Greetings,
I've been dancing around to whether or not to buy those nice Jobe
Classifiers.
There seem to be 3 ways people use them;
1. In the field - you fit one as best as possible into your pan.
2. In the field - you fit one over your 5gal. bucket and make your own
concentrates.
3. Back home- you lug 1(or more!) 5gl buckets home and use multiple
classifiers to
screen the hell out of those cons and (supposedly) you get more fine
gold that way.
I've used both 1 & 2 as above but I've had problems with both and so I
thought I'd
post my experience because maybe someone has a better way.
The stream beds in my area I would describe as a matrix of fairly close
packed fist-
sized rocks grading down to knuckle and peeble-sized with sand, clay and
other goodies
inbetween. You simply can't get anywhere down near bedrock without a
shovel or prybar
to loosen the "junk" that you pick out, then scoop up the finer stuff and
pan. At least, that's
been my experience. After an initial trowel-full or two at any given spot,
you can't get enough
worth panning with out first yanking the bigger rocks out - then there's
good stuff to pan.
So that reality lead to jury-rigged classifiers. The problem I've had with
those are that I need a
lot of water to rinse the good stuff down and off the junk. If I classify
directly into the pan I'm
suspicious that I'm wa****ng the good stuff right out the pan as it can
take several drownings
of the junk rock to get them cleaned off. I wonder if I'm not just rinsing
my rocks clean and
slo****ng the gold right back out into the stream.
So then I switched to classifying into a 5gal bucket. This works well but
has the problems that:
1. I fill the bucket with water by the time I get a some cons and may be
losing gold because I've
no choice but to tip it over and pour the water out.
2. But more worrisome is that a 5gal. bucket has the amazing ability to
hang on to the best cons
at the very bottom of the bucket until you can't trowel them out and
you just have to tip it
over your pan and hope you catch it all.
Oh, and buy the way - Any time that bucket is NOT full of something it is
forever trying to float
away!
So it's sunday and quiet and I'm under the weather and can't go panning
today so I though I'd
post this in case anyone wants to reply with ideas, experience, or
whatever.
Enjoy the Day,
Andrew
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