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When you can't fly

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Posted

The weather has not been to conducive to flying on the days I have been home.  It's either been raining and low ceilings or sunny and blowing 40.  So to take up my spare time I got into something really addictive!  Nope, not drugs, its actually worse than that..

I have had my eye on some areas I wanted to do a little prospecting at since I was a kid.  There were times after a big rain that we could walk down the beach and pick up nuggets from a creek bed that normally is dry.  Just one of those things I never really spent the time to go back and really check out but it has always been in the back of my mind.

My quest was kicked in the ass a few weeks ago when I was bored at work and surfing youtube.. Behold, the perfect size toy to fit in the airplane, yet still be able to run a lot of dirt through.  I had one of my buddies do a little cad work and printed out full size patterns for me so it was easy to lay them over the aluminum sheet and scribe the cut lines.  A little creative hammer work on the edge of the welding table and the hopper was ready to weld up.  The sluice box I actually took to a buddies house to use his break to fold it up so the mats would fit perfect.  When it was all said and done, I only had time to do a quick test on it (ran dirt for about 30 minutes or so) the day before I came back to work but it worked perfect!  I was still playing with the angle of the sluice and the water flow to get it all dialed in so I had a catch tub at the end of the sluice to catch everything that went through the run.  I only had time to clean up the concentrates from the mat and I am sure I blew a lot more out of the end as I was trying to run the mats to failure to see just how fast I can run the material through it.  I will clean up the rest of the slurry when I get home to see how much I blew out.

All in all it was a great day out on an undisclosed creek bank with my daughter helping to shovel dirt in looking for "buried pirate treasure".  She is on a pirate kick right now :lol:

All up weight with the pump and hoses is just over 50 pounds so its easy to toss in the seat of the Avid next to me and go out and play on beaches and rivers.

In the spirit of bigger is better, I now blew it up a bit and am having parts water jetted for a bigger one that I can carry on the side X side or truck and should have the capacity to keep 3-4 people busy shoveling and dumping buckets of dirt or I can hook the dredge hose to it and be dredging while others are shoveling! 

Another fun hobby that baby girl loves so far getting out and spending time with dad :)

 

:BC:

 

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Posted

Cool stuff!!! Can't do anything like that here!!!

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Posted

You need to add in on that ak gold reality show.  Bet they'd like to have a fly in prospecter segment.

Ya just gotta start coming up with some good fabricated drama you could pitch to them so they'd bite LOL!!

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Posted

Leni could come up with some drama, I have a feeling :-)   :-)  Sorry Leni, I couldn't pass that one up.  ;-)   JImChuk

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Posted

The real gold is the smile on that girls face!

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Posted

That's awesome, I have 2 young daughters myself and we're always going on adventures treasure hunting. Haven't really found anything cool yet but the time spent is well worth it . I have a gold plate machine and have made them pirate treasure just gold plating coins . Going out for real gold would be awesome . 

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Posted

You need to add in on that ak gold reality show.  Bet they'd like to have a fly in prospecter segment.

Ya just gotta start coming up with some good fabricated drama you could pitch to them so they'd bite LOL!!

I don't need my locations known to anyone hahaha.  I tend to go where no man has gone before and probly shouldn't be.

:BC:

 

That's awesome, I have 2 young daughters myself and we're always going on adventures treasure hunting. Haven't really found anything cool yet but the time spent is well worth it . I have a gold plate machine and have made them pirate treasure just gold plating coins . Going out for real gold would be awesome . 

It is addicting for sure.  When you get color with little to no effort, it makes you dream big on putting in some real effort to find that serious pay streak.  Reality is that you will be lucky to get enough to pay for the 2 gallons of gas that you burned in the pump let alone anything else.

:BC:

 

The real gold is the smile on that girls face!

Yes it is.  And no she was not flipping off the cam, she was making her "claw" ready to defend from other pirates that may be trying to attack... and maybe she was being a bear since I had just pointed out the bear tracks to her and told her to not wander off into the woods :lol:

:BC:

 

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