We finally broke down and bought our own gold dry washer. Where there isn't water available you use a dry washer to find gold. After having our lesson from Old Stoney on how to run one we felt confident enough to purchase our own. The one he had was run by a gas powered blower so you need a generator, gas can and a leaf blower type motor to run the dry washer. We opted for one that is simpler because we are so limited in storage space. Ours runs off of a little battery that you can see under the machine. It operates by blowing air up from the bottom and blowing the dust up and off of the machine while the dirt/gravel runs down over the riffles. The gold catches in the riffles and after shoveling dirt into the machine for awhile you then do a clean out and pan what is caught in the riffles. We found one little piece of gold that was big enough to grab with a tweezers and the rest of the specks were so small you had to suck them up into a sniffer bottle to capture them.
A dry washer only works with dry dirt. Of course, the first day we ran the machine, got it home and cleaned back up it then started to rain. It rained quite a bit for the desert so now the dirt is too wet and will take a while to dry out enough to run through the machine. Some diehard people will dig dirt and spread it out on tarps to dry it faster. We aren't that crazy yet!
No comments:
Post a Comment