The Gold Sluice & The Gold Drywasher

Moving back to gold tools and gold equipment, we’ll next be discussing the gold sluice.

Please read on to find out more about this awesome piece of gold kit which is fantastic for catching gold in riverbeds / streams etc.

The Gold Sluice is a great and very handy piece of gold kit, small enough to transport virtually anywhere.  A gold sluice looks similar to an elongated metal tray, with a wider opening at the top to funnel the water through the gold sluice.  You basicly hand trowel or shovel material from the streambed into the top of the funnel, then the action of the water flowing downstream carries this material through the sluice.  Usually you’ll use a gold sluice in a few inches deep of flowing water.

Along the bottom of the gold sluice is a gold catchment mat, on top of this gold mat there are riffles all the way down the sluice, the idea being that as the material is placed at the top of the gold sluice, the water action will carry these gravels etc through the sluice towards the bottom edge.  Any gold, naturally being heavier than the other material going through the gold sluice, this will become trapped by the riffles and the mat below them.

You can quite easily make your own gold sluice or they can be bought online, indeed, if you look in our gold store on this site, you will find many for sale at very good prices.

Short Gold Sluice Video demonstrating a mini gold sluice:

The gold sluice is very effective in collecting gold for use in streambeds and rivers where water flow is not a problem. There are many makes and models of the gold sluice available online, with some interesting innovations on the market all basically using the same principle for collecting gold.

If water is a problem, for example out in the middle of the desert, a similar piece of gold equipment comes into play, in a nutshell it’s very similar to the gold sluice working on the same principle, only this time a very fast strewam of air is blowing the material through the channel rather than water and this is called, the gold drywasher.

A gold drywasher doesn’t cost very much, the only downside to many of these gold drywashers is a/ the noise they make and b/ the dust that they can create, having said that depending on which model you buy, the gold drywasher is also very effective in the collection of gold, with of could some machines being better than others, so research and due diligence you must carry out first to find out which gold drywasher is particularly suited to your on the ground conditions. You can also buy a dustless gold drywasher, the two can be seen side by side in the gold drywasher video below.

A video demonstrating the Gold Drywasher.