Ads
related to: keene gold panning equipment
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Gold Dredge, Klondike River, Canada, 1915 The Yankee Fork dredge near Bonanza City, Idaho, which operated into the 1950s. A gold dredge is a placer mining machine that extracts gold from sand, gravel, and dirt using water and mechanical methods. The original gold dredges were large, multi-story machines built in the first half of the 1900s.
Starting in the 1920s, water was brought to the area through the 90-mile (145 km) Davidson Ditch for gold mining. The Goldstream Dredge No. 8 cut a 4.5-mile (7.2 km) track and produced 7.5 million ounces of gold. [2] The dredge was named a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1986. [2]
"Panning out" ~ Stereoscopic view of print taken by the U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories ~ circa 1874–1879 Gold panning is a simple process. Once a suitable placer deposit is located, some alluvial deposits are scooped into a pan, where they are then wetted and loosed from attached soils by soaking, fingering, and aggressive agitation in water.
This may be done by open-pit mining or by various surface excavating equipment or tunneling equipment. Placer mining is frequently used for precious metal deposits (particularly gold) and gemstones, both of which are often found in alluvial deposits—deposits of sand and gravel in modern or ancient stream beds, or occasionally glacial deposits ...
Panning for gold was the simplest method of recovering gold, but mostly used for prospecting since it was slow. A faster way was by a rocker box or by sluicing. Dirt was filled into the box or sluice together with water and rocking movements or gravity would make the gold particle go to the bottom whereas sand and fine gold particles would flow ...
Gold prospector pouring water through his rocker box, Pinos Altos, New Mexico (1940). Rocker box exhibit at Dahlonega Gold Museum. A rocker box (also known as a cradle or a big box) is a gold mining implement for separating alluvial placer gold from sand and gravel which was used in placer mining in the 19th century.