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.