#Diy dredge nozzle full#

And of course as you go up in size you increase the weight of the motor/pump/air pump and need larger pontoons to keep the sluice floating when you are running, but you can move a lot more material Most of the little backpack style dredges i retail about only 60- 65 pounds total weight but the drawback is its a 2 inch and 2.5 inch and though its good for sampling if you have to go very deep, there is no air onboard, and not enough power to pull the gravels if they are very deep, but you do not lose as much fine gold with some of them,basiclly there is not much difference between highbnaker conversions and the smaller backpack style dredges with the exception of using a flare attachment design and single hose over double hose length. You can build a dredge on legs, or floation, and the floatation can be inner tubes to a pontoon boat, the bigger boat has its pros and cons same as one you just set up on the bank.

#Diy dredge nozzle full#

Ive run a dredge and shut down after 30-45 minutes and my riffles were full of black sands and gold, and ran all day long 4-8 hours and clean up was the same, no more fine gold than short runs in the same material.makes me wonder how much ive lost over time. there are various designs of sluices to remedy this problem but they all still lose much of that fine gold.

When you increase hose diameter size by one inch you can move 4 times the material from that next size down, however as the hose size increases so do the size of rocks you pick up and run over your sluice and the higher volume of water it takes to move them off, as that happens your finer gold will not always settle into your sluice and goes over the end of the dredge, so increased volume of material sometimes gives up that fine gold which really does add up over time.

The 'jet flare' design uses a short hose to feed water to the venturi and flare /crash box, as opposed to the older style using a long hose running out to the suction nozzle which adds both weight and expense as these hoses need to be pressure rated and not collapse, those pictures above show clearly a nice yellow dredge pump. we will see what it will eat, but right now i have no trouble feeding it a five gallon bucket in 5-7 minutes with a large trowel.Ī suction dredge needs to have a specific pump on it, made for pressure and volume, trash pumps just wont produce the pressure needed for sucking up gravels as well as a dredge pump does. Such would be a great candidate for a Gold Cube which uses about 1100 gallon per hour 12 volt pump and can process from what the inventors claim up to 1000 pounds of classified material per hour or about a half a yard for such a little tool, i have not had that kind of volume yet to try to run on a timed basis, though i hope to this summer yet. From what i read your friend has rices sized nuggets/pickers which would make them able to pass through about 10-12 mesh, for the most part and an 8 mesh screen most all the time unless its really long wire type gold. below are some pictures of my work in progres.While i have not built my own dredge, i have run a couple and have thought about building one a time or two or improving an existing one. My goal is to get a working 3 inch nozzle, if that works I plan to build a 2 inch and 4 inch to sell to buy more equipment. I looked at it like this, a standard pump and nozzle you might have I'm guessing $1000-$1800 in it, if you had let's say $500 in a I-Jet nozzle and picked up a 190 GPM Pacer pump off Craigslist for $100-$300, then a few hoses, you'd have less than 1/2 the cost of a standard set-up and be able to move 3 times as much material. The pumps are cheaper and more readily available, you can move almost 3 times as much product for the same gas spent running and if you can get a working nozzle, you'll have almost 1/3 the start up cost. In my opinion, if you have the option of an I-jet with a trash pump or a Dredge pump with a standard dredge nozzle, the I-Jet is the way to go. It offers higher suction, can move more material and works well off a low pressure high volume pump such as a 'trash pump.' They do not like high pressure, but do like high volume, this makes it perfect for a 'trash pump.' Even though you can run a traditional suction nozzle off a trash pump, a dredge pump is a better choice with a standard nozzle. From the research I've done on this type of nozzle, It's the best design for use use with a dredge. It's expensive to build at home unless you have some equipment to work with. From what you explained, it is economical to incorporate into the dredge but very expensive to build by the home builder, right ? Again, I want to just know if it can be run by a regular low pressure (clean water) pump or not.