New Zealand Gold Prospecting & Metal Detecting Forums Archive

awhile ago i saw on someones post on here that they were using car mats as sluice matting.im pretty sure there called the sheep shagger car matts.it is a rubber mat with deep (5mm at least) dimond shaped pattern. i decided to try some out on my sluice last weekend when i went away instead of my ribed carpet. i was amazed at how it held the gold. i just stuck in there. i put my pan at the end to test if/how much gold i was loosing and i was loosing a bit of the very very fine gold.i cut down the rubber matt to only cover 70 percent of my sluice riffle area the at the end of the sluice other 30percent i added a portion of my ribbed carpet to catch the fine stuff.did the test pan again and came to the conclusion its a pretty awsome combanation. the rugged rubber catchs all the bigger gold and some fines and really breaks up the mud/pud /clay ect really well with the heavy riffle action of the rubber and then the carpet was geting the small amount of fines making it further down the sluice.

i then decided to to another test as the rubber matting was working well. i clean sluice out and set it up again .then proceeded to dig a hole and run material unclassified thre it.big stones and all.obviously id chuck the huge ones out but put stone up to golf ball size threw.and still i was loosing very very minimal amounts of gold out the tail end. i had to put a bit more water flow threw it to help work the bigger stuff threw the sluice.

i wouldnt normal do this i will always clasifie down ect but just did this as a bit of a test.and was impresed