Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Snail is born. My first mini sluice.

Back to the story now. We are fast forwarding a bit. After Mohican I went and prospected Nimeshillen creek. Found nothing but I still had a good time gathering intel on that spot. It was at this time that my lack of equipment finally came to a head. I just said to myself nope can't do it anymore. I went to the local Walmart and bought a pair of knee high rubber boots. I think they were about 25 bucks. Now that the wet feet problem was solved we turned our attention to the equipment. At my shop I have access to all kinds of different doo dads and what nots. I gathered up all the empty 5 gallon buckets I could find. I kept four nice round ones and two square ones. I then took a not so nice round bucket and cut the top part off. I pushed in some 1/8 inch scrap screen I had laying around. Pop riveted it all the way around added handles and eureka we had a classifier that fits in a bucket. I had a way to get at the material. I had a way to classify the material. Now I needed a way to run the material. With a family, two dogs, a mortgage and a car payment dropping money on a sluice was out of the question. I could build one like my engineer buddy that works with me. The problem is that I am impatient at times and I wanted something right then. This is the part where my engineer buddy saves the day. He had the idea to get a flexible downspout extender. They are like an accordion you just pull it apart and the next thing you know you have a whole bunch deep V's. I bought one at Lowes for like 8 bucks. We went back to the shop and proceeded to cut the top off. You can see the end results in the video. Needless to say I was excited and pleased. I saw great potential. When I got home that night I was trying to tell the wife about it all. She was not as excited as I was. Go figure.

Friday, August 24, 2012

More gold stuff

gold from Ohio
gold from Ohio
Here is a couple more pictures I had of my Ohio gold in the vial.

New gold spot!

Thanks to Google earth and a nicely timed family gathering I was able to find another spot to prospect. It is not a close spot however. It's a good forty minutes away from where I live. As luck would have it the family gathering we had to attend was close. You can guess what happens next. We cut out early so I could prospect. What can I say? I have a great wife. I had read that there was higher concentrations of Ohio gold in the Knox county area and the river I was on is close to there. Google earth is a great tool for prospecting. I had used it to look for road access to rivers and creeks the week before. I found this spot and one other over in Canton. That one I had not prospected yet but I had plans to in the near future. I started recording and got to work. It was a typical cold Ohio spring day. I did my best to try and stay mostly dry. I needed to make some serious upgrades to my equipment. A fact that was getting more obvious every time I went looking for gold. I needed to get with my engineer buddy at my shop and do something about my stuff. During that time the PaystreakTV channel was starting to get some views and people were liking what I was doing so I was pretty stoked. The bottom line was, whether its big nuggets or small flakes people love gold. Finding flakes that day in a new spot validated what I was doing in my mind. It was a very exciting time for me.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

gold from Ohio
I am interrupting the PaystreakTV video blogging so I can post this picture. What you see there is my gold after four months of work. 42 episodes of of PaystreakTV laying in the pan. I know it looks like a lot but the flakes are really small. I could fit it all on half a dime. Sorry for the poor quality as this was a cell phone pic. The episodes that I found all of this in will be up here eventually. Ohio gold baby!

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Learning to prospect

So by this time I had figured out that the spaghetti strainer was not fast enough for me. I was an equipment challenged newbie prospector youtuber in Ohio. Needless to say I had some hurdles to jump. I have a friend who is also a wannabe prospector like myself. Luckily for me he has some equipment. I borrowed his half inch classifier and I brought my big shovel to help me as I tried to dig a five gallon bucket. I had every intention of doing a whole bucket in the episode I was recording that day. But in reality....classifying material is hard and it takes a long time. So we learned stuff that day. It was still early spring and evening sets in pretty quick. I did what I could and had some success. I got another pretty good episode out of it as well. That evening when I was in the editing room I took some time to think. I came to realize that not only did I need more equipment. I still only had one gold spot. I decided that I would look around my shop for stuff I could turn into prospecting equipment and try to Google earth for new spots on my lunch break at work. Once both of those problems were solved all I had to do is figure out where to fit prospecting and show making into my already busy life. I did find that prospecting show making time fits nicely into lawn mowing time. My grass got long as the result. Oh well. Sacrifices had to be made.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Gold fever!

