Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Gold rush Alaska do or die episode review

  You will have to excuse my tardiness on the reviews. I had a lot of gold shows to watch on my DVR. So I think we will start off with the "Gold rush Alaska" do or die episode. They showed some of the off season action as all of the miners get ready for season 3. Back this year are the Hoffman crew, Young Parker Schnable, Dakota Fred and his son Dustin.

  The drama at the Hoffmans operation this year involves Dave Turin going to mine a second hoffman claim his way for a change. He's going with a shaker wash plant with big sluice boxes. Todd has been sold on an untested turbo trommel  with a wee small 18 inch sluice. Dave was against it. I agree with Dave on that one. Kind of a no brainer. To mine the two claims this year there is some new people starting for the Hoffman crew. Some family members. Some gear heads and electrical guys. We will talk more about the new guys later on after we know more about them.

   Parker worked the Big nugget mine through the winter. He has been digging the Smith creek area of his grandfathers claim to get close to pay dirt. His test pans are not looking spectacular however. I hope he gets it worked out.

   Finally the Dakota boys Fred and Dustin Hurt. They all most did not do the show this year. Fred did not like being portrayed as the evil claim jumper last season. In Fred's defense I have to say he is just doing business. That's all.  If the Hoffmans were doing their business correctly they would have paid their lease on time and they would not have lost Porcupine creek. Fred saw an opportunity and he jumped on it. I bet most of us would do the same if we were in his shoes.

   Ok so that's the warm up. Check back, follow or subscribe because I will have my take on the first episode of "Gold rush Alaska season 3" posted soon. I will also be reviewing the new show "Jungle gold" as well. That one is crazy.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Testing my shop built mini sluice. Finding gold

Fall is starting to put a damper on my prospecting escapades. I can no longer get on the river after work as the sun is setting to early. At least I still have my weekends to prospect for gold and make videos so I am thankful for that. In my last post I showed the mini sluice being built. It was time to test it. The weekend after the build we managed to get to the river. We had to leave half way through the day to go to a peewee football game but I made it back after. The mini sluice ran surprisingly well considering it was made of a bunch of scrap junk we had laying around the shop. By the end of the day we had a bunch of small flakes and a very pleased prospector. Enjoy the video!

 Special thanks to http://www.soundjay.com/ for the royalty free music!
Just a quick reminder. Gold rush Alaska and Jungle gold are starting new seasons this Friday. The jungle gold show looks interesting. They say someone hits the mother load this season in Alaska. I hope it's young Parker. Anyways I will post my reviews, commentaries and tallies shortly after I get a chance to watch. I am getting excited!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

I built a mini sluice. Hope to find more gold.

The PaystreakTV blog is just full of interruptions now a days but this is a gold blog and we built a mini sluice so I had to post this by default. In my first few posts in the blog I was declaring my self an equipment challenged prospector. I also mentioned that I am the maintenance man at a small cnc shop. That being said machine shops and metal kind of go hand in hand. I had managed to gather up a nice pile of junk aluminium scrap sheets and whatnot for the sole purpose of building some kind of mini sluice. I have access to a small press brake so we used that to do all the bending. The rest fastened together with pop rivets and wing nuts. We lucked into some donated miners moss from my engineer buddy Joshua. He also helped me with the build as we had limited time. It was very much appreciated let me tell you. We worked through our break and lunch hour then a bit of time after hours but we got it done. Eventually I will try to draw up and post some basic schematics of the "frankensluice" (yes I named it allready.) Is that weird? Until then enjoy the video of the build. If you watch closely you can see what we did. Enjoy! Comments and thoughts are welcome.


 Special thanks to http://www.soundjay.com/ for the royalty free music!

