Inexperienced dredgers get many! This comes from not understanding which types of rocks, or combination of rocks, to avoid sucking up the nozzle. Plug-ups are caused by rocks jamming in the dredge’s suction hose or power-jet. The time and energy spent freeing plug-ups from the hose and power-jet cuts directly into how much progress will be made in the dredge-hole.

Generally, there are two things that drastically slow down the production of less-experienced gold dredgers: (1) plug-ups and (2) “nitpicking.” This really is the key to production dredging! Then, you can see which rocks must be removed first so that you can free the others more easily. We call this a “top cut.” If you take down a broad horizontal area of the streambed all at once, you uncover a whole strata of rocks which are interconnected like a puzzle. Usually, because of gravity, rocks higher up in the streambed (laid down later) are locking lower rocks (laid down earlier) into their position within the streambed.īecause of this, we have found the best means of production is to dredge the hole down a layer at a time. Generally, the streambed is put together like a puzzle, with different rocks locking other rocks into place. Hard-packed streambeds are laid down in horizontal layers during major flood storms. From a production standpoint, a large portion of this work has to do with freeing and removing the over-sized rocks from the streambed in an orderly fashion. In most hard-packed streambeds, this removal of the over-sized material is the bulk of the dredger’s work. Dredging technique in gold-bearing streambeds mainly is focused upon removing the over-sized rocks (any rock which is too large to be sucked up the suction nozzle) from the work area of the dredge-hole.

How to build a suction dredge nozzle