What is it and where can I get some? Planning on making a sluice box. Cheerz.
Have a look on the Dredgenz website…Daniel has dream mat in stock with a description of what it is
It’s expensive plastic 
costs $1 to make and retails for $140+, works ok if you feed it slow, don’t expect to throw unclassified dirt through it though, the cells wash out real easy and you’ll lose everything. You can buy it direct from the maker - Vortex Dream Mat Sluice Matting – Gold Rat Highbankers Australian Made Gold prospecting Equipment
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Thanks…think I’ll try a cheaper option.
Don’t let the dis believers deter you…dream mat is awesome (however polarizing options)…you can feed it all day as fast as you like…unlike riffle matts and minors moss combos its very easy to roll off your sluice and wash out in a bucket or pan which is great for testing ground fast.Order from Dan (DredgeNZ) or gold rat in Aussie.
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do you clasify first mal or just shovel away?
Classifier sits in the flare…spade or bucket material straight into it.This is my mate Jeffs set up that we used last season.
I classify in the flare of mine to about 20mm and it does alright but I do wonder how much of the fine gold I’m loosing. But as mal says its real easy to just pull it out and roll into a bucket with water in and clean it out. And hardly any concentrate to have to clean up. I love it
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That’s what I don’t like about my mat and why I no longer use it, concentrate=fine gold recovery that’s why proper exploration companies spend thousands on separation devices, dream mat may leave a cup full of cons but that’s not a good thing in my opinion, the reason people like it is that they can see the gold collecting and it gives you a sense of achievement! I’ll stick with the old proven products, I actually like the final stages of being out and panning down the sands anyway 
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I see what your saying there gav and I have been thinking and researching alot to try find a better way on a budget with riffle design and size shape spacing angle. I did read a large finding from a guy who wanted to test riffle design and allass there wasn’t a definitive answer but one thing that he mentioned was some thing I never thought of, and that was that with miners moss type matting there is still a current that will suck fine gold through it along the bottom of the sluice unless you can perhaps section it off underneath the rifles. Have you heard/thought of this? Because I’d love to know a solution.
What are your thoughts on gold hog matting?
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So my friend jeff did a field test with a primary and secondary sluice of dream matts connected end to end(see photo 1) and loaded the crap out of it for an hour or so see if the primary matt was losing any fine gold and this photo(attached 2) is the clean out results of the secondary matt …as you can see …no gold in secondary matt…QED
When your day prospecting with limited time you just have to go for it and not worry about losing fine gold…it often doesn’t add up to much…you can find you spend a fair percentage of your time mucking around trying to capture less than 5% extra gold…spend your time processing as much material of the richest material you can in a day and the gold will add up.
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I think gold hog has its place with the likes of dream mat, both have plus and minus, so does miners moss like you say with its open spacing and free flowing voids, that’s why its preferred to have it placed on vgroove rubber to catch the small stuff. Being able to have riffles especially like the clarkson system riffles is the added bonus of carpet sluices, more allocation for user error and more safety nets because anything can happen in the field. Over the many years I’ve been sluicing i have found you don’t have a one system fits all rivers device, take the shotover and arrow, possibly the highest concentration of black sands in any NZ river, dream mat and certain hog mats just don’t cut it there,I know as I have every type of mat avalible and I am lucky enough to be in a position where company’s send me products to test before I sell them. If they don’t work in those river systems they are a failed test and I won’t recommend or stock them as a majority of rivers will be similar conditions.
Even now today I have just been sent the Gold owl mat to test out and review, the likes of Dan Hurd and many other guys on YouTube rave about it but I don’t know if they are paid endorsements or not, so test it to buggery I will!
At the end of the day most kiwis want an affordable if not free way of getting gold, and most can make that happen by using the old number 8 wire, a good cheap homemade box and carpet can perform just like any other system, gold will settle behind a rock in the turbulent river so. Anything will do, I just despise being ripped off for products that have no real substance.
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And that’s why I am so happy to have found this site gav and mal. We the cheap ass relative newbies can put up a question or querie and even after exhaustive searching on the interweb and 14 hours or so of you tube with so called experts all over the world we get it straight up from someone who actually knows our ground and isn’t scared to educate someone with real info not just the newest tech. Cheers. I make my own stuff and I listen to every piece of info that I can and take it in and I appreciate all the input and I’m not counting you out mal at all especially since I have a dream mat.
