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Suction Dredge Tailings Piles Can Contain Good Gold


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This was an eye opener. Indiana gold dredge tailings piles reworked via panning contained good gold. Dennis tip was to watch for where the dredgers are running their machines with really fast water flow, then pan their tailings piles. He gets quite a few pickers. I always wondered why people still get good gold at places like Gatesville,Indiana, where the same gravel bars must get reworked 100 times a year?

-Tom

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Good post Tom! Suction dredges are relatively inefficient recovery devices and can lose substantial amounts of gold for many reasons. I am sure I have personally pumped ounces of gold off the end of dredge sluice boxes over the years with the sheer hours of dredging I put in under adverse conditions.

One memorable event was when I had my box load up with rotten shale I was hogging too fast. It just sort of laid down over the riffles like roofing shingles. I went back and looked at the tailing pile underwater and could see gold all over it. Dredged the whole thing up all over again!

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  Ihav e nevr hd tto go bak an d reedoo somthin becus i gto in to big ofa hury.  The last time I dredged  I found considerably more gold in less time by slowing way down. Gee. Maybe detecting works the same way.

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Steve,

 

Was just thinking the better gold might actually be on top of these tailings piles as that was the deepest point the dredger went to and was probably at or near bedrock where the gold is sposed to be the richest? The poor dredger would have taken home some gold but would have done all the hard work for the gold panner to take advantage of is my thinking?

    I remember a day at Knightstown,Indiana.I highbanked all day and found hardly a speck. Then a man and woman come by, greenhorns, newly bought gold pan in hand, and they head straight to my cone shaped tailings pile.A minute later they asked me if the yellow specks in their pan were gold? Dang, bright shiny yellow pinhead gold flakes they had, right from the top of my highbanker pile !!  That taught me to run the sluice as FLAT as possible and might have to ignore the 1 inch of slope per foot of sluice box I had always been told even if the riffles do appear to be loading up? A steeply angled sluice , even at 1 inch per foot, can just flush the fines and small flakes right out the end  for sure !!

   I wonder how much gold the commercial mining operations lose that use wash plants, considering how fast them sluices run?

 

-Tom

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