I recently made some changes to my dredge, using gold hog matting to process the the slurry passing a 6mm screen. Gold hog matting used was 900mm long made up of ur, bedrock and motherlode profiles, and I though it was running great and particularly enjoyed the not having to pan so much tailings, That was until, i popped a keene sluice on the end to see how well it was really doing and the results were surprising, the cunky bits that just passed the got throw the screen were all found in the keene sluice with some fine, and the gold caught in the goldhog matting was mainly fine, less than 2mm in size, to ultra fine. It was a short test, with the total gold found being 3.2 grammes, of which 0.7 grammes was caught in the keene sluice.
Conclusion, you cant run exclusively gold hog mates as your heavy gold is being blown over the matting and out the back, contrary to all doc assurances and tests. I would recommend that peeps use a combinantion of riffels and the matting, with say three or four proper riffels at the head of the box to catch the heavies followed by the gold hog matting, unless of course you like losing 25% of your hard won gold.
my experience is, that , on the flare use UR then one slice of talon (10 x 6) then alternate between razorback and downdraft. use a big long flap to slow things down and a pan at the end to give you an indication of any fines lost. my sluice box is 4’ long (modified 2" suction nozzle keene backpacker) gold hog has stopped any comments on you tube and there other mats in my opinion are shit.
real funny when he claims “wow look at that 400 mesh” lmao…he needs to come to nz…but he mite have a heart attack …
his other mats as above are awesome tho
Personally I don’t trust rubber mat, I’ve The new a52 Keene with miracle mat and you can see gold all the way down the end some times. When I use miners moss I never had issues like that. My original Keene I split the carpet in two, front was moss back end was Keene green Mat and I never found sizable gold in rear section.
Also in side by side tests with a mate digging same ground as me the rubber never seems to cope with black sands as well as Hungarian system and standard box always has more gold? I would definitely never use it in a dredge as the shift of material when the pump is on and off is enough to give me the shits
Well just put my experience out there, personally I think that no hog matting can deal with chunky stuff and suits people in a fine gold situation. Definately should be carefully considered before using in a dredge. i am now refitting moss and riffles.
Hi GoldenEel …along the top tool bar in the box is a arrow pointing up,click on that then "choose files"select your file on your computer…then click "open’then click …"upload"and should start uploading…we have this issue as noobies on the keene 4 inch as to the best setup for course thru to fine gold…Mal…good post
Gold hog matting I find is a bit like snake oil. They tend to edit any negative feedback on their websites as pointed out by the bloke above. The use of very scientific jargon and clever marketing when its products are described by its maker I think tends to rope people in that and the ability of its makers to control very closely its feedback rings alarm bells for me especially when they control the whole manufacturing chain.
Its use in a cleanup sluice where one can have fine control over all a number of parameters (pitch, water speed, slurry size, classification etc) might be OK. My experience with it in a dredge environment is that due to the large volume of water in a sluice and the lack of pitch control in the sluice does not favor gold recovery compared to traditional recovery techniques such as Hungarians, expanded metal, carpet , miners moss etc.
The only exception I see with rubber matting being of benefit in a dredge is deep V matting with raised expanded metal on top of it particularly in the under sluice. Dave McCraken uses this principal on his over under setups for fine gold recovery ( in up to 8 inch size dredges) and with my own experience with this setup its pretty lethal on the fine gold.
I found that it was ok with fine gold , right down to 10000 micron size as doc would probably say, but larger gold, well lets just say that it just flips and jumps for joy has it rolls along the rubber and dives back into the river.
Just a quick follow up, went back to my old riffles and miners moss, put the keene sluice box on the end, and did a test pan after three hrs dredging. The result was only some very fine, 400 mesh as doc would put it, got past my old system, didn’t weight it but probably less than 0.1 of a gram in total. My riffles arent complicated not even hungarian, just a simple 10 degree rake on them. So my advise to people is, dont over complicate things, and follow all the bs, gold is heavy and will always drop to the bottom of a slurry, just dont stir the slurry to much and you will always capture 97% of the gold with simple riffles.
