For BC, see the Basic Rules about
Sluice Boxes and Highbankers.Water flows through a sluice box and gold-bearing sand, gravel, etc. is fed into the upstream end. Gold is very dense - heavy for it's size. It settles on the bottom of the sluice box in places where the water slows down. There are various designs to make this happen.
A Highbanker is a sluice box on a stand, with a built in "grizzly" (grating) to reject oversize gravel, and a water attachment for the sluice and maybe spraying the grizzly. See the photo at the top of the Mining Equipment page.
A grizzly is grating or punch plate or coarse screening at a fairly steep angle. Paydirt is dumped on and spray bars might wash it. Small pieces pass through to the sluice box. Larger pieces slide off.
You dig paydirt and process it...
Small sluice boxes used for prospecting and hand-digging operations are generally 10 to 18 inches across and 3 to 5 feet long. A sluice fed by a large wash plant might be more than two feet across and ten to thirty feet long.
A major advantage of this sort of sluice is that clean up - removing the accumulated concentrates - is very easy. No carpet or moss - just tilt it up into a tub and run a little water through.
Getting a sluice box working properly depends on the sluice and on what you are trying to run through it. You have to experiment.
From time to time, especially after making a change, you should catch some of what is coming out the end and pan it out to see if you are losing gold.
The water flow and water speed have to be high enough to clear out almost all the light sand, but catch some black sand behind riffles.
If you can't get the water flow you need because the water gets too deep, increase the angle of the sluice. If you need the water deeper, decrease the angle or increase the water flow.
Changing the angle of a sluice box changes the angle of riffles or the shaped-bottom. This affects how it works.
Increasing the sluice box angle or the flow of water or both, will increase the speed of the water. This gives gold less time go settle.
Increasing water speed increases turbulence, which...
In a "Mat/Screen/Riffles" sluice box, when the angle and water flow are just right, (most) gold will be retained behind the riffles, while most of the regular sand and some of the black sand (and probably some of the fine gold) are flushed out.
Miners have often ignored very fine gold. It can be a mistake for you to do the same thing. Often the bulk of the gold that you can recover from a claim is fine. For more information, see Fine Gold.
Clean up is a chore with the mat/screen/rifle sluices. You have to take them apart, probably at least dip the mat in a tub, maybe do more work on it, flush everything and put it back together.
With the engineered-bottom sluice boxes, you just tilt them up and run a little water through. It is a major advantage if you have to clean up often.
How often you have to clean up depends mostly on how much black sand you are getting and catching in your sluice box.
Some people try adjust the sluice so that much of the black sand is washed out. In some areas, this can make a big difference in how often you clean up.
Other people like to get the black sand - if you get the black sand, you get the gold. This might not always be true for very fine gold, but the basic idea is good. It does mean doing clean up more often.
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