Here is another 4 hours worth of clean up. Sucked out around some boulders and got a lot of nice pickers! Plan on experiementings some next season. The close the cannal and flood the river. Has been raining everyday too so it will be undredgable for quite a while :(

Awesome results with your DFD Rich! Did you ever manage to get a hold of some rubber and install a damper? Just curious.

Thanks Swizz! Yes, I am using some of the small v matting as a dampner. Seems to smooth everything out real well. It is about a 1.5' length of it. I run it with the v side in down.

Nice looking equipment, and finds Rich!

What my question is though, is anyone taking into consideration lowering the surface tension?
Not many have mentioned it, but by doing so you will be recovering alot more fines in your pans.

Just my

Hey Rich,
I'd like to rig one of my sluices with expanded metal. It looks like the piece that you are using is heavy aluminum and rigid. If you (or anyone else) could give me any advice as to the proper size (gauge), that would be most helpful. I plan on integrating it into a typical 10" wide box (A52) which is about 3-4ft long.
Thanks!

its been my experience that the riffels,matting or whatever your using in your sluice,depends on the average size of the gold your getting. the bigger the gold, the bigger your riffel! on smaller,fine gold,i sometimes just use 1/4,1/2 inch expanded screen .this is just to get the raw material out of the stream. when i do my cleanups everything is screened down and run seperatly.one setup is just black ribbed rubber matting and another is a small Miller table that i coated with the Chalk board paint. im cutting out a peice of slate to use instead of the painted surface for BETTER results.i havent finished that yet but itll be done sometime this year i hope!

Swizz. The original sluice came with 1/2" opening raised expanded. This works great for real fine stuff. It is the same as what you can buy for paint rollers. I bought some sheets of expanded in various sizes from my local metal supplier. I use a 3/4" raised for areas with bigger flakes and small nuggets. I set it up so I can just change metal when I need. Not sure if there is any certain gauge rating or anything? It is steel. They did have the same sizes in aluminum, but it was a lot more expensive.

The expanded metal plate that came with my A52 hand sluice is 1/2" (metal). It's held down in place by the riffle bar when it's locked down. All I need to do is rig a fastening system for the expanded metal so that I can eliminate the riffle bar. This should be easy to do since I also would like to narrow the sluice flow for low water conditions. Clamping siderails to the inside of the box (pictured somewhere in this thread) should solve both problems.
I'm going to pick up a couple of larger sizes of expanded metal and experiment with them also.
Thanks!!

This is what I'll be running today for some low water conditions. (modified A52)
I narrowed the run by attaching a flare-cut 2X4 to each inner wall of the sluice. The clamped 2X4s hold down the expanded metal and collection mats. The C-Clamps are situated above and clear from the water flow.
Today's sandwich will be: Bottom is green riffle-carpet (backed), mid is Miner's Moss, top is the 1/2" expanded metal.

She worked well today!!
As you can see in the pic, I was able to capture nearly 100% of the small creek and successfully narrow it to a more powerful and productive flow through the sluice. The expanded metal contributed to a much more efficient run without the use of Hungarian riffles which were really slowing down the process for me on low water conditions like this.
Glad this thread was around, thanks for the info!

Worked like a charm.

Swizz if that setup dont capture fine gold then nothing will!

Got a question for you guys. I want to set up my DFS as a recirculating sluice for processing large batches of cons. What is the smallest size electric pump I can get away with using? I've got a 1100 gph pump sitting around. Was hoping that this would be enough. If I add 2x4s on the sides like in the OP what would the pump size be? Would like to know before I start building stuff. TIA

Hi Rich, hope you are doing well.
1100gph is probably more than enough to run a small concentrating setup like you described. I'd set it up with the 1100 and add a water regulator (faucet or other) between the pump and sluice so that you can manually slow it down to your desired flow. If you wind up running it at 1/2 speed... obviously a 500gph would suit your needs for example.
An 1100 is a good starting point.

i agree with swizz, plus you can run your bilge pump off your battery charger and switch it to 6vdc and your pump will run at 1/2 speed. i do this at home instead of using a battery. infact, i have valves installed on all of my cleanup equipment for just that purpose. the finer the gold, the slower i go!