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Prospecting gold and a string of bad luck

Picking up where we left off is getting difficult so I will improvise. Everything was going well. The PaystreakTV channel on Youtube was starting to grow. I was prospecting almost everyday and recording a show every time. I had even talked my wife into a family prospecting vacation at the end of June down in North Carolina. We had reserved a cabin at the Luckystrike gold and gem mine. Needless to say I was extremely excited. I had decided that the week down south would be my week long PaystreakTV season one finale. When June finally arrived it was almost like a switch got flipped. Everything that was good suddenly went bad. We will call it the "miners curse" and it landed right on my head. June first. I lost my ad server. I had been running Adsense on my Youtube channel to monetize my show. My plan was to try and use the revenue generated by my ad clicks to help pay for my gold prospecting and show making hobbies. It seemed like a good idea at the time. When I say I lost my ad server what I mean is the Google algorithms aka bots flagged my account as fishy and it got flushed. You have one chance to appeal and if you screw it up your done forever. At PaystreakTV we have raised the bar on screwing up. That being said we ended up squandering our one and only appeal in record time. Anything worth doing is worth doing fast. The following week was not much better. If you watch my series on Youtube you have seen my gold guarding dogs. I have two sixty pound mongrels running amok at my house. Great fun. To make the long story short I have bad knees. The dogs dislocated one of them as they ran through my legs to get outside. It swelled to the size of a small pumpkin and it felt worse than it looked. This was just weeks before our vacation so everything was in jeopardy. I was pretty bummed out by this time. I made a video to show my knee and let everyone know I was going to be down a bit. I limped around the house for the next few weeks using a cane trying to work the fluid out from around my knee cap. I had to wear a brace to keep everything straight. When most of the pain was gone we decided to go out for one last dig in season one. I had been going stir crazy sitting at home for the last few weeks and we needed to test the knee out anyhow.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Prospecting with Ed part 2 gold

Here is part two of this PaystreakTV episode featuring Ed from the Prospecting with Ed channel. More blogging coming soon so don't forget to subscribe.

Prospecting with Ed. Better than gold!

One of the highlights of my prospecting season on PaystreakTV was prospecting with Ed. Ed Marvin is a prospector on the western side of the state and he has a Youtube channel called Prospecting with Ed. Here is the link if you want to pay him a visit.  http://www.youtube.com/user/tdz61/featured  Anyways back to the story. When I first started these gold mining shenanigans I watched hundreds of videos on Youtube and alot of them were from Eds' channel. I learned a lot of useful tips and tricks and being the noob I was I needed all the help I could get. Ed and I were talking through our Youtube channels a bit here and there. He was a nice fellow as most prospectors are. Out of the blue one day I get an email from Ed inviting me to come down to the Swank claim as his guest the upcoming weekend. If you prospect in Ohio I imagine you have heard of the Swank claim. If you are not from here i'll fill you in. The swank claim is a GPAA (gold prospectors association of america) leased claim located in Butler Ohio. If you are a member of the GPAA you can camp and prospect the claim for free. These next two videos are from that adventure. I had a great time. Enjoy! Comments are welcome. Tell us about your gold stuff.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

New gold spot recent gold pics

gold spot bridge
flowers in gravel
Ohio gold
more Ohio gold
pan of gold
Here are some pictures that I had on my camera from the last few times I went prospecting. I have to say that summer is definitely on its way out. To soon in my book but you will have that. I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty that PaystreakTV will be out looking for gold until the winter freeze makes us stop. Comments are welcome below. Thanks for the visit. :)

Monday, October 1, 2012

I met a fellow gold prospector. We watched a canoe tip lol.

We are skipping ahead a bit with the PaystreakTV story. If you want to see the videos in between my skips you can watch them on the PaystreakTV Youtube channel or at my BlipTV. Back to the posted video. This was a fun day and I will tell you why. During the week before I was prospecting my first good gold spot there on the Tuscarawas river I kept noticing holes. Now prospectors know what prospecting holes look like. That was what I was seeing. I had been there for about a week and had not seen a soul. I figured that maybe they were old holes and went on about my business. As luck would have it on the weekend I recorded this I stumbled upon my first Ohio prospector. Prospector Gary is what we call him on the show now a days. He is an older gentleman. A scrapper, handyman and a prospector rolled into one. He's one heck of a nice fella and pretty soon we were talking like old friends. I was amazed that I had actually ran into another crazy Ohio gold hunter in my neck of the woods. At the same time I was thrilled to have some like minded company on the river. It was also a nice change to the show. Having a guest breaks up the monotony. So I met a new friend. While prospecting with said new friend we finally got a canoe tip on video for the show. I had been trying to get one all week. To top it all off I got some gold. It was a fun day. Enjoy!