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Make sure that the sluice box is leveled sidewise. Step 2: Level the sluice box and stabilize Tip: A nice trick when building your own funnel is to bring a sheet of thin plastic or a couple of rice bags, and use it to prevent the water from running through the barrier you just built. Sometimes just placing a couple of rocks around the entrance of the sluice might do the trick, and provide just the extra water that is needed. If the stream isn’t flowing quickly enough, you can always build a funnel of rocks that are heavy enough to not be moved by the flow of water. This means that you need to place it in a rather fast-moving stream or creek, to ensure that there is enough water to remove the lighter material.
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To operate as efficiently as possible, a sluice box requires a steady flow of water through the box. To make it easier to follow, we have broken down the process into a couple of easy-to-follow steps: Step 1: Find a spot with enough water flow With that said, let’s look closer at how to set up your sluice box correctly. For example, having too much water coming through the sluice will cause a lot of the gold to get flushed out, which is something we want to avoid. Setting up a sluice box correctly isn’t hard, but still requires you to know some basics. With the basics of sluice boxes covered, let’s go on to the meat of the article! How to Set Up a Sluice Box Miners moss, as well as natural moss, often manages to catch the really fine gold, as it falls into the fibers and gets trapped. It consists of woven fibers and as its name suggests, it resembles natural moss. One common type of matting is the so-called ” Miner’s moss”. Due to this, many sluice boxes are equipped with some type of matting or carpet that is design to capture the gold as it slides along its surface. Sometimes very fine gold particles might escape the riffles. The image below shows an example of this: The overhanging lip helps deposits to form right after the riffle. A so-called “Eddy zone” is created, which helps to capture the fine gold. The resulting slowdown of the water current causes heavy materials such as gold to drop behind the riffles.That’s exactly what you will learn in this article, but before, it really is necessary to have a brief look at how sluice boxes capture gold! While this is the short and correct answer, there are some more details that are worth considering when setting up your very own sluice box. To prevent the sluice box from floating away, you may place a heavy rock on top of it. As a general rule of thumb, it should slope around 5-7 degrees to function efficiently. So, how do you set up a sluice box? A sluice box should be set up in a creek or river with a steady flow of water, so that the lighter materials can get flushed out of the sluice box, while the heavier gold and black sands are trapped. If run recklessly, you risk losing a lot of the gold you have been digging so hard for. However, as with everything, there are some technicalities you must know to make the most out of your sluice box. There is no doubt that having a sluice box is a great way of finding more gold and work through more material. It’s small, lightweight enough to be carried around, and can speed up the gold recovery rate by 10 to 200 times depending on the exact situation.
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A sluice box indeed is a great way of prospecting for gold.