While it may sound easy, suction dredging is much more difficult than vacuuming coins out of your couch cushions (or gold flakes out of your carpeting). In a way, the process is like a combination of the best parts of gold panning and gold dredging. These materials pass into a floating sluice, which filters and recovers the gold. It sucks up rocks, gravel, silt, and anything else at the bottom of a streambed using a gas-powered pump and suction hose. The rocks deposited behind the dredge (by the stacker) are called "tailing piles." The holes in the screen were intended to screen out rocks (e.g., 3/4 inch holes in the screen sent anything larger than 3/4 inch to the stacker).For the amateur prospector who wants to take their hobby to the next level but doesn’t want to work in a mine, upgrading to suction dredge can be a great way to find more gold while still enjoying the great outdoors.Ī suction dredge essentially works like a heavy-duty underwater vacuum cleaner. The material that is washed or sorted away is called tailings. The cylinder has many holes in it to allow undersized material (including gold) to fall into a sluice box. On large gold dredges, the buckets dump the material into a steel rotating cylinder (a specific type of trommel called "the screen") that is sloped downward toward a rubber belt (the stacker) that carries away oversize material (rocks) and dumps the rocks behind the dredge. The material is then sorted/sifted using water. Small suction machines are currently marketed as "gold dredges" to individuals seeking gold: just offshore from the beach of Nome, Alaska, for instance.Ī large gold dredge uses a mechanical method to excavate material (sand, gravel, dirt, etc.) using steel "buckets" on a circular, continuous "bucketline" at the front end of the dredge. The original gold dredges were large, multi-story machines built in the first half of the 1900s. Machine to mine stream beds for gold Gold Dredge, Klondike River, Canada, 1915 The Yankee Fork dredge near Bonanza City, Idaho, which operated into the 1950s.
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