High feed rate on explorer

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2011 11:43 pm

Went out to a creek to do a little sluicing today since it's been awhile. Only found a few small pieces, nothing to write home about. It's all I really find in the creek but it's nice just to get out.
Since this was just a get out the house trip I thought I'd try a few things playing around with the sluice. One that I've always been curious about was how fast can ya feed a Mckirk. I went ahead and classified 1 gallon of stream material and then put a little piece of gold from my vile into the bucket. I proceeded to classify 3 more gallons of material into the bucket for a total of 4 gallons of classified to 3/8'' material.
I then started running scoop after scoop as fast as I could into the sluice. I use a Small hand held garden shovel for my scoop. Sure enough the explorer sluice caught that little gold piece. Further down than the 1st riffle as usual, but caught it none the less. Great little sluice.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 8:49 am

Yeah they are great for catching it. I have sample panned areas while my sluice is running and found flakes then I just dump my pan into the sluice and I haven't lost a piece yet.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 2:48 pm

Thanks for the pics, and yes gotta love them drop riffles. Last friday Dr Phil helped me clean up my garage of some once panned cons (9 buckets of cons ran so far and there's still more left). He ran his angus mckirk explorer down at the river while I ran a hybrid drop riffle sluice I made (drop riffles for 24 inches then 18 inches of vortec matting and raised expanded). He said there was over 100 colors in his cleanup but I havent panned out my sluice clean ups yet. I will get some pics of that up soon as I pan em out.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 5:16 pm

I did a test the other day on my explorer...

I ran 2 gallons of non classified material(well I mean it was classified to 2 mesh)

so, I didnt think there was more than a spec or two of gold in those 2 gallons but after running it and feeding it as fast as I could with alot of half" rocks rolling down the sluice. When I panned it down I was surprised to see 5 medium to large flakes and 6-7 specks of color.