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Been watching this thread with some interest. That dream matt concept surfaced at least 10 years or more ago. It originally came out as a solid aluminum base which was the sluice box. Every year somebody comes up with a new concept that is going to catch all the gold and have brilliant results. That"s been going on for years. Lets face it, most gold is easy to catch with conventional methods. I would class your gold in the pic Jabs as coarse gold, easy to catch. Its the micro fine and flood gold, that is the challenge. And as has been stated is it worth going to extra lengths to try and catch it. As many of you will be aware if it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be any gold cubes flying around. The secret with fine gold and black sand, is it has to be treated independently. There is no one pass system that will grab both the coarse and the fine gold. Oh yep you will catch some fine stuff, buts that more by accident than design. So do we attack the fine gold first or the coarser gold. That depends on the ratio of black sand in the base material that is being presented to the recovery system. The Arrow would be a challenge but not unsurmountable. I take it, that the abundant black sand kinda clogs the riffles or expanded metal or whatever you are using as a primary recovery system. Way back when I got into ocean beach black sanding all I had was black sand to work with. I employed the age old recovery process of beach tables as used by the original black sanders as they were known. They had no doubt gone through the process of experimenting till they arrived at the best way. Could I improve on that. Simple answer “No”. All I could experiment was with the matting. My research indicated they used coconut matting. No flash materials in those days. Tried all sorts of material and the best catcher was polar fleece. (The fluffy Side). Later the up/down outside matting came on the market and that worked well. I have always held the belief that the nylon in both materials had something to do with its ability to catch gold. Some kind of electro static force was at play. Gold being a super conductor. My theory was the moving water over the nylon based material may have produced electro static energy which assisted in recovery. Sadly there was never any way I could test my theory. So I just accepted that it was there. Maybe it made the fluffy side of the polar fleece stand up. Much like the electro static phenonium on your hair. Way back when I and most dredgers were using six inch suitcase dredges we just accepted that we were losing a fair proportion of our gold. But we were still making money and happy with that. Probably the best dredge I ever owned, was the Keene 5 inch Triple sluice. Purported to be the best dredge on the market at the time to catch all the gold. .And I bet it lost plenty of fine stuff too. She was a bit of a beast, but lots of fun. Now where am I heading here. Well after quitting all my gold gear recently, or what I had left. . It was like somebody close had died. I missed it. So I clawed some back, because me and gold ain"t done yet. Early last Dec I was diagnosed with throat cancer. Had 30 radiation treatments. The radiation kinda knocked me for a six, got tired easy and had no motivation. That probably played into my decision to quit my gear, plus the fact I am 73 years old, and the body ain’t what it used to be. But its gunna be small scale, 2.5 inch gear mucking around on the banks. My underwater days are over. I will go see if I can find any pics of the gear I propose to use. Lost most of them when my last puta got fried by lightening.
Cheers Trev aka (The Hatter or Kiwigold)
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Nice read Trev. Thanks
M penny in the mail tomorrow - sorry for delay. Don’t spend it all at once.
Take care
Why thanks Musketballs. Gee three aniseed balls. In my day. Or two Eskimo’s or three N Babies. All gone now. So guess I will have to keep it and not spend it.
Cheers Trev
Well I was really hoping you would join in on this one trev and I appreciate that you did. I have read up on the old timers that came here to the west coast and how they won there gold and I noticed the word “plush” used alot and I guess that’s similar to felt or polar fleece.
I recently watched the gold hog video on how they suggest gold should be captured and as you said, it’s either fine or coarse at a time so they have high velocity deep water on the top sluice with a steeper angle to capture coarse gold then a wider less aggressive mat on a flatter angled sluice below to get the fine stuff when they run there highbankers. I know that doesn’t help with stream slicing but makes good sense I guess.
So I ask you with a stream sluice is there a tryed and true riffle formula for a typical river sluice?
One more thing, I did read on here your recent health scare and I am glad to hear that you are obviously a strong stubborn ol bugger that just refused to quit… Well done and cheers
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gold hog matts are wonderfull for fine gold recovery they handle adverse water flows really well for me gold hog is the bomb
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You should of continued looking into the static gold system! A patent was filed in 2006 for an electrostatic sluice, the product is still under test in Alberta but reviews say it has the ability to pick up gold invisible to the naked eye, it runs much like a river sluice over a pvc bed that is positively charged, when the negatively charged gold is feed over the top the combination of electrostatic attraction and gravity trap the gold in the grooves!
This process looks interesting to me - phytomining of plants over gold bearing soils causes microscopic gold to end up inside the plant, the gold is then extracted from the plant!! Massey university have done study’s here - Gold in herbs - The Country News - NZ Herald
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