Gold Prospecting And Mining Equipment Plans

You may also want check 2 great books of DIY prospecting equipment plans by: Sam Redding:

Sam Radding's Book of Plans 1

Plans included in Volume I:

1) Port A Sluice - Build a compact, yet full-sized sluice box that breaks down into sections for portability and storage

2) Rocker Box - Build a traditional rocker box, a truly time tested pieces of prospecting equipment

3) Small Rocker - Plans for a small rocker box that is easily portable and great for sampling

4) Wooden Concentrator - Add a strong pump and this wooden highbanker style concentrator is great for getting gold out of those high benches. These plans also include a section for how to build a rocker concentrator

5) Aluminum Concentrator - Similar to the highbanker style concentrator above, but in lightweight and tough aluminum

6) Bellows Drywasher - Plans for how to build a hand-crank bellows drywasher, perfect for desert gold prospecting. Can also be powered by a small motor

 

Sam Radding's Book of Plans 2

Plans included in Volume II:

1) View Scopes – Build your own viewing scope to snipe for gold underwater.

2) Snuffer Bulb – Works in a similar way to a snuffer bottle but can be used underwater to suck up any gold while sniping.

3) Crack Hook – A great tool for easily scraping out material from cracks.

4) Fanning Board – Use a fanning board underwater to quickly move sand, silt, moss and more.

5) Suction Stick – Use this homemade hand dredge to quickly and easily suck up material from holes or cracks and easily transfer it to your recovery equipment.

6) Vibrobasic Drywasher – Build your own small and lightweight vibrostatic drywasher.

7) Mini-Magic Drywasher – A bellows drywasher that is small and light enough to carry into otherwise unreachable spots.

Shaker Tables

Shaker tables do a great job of cleaning classified concentrates.

• The British Geolocical Survey has this hand-powered shaker table. This is very cool !!
•  

Rocker boxes are cheap and easy to build, easy to operate and good at getting fine gold. They're also a lot quieter than dredges, highbankers and other power equipment but is also quite dusty....LOL

• Rocker Box - PDF file of rocker box plans hosted at the GPAA site.
•  
• River Rocker - Another PDF, from GPAA.
•  

Gravity Dredge

The gravity dredge is basically a suction dredge without motor, or pump, no moving parts, etc. They rely on gravity to build a head of suction. They aren't all that portable, relatively inexpensive and they work really great for finding gold.

 

• Gravity Dredge - plans, and tons of information for more advanced operations.
•  
• Gravity Dredging for Placer Gold has an explanation on simple gravity dredging.
•  
• Simple Simon is another take on building a gravity dredge, this one with bucket header box and sluice box setup.

• This Wet Willie sluice combo unit .
•  
• Several sluice box designs A must see.
•  
• Two more sluice projects described and with pictures.
• A poop tube (Henry Henry) and a wooden sluice setup can be found here.

• Gold sucker plans

• miningold.com,
• sucker classifier attachment
•  

• Highbankers

• mini highbankers,
• drill powered pumps
• highbanker/sluice