How do I Find Gold With an In-Stream Sluice Box?

Mining gold with a sluice.

You can recover fine gold and gold nuggets in streams, using a sluice box. A sluice box is usually made from a lightweight metal material for easy transport. But some homemade sluice boxes are made from wood. A sluice box looks like a long, rectangular open-topped shallow box with ridges---called "riffles"---and carpet in the bottom to catch the gold. Often there is a fan-shaped funnel at the top to help direct the water into the sluice.

Things You'll Need

• Gold pan
• Sluice
• Shovel
• Tweezers
• Snifter
• Container for gold

Instructions

1. Find a stream that is in a known gold-bearing region.

2. Dig up a little of the sediment from the bottom of the stream with a gold pan. Swirl the water and contents around in the pan, allowing some to slosh out. Look in the bottom of the pan for gold pieces or flakes. If you find some, move on to step 3. If not, move to another part of the stream and repeat step 2 until you find gold.

3. Set up your sluice by placing it with the funnel end facing upstream. Make sure the sluice is running parallel with the stream.

4. Place rocks under the sluice so that it is resting horizontally and high enough in the water so that some water flows through the funnel, down the chute and over the riffles. You will have to play around with it a little bit because if the water is rushing too quickly over the riffles, you will lose some gold. If it's going too slowly, you won't find any gold either.

5. Dig up dirt from the bank of the stream near the sluice and shovel it into the top of the sluice. The water will wash the dirt down over the riffles. Gold is very heavy so if there is any gold in the dirt, it will settle to the bottom quickly and get caught in the carpet and riffles.

6. Pause every so often in your shoveling efforts to recover the gold using tweezers, a suction snifter or your fingers. Place any gold you find into a container with a tight-fitting lid and set aside in a safe place or in your pocket.

Tips & Warnings

• You buy or set up a screen above your sluice. Shovel the dirt onto the screen, and the smaller pieces will fall into the rushing water in the sluice. This is called a classifier and will keep the larger rocks out of the sluice, aiding you in fine-gold recovery. Discard the rocks every so often from the screen, taking care not to throw away any large gold nuggets.

References

• Black Cat Mining: Sluice Box Use
• MD Pub: Sluice
• Keene Engineering: How to Sluice