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24” Recirculating Highbanker Project


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So I finally got around to ordering a bilge pump and gathering up spare parts at home along with a couple trips to Home Depot to assemble my little recirculating high banker project. The pump I ordered is a 1200 gph 12v Atwood tsunami submersible bilge pump that seems to deliver adequate  water to operate my setup although I have not had a chance to run any dirt yet. The hopper is made from a plastic desk top office bin outfitted with 1/2 copper spray bars that have 26 3/8 outside diameter nozzles to wash dirt through 1/4“ SS  mesh. The 3 bins probably hold around 15 gallons of water and with the small container inside the 1st trash bin have 4 separate tanks to separate particles in the water from the pump, hopefully keeping the water reasonably clean. The jump starter battery pack claims to provide 90 amp hours that should give me 15 hours run time with the little pump at 50% discharge on my battery before needing to recharge.

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still a tiny bit of tweaking to control any water leaks.

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the pump and most everything fits inside the trash bins for storage and transportation.

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Nice Clark...plenty of water moving through that. Did you find the copper nozzles at home depot or did you have to order those? Does the hopper have a discharge out the back for the rocks?  I followed this guys design on ours  but with a bilge pump. Its has some issues that I could probably fix. Adequate water flow is the main issue so I will go with a bigger bilge pump. Nice set up you got there. 

strick

 

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Thanks Chuck, I made the nozzles fron 1/2” and 3/8” copper tubing, first I tried just drilling holes in the 1/2” copper, but the water came out from the direction of travel at a 45* and out the back where I cut a hole to clear the rocks. I used a tube cutter and cut short pieces of 3/8 then used a dremmel barrel sanding bit that put a curve in the back side of the nozzle, the little pieces holding things in place for soldering are pyrometric cone tips.

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To seal the back from water leaks I smeared a bit of olive oil as a mold release on the aluminum sluice flair, then attached the hopper with screws and injected hot melt glue into the voids.

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I’m also working on a little jet suction nozzle that used the same pump from the high banker, but while it lifts water the flow with the 1200 gph pump isn’t enough. I may add a second matching pump in series for higher pressure or try a 2700 gph instead. 

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following designs online I used a fuel funnel for the flair jet and slightly more than a 4 to 1 ratio on the jet orifice.

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Very clever of you Clark. I was just going to buy a Gold cube with a Trommel but now you got me feeling guilty that should try to do something clever as well lol

 Planting my potatoes this morning so I'll have to ponder this a bit. Whats the suction jet thingy for ? like a minnie dredge pump? 

strick

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1 hour ago, strick said:

Very clever of you Clark. I was just going to buy a Gold cube with a Trommel but now you got me feeling guilty that should try to do something clever as well lol

 Planting my potatoes this morning so I'll have to ponder this a bit. Whats the suction jet thingy for ? like a minnie dredge pump? 

strick

Emmm, french fried taters... zackly, 12v crack cleaner and when I’m done doing that I can look for gold??. There’s a bunch of YouTube examples, I need to fine tune it with smaller diameter tubes along with more pump.

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Last night I tried the first test with the added nozzles all seemed good with the water level between tanks staying even. Just figured out how to upload to YouTube here is the test.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Getting around to something more like I had in mind for a finished product I’ve added floats to my highbanker and can now just drop it in water if the conditions allow instead of recirculating water from tubs. One more item to fabricate is a lower header box in place of thr highbanker hopper without the classification screen, I’ll fabricate a short punch plate instead and the header box will lower the suctions discharge closer to the water surface maximizing the suction effect from the nozzle.

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video flowing water with the 12v 20 amp suction jet nozzle

 

 

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I wanted to test my little setup with some gold Paydirt prior to dragging everything up to the gold fields  only to find out its missing gold, so after some research on a end of month sale bought a 5# bag of unsearched no guarantee vulture mine Paydirt for $17 plus $15 in shipping. I’m not a fan of paying for Paydirt but wanted to try it and it seemed like harmless winter fun and hopefully I learn something in the process. After setting everything up and running all the dirt I saved all the tailings for the most important question what am I missing. After cleaning my sluice concentrates I collected .3 gram of flakes and tiny bits and an 8.5 gram copper nugget that must have been tossed into the bag. Most of the gold  was caught in the black Matt inside the hopper. I panned the tailings several times and found one tiny tiny fragment of a silver looking bit and possibly a couple of specks of flour gold to small to see without magnification, really I’m not sure they were even gold so I put the retention very high.

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