Gold fever had hit epidemic proportions at my house. Much to my wife's dismay. I finally had enough flakes in my vial that you could see them and I have to admit,I stared at them for long periods of time. I had been winging it so to speak as far as my prospecting goes. My results have been good however which was kind of puzzling to me. I did most of my research online and the people finding Ohio gold were all moving a lot more material than I was for just a little more gold than I was getting just panning. Could I actually be lucky enough to live in an area where there is a higher concentration of gold. I had many questions on my mind as I drove to my only prospecting spot.I did another episode of PaystreakTV at the park. I loved the fact that I could find gold so close to home. I hated the fact that I was rooting around in the duck pond water to get it. To me that's just foul. Pun intended. Another problem in this particular creek was all the broken glass. I struggled to comprehend why in a park with a trash can every 30 yards there was so much crap in the creek. I gave a hoot and made it a goal to take anything that didn't belong with me. The duck water thing still bothered me though. I found a few more flakes and the show turned out good. After I was done in the editing room that night I started up my Google earth. I needed to find some more spots.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Lunch break prospecting

It is amazing to me how even a little piece of gold can infect you with the fever. When you get to the point where you are prospecting during lunch breaks you have it pretty bad. I had things to do that day after work and it was still early spring so it still got dark rather quickly. Bottom line. I was not going to be able to get out that evening. It just so happens that I work at a place where salary people like myself get an hour for lunch so I decided what the heck I will prospect the creek that runs behind my shop. I had wanted to prospect that creek for some time so this was my chance. It was cold and windy but that did not matter to me as I was on a mission. I was creating content for the PaystreakTV channel and at the same time satisfying my curiosity about the creek. I did as many pans as I could but we ended up with a big goose egg that day. Nothing. This was probably a good thing though. If I had found color in that spot I would not have been able to concentrate at work. I noticed that my hands were getting sore from large full pans I was working. I just stopped filling the pan all the way to make them a bit lighter but that problem needed to be solved. It is what it is. The fact of the matter is that Ohio gold is hard to find but I am hooked on prospecting and up for the challenge. My first episode of PaystreakTV was up on Youtube and now I had a second one to put up. Freakin awesome.

Friday, August 17, 2012

PaystreakTV is born!

So here begins my odd but fun story. A couple of years back I learned that you could find gold in Ohio in small amounts anywhere water flows. Most of it is in the northern and western part of the state where the glaciers pushed through like a zillion years ago. This gold has been ground up into pieces so small they are hard to see. Anyhow to make a long story short I found one of those itty bitty pieces. Gold fever starts to set in. I buy a gold pan at the local prospecting store. Yes there is a local prospecting store here go figure. I start learning how to pan by watching You tube videos but then life gets in the way. I put my hobby on the back burner for a long time. Fast forward to march 2012. My new hobby is my You tube channel. I started with a show I called stooonyvision where I filmed myself fixing things at my shop. After a few weeks of low views and no comments. I realized that nobody wants to watch me fixing stuff in a boring shop. I took a bit of time to think. And then I remembered my prospecting hobby on the back burner. On a cool April Sunday PaystreakTV was born. The name just came to me right then as I was filming so that was awesome. I hit a local park with a stream and start looking for a good place to dig all the while filming and talking. I know I looked like a crazy man running amok in the creek so it was a good thing the park was almost empty. That being said I was having the time of my life. I was comfortable on the camera and having a lot of fun creating content. I decided that the show was not going to be a "how to" prospect for gold mainly because I still really didn't know what the heck I was doing yet. It was going to be a "how I" prospect for gold show while using my gift of gab to try to keep it interesting. That day I found my second Ohio flake. The gold fever took over from there.