I live in Florida and am a well driller. Have always wanted to look for gold and now I am going placer mining. So far I have built my own equipment, trommel/sluice combo, dry vack, gold cube, blower dry washer, sniping rig and mini sluice. My wife and i are heading to Arizona and then out California. I have absolutly no experience except what I have read on the many forums I have found hereon the web.

 I am almost finished with the dry washer and have a problem with the vibrator, I am going to paste  from one of my other posts

I probably have done "too" much reading and research but in one of the articles the builder talked about using the cage rather than the fan. In the opposite side of the function( causing air to move versus air moving the device) the cage is more efficient so I figured the same should apply here also and I can control the speed of the cage by building a slide into the bottom of the air box where the dryer hose attaches to the box allowing me to slide the air flow closer into or further away from the cage, also the cage will have a slot on each side of the cage walls so I can move the offset weight either closer to or further away from the center of the cage giving me a way to control the "sine" . The box is designed with dead air spaces at each riffle and with the cage I figure I can adjust the "sine" or the height and depth of the vibration, too much is bad, too little is bad. I kind of developed this idea by watching people separate the gold in a pan after they have gotten down to the final black sand cons. They tap lightly on the top of the pan on the high side and the gold seems to separate nicely. I am using the nylon plankton netting Nitex 1000 UM (very tight weave) for my cloth and I will try to set the vibration sine real small.
I live in Florida and will have very little time to spend (30 days) in the field so I want to get the design right before I go. I will be heading out to Arizona on the first of June so I don't have time to experiment, That would be the better thing to do. The fabrication is all done in my little shop and fabrication tools are very limited so small changes take me a long time. I am having a lot of fun doing these equipment builds and am looking foward to having twice as much fun in finding the gold with this equipment.
PLEASE ANYBODY WITH ANY SUGGESTION PLEASE PLEASE POST
FLAIRBOATER

SO AS YOU CAN SEE I WOULD LIKE ANY SUGGESTIONS YOU HAVE. I AM NOT TRYING TO" REINVENT THE WHEEL" JUST TRYING TO IMPROVE IT