The first picture here is of a Gold Well 6 vortex plate as they are made today. The second picture is of the original proof of concept sluice. If you notice, the prototype did not have deep slots in it (what a lot of people like to call standard drop riffles, they are actually a water brake and buffer area in case too much material is supplied to the sluice too fast.) When I realized that the sluice could be overwhelmed with too much dirt and gold could get lost, I had to increase the total volume in the sluice. That would either require 3 times the length or I could put slots in it that would increase the volume without increasing the length. So thats what I did. Of course these slots can capture gold, and do. Studies done so far show that around 70% of the captured gold ends up in the vortex pockets, 30% in the slots. The prototype had just three 1/8 Vee grooves between vortex rows which never really captured much of anything. But of course they werent supposed to. They were there to give the dirt bumps to hit to help break particles apart. The original prototype had no ends on it, just two sides and I just wedged an old water bar from another sluice down in it to provide water for testing. As a result I often discovered that I had run the sluice backwards from the way it was intended, and after a while, I could tell by the water flow when it was backwards. If you have a Gold Well you will know what I am talking about next. The bumps of water below each pocket when run in the backwards position would be much lower and the water ran faster at the end of the sluice than when run in the other direction. For weeks before I started making them, I tried to determine which way worked better but there seemed to be no difference. So, I would install one plate one direction and the other the opposite direction. I did this for a while until a person who wanted to be a dealer was at a show and told me that I had installed a plate the wrong way. Well rather than argue with him, I decided that in fact people might perceive this to be an incorrect installation and so I have since installed all the plates the same way. The way the Gold Well works, is that between each set of pockets a large braking action of the water occurs, so that the water is running slower (and noticably deeper as a result) at the bottom of the sluice than the top. This can be observed by the fact that the top row is nearly scrubbed clean and the bottom row contains very tiny particles on average compared to the top vortex rows. This is the same as a widening sluice, yet does not need to physically widen to accomplish the same thing. So all of that to say, that if you want you can flip the last plate around in your sluice backwards and you may increase your capture if your gold has some characteristics that make it difficult to capture, such as super fine or very thin small and flaky. This gives you the ability to further fine tune your sluice to the material. All that is required is a phillips head screwdriver and 2 minutes time :) Oh, and for those that believe that the pockets lined up in rows will allow gold to slip past between, it does not happen as the water entering between two adjoining pockets is extremely turbulent (two colliding counter-rotating flows meeting) and so all particles actually get forced to enter one pocket or the other. If I were to stagger the rows, it would change the flow dynamics in the sluice and would result in lower performance. One thing about this sluice, the Gold Well was not created by accident, and all aspects of it were fully thought out before I made my very fist one :) Have fun and get lots of yellow stuff :)
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 03:46:49 +0000
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