View our collection of gold dredging dvd's and books.

You may already know this info. If you do, bear with me, If you don't, enjoy. I use a 5" triple sluice Keene and this clean-up method will work with anything 4" and over. After you have emptied your sluice into a suitable tub, screen the cons with 1/4" screen into a five gallon bucket. Only screen 2-3 scoops at a time so you can carefully check what is left in the screen for large nuggets. (grin) This process will take less than 5 min.

I use a 4' metal sluice with armor weave expanded metal over ribbed carpet which I fasten to the end of my dredge sluice. You can fasten it with vise grips but be careful to get it straight or it will funnel water to one side more than the other. Be careful that there are no leaks between the two sluices. Start your dredge and let it idle, you should be able to adjust the incline of the sluice with increased or decreased water flow. If you cannot get it right, place some rocks under the sluice. I like to have the vee where the water necks down in the sluice about 3" downstream of the place where the expanded metal begins. You can test it with some lead shot. My setup never allows gold to travel any more than 4-5" down the riffles. I feed the cons into the dredge sluice well upstream of the secondary sluice (make sure the carpet and riffles are removed from the dredge sluice. You can feed it in with a small scoop while watching to make sure that the expanded metal in the secondary sluice does not load up. This works very well for me and gets rid of most of the heavies, (mine are magnetite and garnet)

Now you can empty what is left in the secondary sluice into a bucket, it should be less than 1/4 of a standard gold pan. The amount that you now have will be the heaviest of the heavy material. This also can be very hard to pan down so I have made an even smaller sluice out of a three inch square conduit channel the only thing I put in the bottom of this sluice is black ribbed rubber matting. I then set it in the dredge sluice and feed the remaining heavies into it very slowly, this will leave very little to pan down. Like most instructions, this seems like a long process but I can do a dredge cleanup in twenty minutes. Hope this has helped someone......

tip courtesy of: www.marciesalaskaweb.com

dredgecleanup