For the sprayer bars, drill some some holes in two lines across each pipe inside the box. If you notice in the pictures below of my system, you can see how I plumbed my box to spray water. You will need some compression of the moss from the riffles so that it creates a seal on your mat. Make sure take into account the thickness of your miners moss in the bottom of the sluice. These are pretty much the same as the ones on jobe and keene sluice boxes. There is a link below to Amazon where you can order the latches. Once you get your you riffles done, you will need to have a way to secure your riffles to the sluice box. I also varied the spacing of my riffles a little so there would be variation in the water flow. I did this because most dredges have multiple shapes to catch different sizes of material. Notice there are two different shapes of riffles. I then measured and cut the lengths of metal I needed to make the riffles. To build the riffles, I measured out the width and built a wooden jig the exact width of the box. Do this before you build your riffles because you need a little bit of space (6 inches or so) before the material hits a riffle. Next you will need to mount your hopper box. To get a good idea of width, look at the dimension of the boxes for the dredges on Keene’s website. You can build a wider box if you would like, but it will require a larger water flow. Have the inside bent in a U shape so there is 10 inches between the walls. You will need a 48″ long (can be shorter) piece of sheet metal (aluminum) at least 18 inches wide. For the sluice box (48 inches long) I took a piece of sheet metal to a machine shop and traded some bags of candy for them to bend it.

Some of the pieces of the hopper box would barely fit. I purchased a 18 inch bender at harbor freight but I recommend getting the a larger one.

Obviously to build both portions you will need a sheet metal bender. If you need some paydirt to test out your equipment or just work on your panning skills go to my page here. In this post I will talk about how to build the sluice box portion and where to get materials. In a previous post, I showed how to build the hopper box portion and posted dimensioned drawings so you can build your own.

I took some pictures (in my attic) of my dredge/high banker so you can see how I build it. I finally got back around to finishing my posts on my Dredge and Highbanker Plans.

Sluice vs hand dredge