$20 Sluice Modification

I've been good about not blaming my equipment for not getting as much gold as I think I should. I've always allowed the blame to come onto me, like messing up the cleanup or not digging where the gold is in the first place.  But after two years of blindly accepting that my sluice box was working great, I decided to read some reviews of the darn thing. The sluice box is what you put your gold-bearing gravels into, and it separates the gold from the other stuff at a much faster rate than panning.

Turns out, its the cheapest and most negatively reviewed sluice on the market! The reason for that is not that it doesn't work, but it only has a narrow application. It is the E-Z sluice by Tee Dee co., and its principal application is as a backpacking sluice, for low volume and very rich gravels. It's quite finicky, and not too easy to just throw in a river and start shoveling.

Purchased Materials and Sluice to be Modified

So I decided to add some modifications. After looking around online and seeing what other people had done, I decided I would add a "slick plate" to let the material sort itself out and hopefully increase gold recovery. I also planned on adding some expanded metal and rubber matting to help catch gold too. After spending an hour at Home Depot trying to find everything, I got everything I wanted. The rubber matting is 27" wide, and $2.09 a foot, so I only had to buy a foot.  Expanded metal was around $9 for a large sheet, and the sheet metal that I needed (12"w x 18"l) was also $9. I bought a drillbit too to handle the sheet metal, and some screws and wingnuts, all in 1/4" threading.

I spent a few hours banging it together, and came out with a usable product. I had forgotten to buy adhesive and didn't have enough epoxy to glue down the matting, so I just jammed it under the flare and expanded metal and hoped it would stay. It came out looking alright, and so that weekend I went and gave it a go at the creek. It worked alright, the slick plate didn't slow down the material fast enough to see it spread out, and the expanded metal just filled up with black sand and clay, but still held a few flakes. The rubber matting got blown up with water from beneath the flare, and didn't last more than a minute in the water, I would have to glue it down. After a frustrating day trying to figure out how to get it set up for proper recovery, I went home with only a flake for the day.

There was another prospector there that day who had a nicer, more appropriate sluice that was covered in the material that people use to coat their truck beds. It was black, so you could see the gold coming down very apparently, and rough, so it would slow the material down just enough. This guy would just sit there with a suction bottle and watch the gold come down, and grab it right there. It seemed to be just what I needed to make my slick plate work like it should.

So I went back to Home Depot and ended up convincing myself that I needed two bars for stabilization on the side, I wasn't sure last time if the two separate parts of the sluice were collectively flat or not. I didn't think so, because it made a sort of a wave where the water came into the original sluice box part.

I painted the coating on, glued in the matting, bent the expanded metal into angular riffles instead of horizontal bars, and am ready to go get to the river and see how it works! I need to go buy a suction bottle or two so that I can collect all my gold in this way. This weekend a snow storm is moving into the region and it looks like it might rain or snow, so the temptation to go skiing is great, but I really would like to go prospect as well.

****EDIT****

My modifications didn't perform at all like I was thinking. The bends on the sheet metal were not 90 degrees or straight, so the water in the sluice formed blast currents in the front of the box. The seal between the two wasn't very good, so additional water came in at the joint, as well as gold being lost when cleaning up. As I lifted the sluice from the water, I watched gold slip from the top of the sluice into the crack and back to the river. The expanded metal seems to work, and could do better if it had a permanent fixture to keep it in place. The black truck bed coating is by far the best thing about it. I have since painted the flare of my other sluice, and it slows down the gold a lot. If I were to do it again, I would find a better way to bend the sheet metal or have a professional do it. But by that point it is almost easier and of equal cost to buy a prefabbed sluice. Its all circumstantial.