Public Fossicking Areas limitations?

'Every person shall have the right to mine for gold in a gold fossicking area by means only of non-motorised hand held tools’—Crown Minerals Act 1991, 98 (3).

That quote is taken from the NZPAM site.

I’m having a go at constructing a small trommel sluice device.
I’ts light & compact, so not worried about the ‘handheld’ aspect.
My concern is the ‘non-motorised’ part. There is no motor, but, I do hand crank it.
Anyone think that might be a problem?

cant see any problem. a motor runs on fuel so dose your body its called food. so don’t eat that day and it should be ok

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I reckon if you bumped into any DOC staff they’d be more curious than anything else. Doubt you have anything to worry about.

Thanks, I just figured because it has a turning motion, mechanical is close to motor.
It doesn’t have any windup springs or even cogs/gears, or “ticketty tick” :notes: sounds :blush:

Like Gavin said, no problems. It sounds like you have an interesting set up would like to see some pics… oh , and with gold in the box :wink:

Well… I need to patent it and such.

I’m not really into sluicing/panning. And I never knew you guys had to resift your concentrates again!
Bah, what a hassle, especially if you have to lug several kg’s of iron sand, magnetite and other junk home.
My aim is to have something compact - you can carry it on your back, under 5kg, ideally 1kg-2kg max.

Researched Gold Cubes, Trommels, Magic Wheels, high bankers, mini sluices, spiral sluices, and different kinds of matting.

Trommel appealed to me the most, but that was only a sorter for a sluice.
And I thought; what happens if you are in a dry area (up a mountain side, away from water), or the water is frozen? Well, how about having a closed system.
It must be very simple. Non mechanical (silent) and able to be used at fossicking areas YAY.

But, if I was going to use it, there is NO way I want to mess around cleaning the thing then reprocessing concentrates. All in one go baby (at least to a reasonable level).
That is a little problem, it needs to be Stainless Steel to survive the larger rocks (only about 8cm).
Also needs to be easy to disassemble for cleaning and if some parts need replacing.
The only matting is a very small amount, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be cleaned often.

And perhaps able to take a small solar powered motor perhaps. But that is secondary.
The design is quite complex, but very simple to use and even pretty easy and cheap to construct.

It sorts out the material into sizes, which can be a pain if you have a 0.5g or larger nugget. But that just means raking through those stones/pebbles really.

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sounds like a nice plan chief! will be keen to see how it works :slight_smile:
I do have to say though… in a lot of things in life… things that are designed for a single/specific purpose seem to work better. where as the jack of all does everything OK the specific purpose things will do that task a lot better .

just a thought. keen to see the results! getting the gold ich pretty badly right now myself!

Well it can’t handle rocks larger than 8cm, so it is more for smaller gravelly stuff.
If an 8cm rock went in covered in gold containing mud, there are some issues with washing that off before it spits it out - currently the rocks it accepts for “sorting” are 2cm max. And there are going to be issues with some long or angled thin rocks, if anyone has an idea of how I can stop them from clogging up the initial screen that would be great? Perhaps two screens 1cm apart and slightly offset or different shaped netting holes?
It’d probably get clogged with roots/grass etc too.
I still haven’t worked out cleaning the thing easily, so it has some drawbacks that’s for sure.