DESERDOG'S
ORIGINAL GOLD SUCKER HAND DREDGE

HAND DREDGES

There are many types of hand dredges. Some work well, and some just work.

The most basic type of hand dredge is the open-ended  hand dredge that does not use any nozzle. It is also known as a Henderson pump. With this type of hand dredge,  you have to move rather quickly, as the large size of the open end makes it easy for material to fall out. But once you get use to using one, you lose very little material. The Henderson pump seems to be the most popular type of hand dredge in Europe. A variation of the Henderson pump is the 2 inch super gold sucker. It has a 45 degree ebow and a short piece of pipe on the suction end. the additon of the 45 degree elbow makes it much easier to keep material inside the pump.

Another variation of the Henderson pump is the gold sucker. The gold sucker has a smaller diameter barrel than most Henderson pumps, and uses nozzles. It also employes a vent hole. You keep the vent hole covered with your thumb while pulling up on the handle. At the end of the strok, you take your thumb off of the vent hole. This breaks the suction and the material falls out of the barrel.

There are other types of hand dredges as well. Some employ a collection chamber. The gold sucker can be used with a collection chamber. Here is how the collection chamber works. You suction up material into the hand dredge. The heavies fall out first and go into the collection chamber. Collection chambers are a good idea for use in places where you cannot easily place a pan or bucket for collection of material. Collection chambers with internal classifiers are in my opinion not a good idea. They cannot collect enough material to be useful. A regular size classifier can classify many, many times the amount of material in the same time.

Then there are the end dump hand dredges. Here is  how the end dump hand dredges work. You suction up material, then dump it out the end of the barrel. End dump hand dredges work well as long as they utilize large bore, 2 inch or larger, nozzles and barrels. With the large nozzle, they can collect a lot of material in each stroke. But if they employ smaller diameter barrels and nozzels, they are just to slow. A super sucker or gold sucker will collect much more material in a given time than a small bore end dump hand dredge.

What type of hand dredge do you use, how easy is it to use, and has it helped you recover any gold?

Went sluicing today, and got very little gold! What I did get was very fine stuff you could barely see. I got my 3 pieces of test lead, so it was just poor ground. I always put in 3 distintive pieces of lead in the material I feed through my sluice. If I am recovering the lead, I will recover most of the gold. But if I lose the lead, then I have my sluice set up wrong.

I have used hand dredges for gold prosprecting for years now. And the ones that I have found work the best is the gold sucker for small cracks and crevices and the super sucker for moving larger amounts of material. I have also found that putting small nozzles on hand dredges with large barrels just makes it harder to pull up on the handle. The gold sucker works much better for cleaning out cracks and crevices than a large hand drede with a small nozzle. Here is a picture of a gold sucker.

It is the best choice for cleaning out small cracks and crevices. It is the fastest of any of the smaller hand dredges. It will out perform easily any of the smaller hand dredes that you have to empty by dumping the material out of the barrel.

Now here is a picture of a 2 inch super gold sucker. It is the best choice in hand dredges if you are moving a lot of material from underwater .

Here are some pictures I took while using my sluices and 2 inch super gold sucker in Cajon Creek. This pictures shows the sluices set up in the creek. I have a slickplate, followed by a sluice with expanded metal riffles, and then a standard sluice.

Here is a picture of the grizzly set at the top of the slickplate. It keeps out large rocks from the slucies. I like to set up so that I can shovel or empty my 2 inch super gold sucker directly onto the grizzly.

Here is a picture of the sluice with the expanded metal riffles. This sluice pulls most of the fine gold out of the material.

Here is the standard sluice. It will get any bigger gold, and if any of the fine gold gets by the upper sluice, it can get caught here.

Here is the hole I was working with my super gold sucker. I only worked about 45 minutes or so. You can see my small pry bar in the hole, it is about 18 innches long.