Hi all, I am Don aka Old Salt. I am retired Navy and living in Arizona. I have been prospecting for about 2.5 years now and learning new things all the time. My arsenal of gold finding gear includes: Tesoro Lobo, Falcon MD20, Gold Buddy Mini Highbanker, and other miscellaneous tools. My preference and most luck has come from crevicing and collecting what I call prime material to process through panning or the highbanker. Ive built a few homemade gold finding machines. None of which has worked well, but I am sure I will keep trying. My prospecting bud is Ol Oli who told me about this new forum.
Thanks Old Salt Looks like you are set with the equipment needed to just about take care of any terrain. Im kinda curious about your gold finding machines. What do they do? Always open minded to gold finding ideas.
thanks again for checking us out and please contribute to this site so it may grow.
Hi Nightrider, So far I have built a mini puffer drywasher, and some recirculating highbankers. I also built a black sand separator that is a gravity fed/dry system. Good for getting the magnetic stuff out before using a Gold Bug 2 or Falcon detector or maybe good for space rock hunters. I am putting together a gas vac this summer and also going to try to build a mini drywasher that uses two battery operated fans. I am also toying with the idea of something that uses forced air through PVC to create static electricity for capturing fine gold. Thought about building a recirculating beach box for fine gold recovery in AZ, but requires too much water. Keeps me busy in the summer here when it is to hot to go out in the desert.
Looks like you have your hand full on some of those projects! I just built a 5gal vac system powered by a leaf blower gas system. I have not got around to posting the specs yet but will do so soon. It works fantastic! and is light weight. I have some video on the main site yoreplacermine.com under videos/redneck vids. It shows its first field operation. We lifted about 5 5gal buckets of prime shale concentrate. It worked like a charm. I believe the total cost was under 10 dollars. I would like to hear more on your ideas as you tweak them. Matter of fact I will start a new section for this type of money saving idea's. Forced air to create static electricity sound very interesting.
