The material that is washed or sorted away is called tailings. The cylinder has many holes in it to allow undersized material (including gold) to fall into a sluice box. On large gold dredges, the buckets dump the material into a steel rotating cylinder (a specific type of trommel called "the screen") that is sloped downward toward a rubber belt (the stacker) that carries away oversize material (rocks) and dumps the rocks behind the dredge. The material is then sorted/sifted using water. Small suction machines are currently marketed as "gold dredges" to individuals seeking gold: just offshore from the beach of Nome, Alaska, for instance.Ī large gold dredge uses a mechanical method to excavate material (sand, gravel, dirt, etc.) using steel "buckets" on a circular, continuous "bucketline" at the front end of the dredge. The original gold dredges were large, multi-story machines built in the first half of the 1900s. ![]() Gold Dredge, Klondike River, Canada, 1915 The Yankee Fork dredge near Bonanza City, Idaho, which operated into the 1950s.Ī gold dredge is a placer mining machine that extracts gold from sand, gravel, and dirt using water and mechanical methods. For the historic landmark in the United States, see Gold Dredge.
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