New Zealand Gold Prospecting & Metal Detecting Forums Archive

Good effort keep up the hard work ...it does pay off!!!

nice, that would weigh up all right im sure. damn stuck up here, would rather be doing what you are up too

it takes me a about half a hour per pan slow but, not worth loosing any bits

Very nice Zimbo!!,good to see you braving the winter,
steve

hi zimbo. it was good to meet up with you and do some sluiceboxing the other day. good to see you are also still out there and into it. everyone else round here seems to have given up because they reckon its cold. i reckon its the time to get out there. true, its cold but like you said it gets pretty hot once you get working.

i went out on wednesday. worst part was stopping when it got dark. wasn't really cold until i got home and had to get out of my neoprene at the back door. i think my feet nearly froze to the cobbles.

have you tried just panning down your fines a good deal and then taking them home to dry and blow. after a few summers down at the shotover most days i collected buckets of the stuff. black sand that is. i dry it out usually after each days sluicing. then put it on a white piece of paper and blow the sands away leaving just the gold. a very tedious process if you have to do it every day. eventually i got a little plastic concentrates sluice that i hook up to the garden tap. took a bit of fiddling to get the right water flow and it seems to work well. from what i would have thrown away i recovered a further few grams per bucket of blacksand. and once you have a paint bucket full of blacksand you can really appreciate how bloody heavy the stuff is in comparison to gravels.

we should get together again for some more sluicing if you're keen. i haven't been up the arrow for a bit. it frustrates me how much blacksand there is there. i have noticed that the channel by arrowtown is dropping quite a bit now that the flood training line wall seems to be a permanent feature behind the town. as you go up the macetown track you can really notice it. right next to the track its now nearly a metre drop off. used to be pretty much the same height as the track just at the top end of the gravel wall.

they reckon by town the overburden from mining is 12 metres thick. a guy using a hydraulic elevator at the 100 anniversary of the gold rush got down that far and found a claim peg in place. it used to be a bit of a gorge but i guess it is the first possible place to back up from all the sluicings off the tops of the gorge.

i see there are many claims in for the whole river so might soon be stuck in the side creeks and the public area.

and i thought i was mad lol

zimbo,

here is the link to the plastic gold concentrator. i'm sure there's probably something better out there but this was cheap and seems to do the job once you learn how much to regulate the water flow.

http://www.goldminingnz....sluice-concentrator.html

sorry, didn't take my camera up the creek. was extreme though on saturday wasn't it. lost many good sized rocks that turned out to be iced up when i picked them up. sluicebox froze up on walk back to the carpark. was nice and warm until i stopped to talk to some guys that came by. i could only dig under the surface as the ground was pretty solid. a heap of water in the creek at the moment cos of all the snowfall.

i'd be keen to try the arrow or a side creek with you on saturday if you're free.

Nice Looking gold Zimbo,
Thats what I like to see, a keen man, didn't let a bit of snow stop ya!.

Digger