing the opposite. You've saved me some head aches.
I was looking at your sluice highbanker, nice workman ship bud! where did you get your hopper classifier mesh thingy from if you don't mind me asking? Your right the 5mm circle tray is pretty thin so unless I can find something else I might go with the cable tray and lay a 10mm mesh over it.
Thanks again

I had the same problem trying to find a classifier with the right configuration. I ended up going to a scrap metal yard, the best I could come up with was 11mm square holes X 1.5 thick, it was part of an old aircon duct! Try engineers who make security screens/fences/railing? and hopefully score a bit of off cut to do the job.
Cheers.

G'day there, t-Tony

As usual someday has some great observations.

To just zero in on the length of legs -

Someday's thought does reduce the weight by just using the length of leg needed - however - during my set-ups with a generally similar piece of equipment - I really like to just grab any leg rather than the correct one of two. In addition, I set up many times sideways to the stream, or in a rocky enviroment. The ability to custom use longer leg length (as "over extended" or "under extended") sometimes 'saves the day' on an awkward set-up.

Yet another observation:

The drop angle not only provides clean-out of oversized gravel but also provides the 'energy' (through gravity) to keep the riffles or lath fields active in the face of the friction created by the water, gravel and the 'riffles' in the recovery areas.

My G-1 highbanker uses a steeper upper portion to allow the oversized gravel to transit that upper section and, transiting a classifying screen, to be discharged. The undersized falls through the classifying screen and is processed on a lesser drop angle.

Be aware what your equipment is doing. Different stream situations require "fine tuning" for varying conditions.

Joe