Dry washers are used primarily in areas where water is not available, such as arid and desert areas. Dry washing goes back to the earliest days of gold discovery, where water was not available to separate the valuable minerals.
The early miners devised crude methods utilizing the flow of air and vibration to concentrate and separate valuable materials from sand and gravel.
In the past, most dry concentration was slow and inefficient. Even today, some dry washers have trouble recovering gold after the top layer of dry sand has been removed, due to the moist sand and gravel below the surface. New technological improvements allow modern units such as the 151 drywasher model made by Keene to help dry out this material and increase gold recovery to very high levels.
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