Gold Rat Metal Detectors is located 6/50 Freda Street Upper Mount Gravatt. This is the only store to stock Metal Detectors. Gold Rat Engineering is located 4/16 Redcliffe Gardens Drive Clontarf This is where you will see the largest range of your highbankers, sluices and accessories

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Gold Mining with miners moss

Gold Mining with miners moss

Miners Moss is by far one of the hobby gold mining prospectors best friends when it comes to gold capture. Without miners moss the clean out and shutdown periods shorten as sedimentary issues arise.

What's so good about Miners Moss?

Miners moss is your "active layer" underneath your riffles which create a slow slurry area for mineral transfer. The use of miners moss is widely accepted as the best material to trap gold when using riffles or expanded mesh. In order for effective mineral separation to occur we need to create the right environment for heavies to settle and the lighter materials to move through our capture system or sluice box. By using riffles to create eddies or vortexes we create an environment that pushes new material into the miners moss whilst also removing light sediments.

Miners moss will not work perfectly by itself without being dialed in with the correct angle of your sluice box and the correct water flow to back it up. Too slow water flow means you will have build up of light material which will compact and all your gold will flow straight out too much and your gold will likely bound right out as well. Running your sluice box too level will also cause buildup, the trick it to try to measure your results by varying feed rates, angles and pitch.

Miners moss backing

Because miners moss is designed to allow light material to move through and out of our sluice box or highbanker we need to create an additional removable capture layer to hold the very tiny light gold that will settle on the bottom.

We do this by adding a layer of V ribbed matting or using backed moss which is our preferred product for more on this follow the link.

Here is some gold I got yesterday in Creswick using the gold rat for a few hours just under a gram.

Australian Gold Price on the up and up

Hi Guys just been watching the gold price creep up here for the past month or so and noticed were nearly $50 a gram again, what a wonderful thing :)

Fingers crossed the demand will continue to grow and us prospectors will have a little more reward for our hard work, not that we do it for the money. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on why the gold price has shot up recently?

Gold Rat Testing Flood Line

I took my new Gold Rat V1.0 Highbanker out yesterday for a run in an old diverted creek on the south side of Ballarat, there was some really good colours in the flood line. I made a demo video to show you how the height of the hopper can be changed depending on the type of material (pay dirt) your running at the time.

If I'm in really soft washed flood material most often I will run a very steep angle because I don't want all the material to run through the box, I just want to wash the gold off it and into the sluice. However if I am running really muddy material then I'll lower the hopper as much as possible to slow down the fall off action and put as much pressure on the clay as i can, you will find that most often once a rock is clean it will move toward the rear of the hopper.


I didn't get a lot of colours but I wanted to show you how fine the gold is that this unit will catch, on the left the pan is about how much concentrate you'll get out of each clean out if you've run for long enough, pan on the right was the tally for the Hour run came home with some really fine gold.



Research is Key ballarat Leads - Gold Mining

I Came across this publication whilst researching Ballarat leads on the Sebastopol side its such a great read if your a Ballarat local it gives away a lot of information to the success of certain leads. Its not enough to simply research the leads and where they intersect a river or waterway you need to find out what type of gold was produced, what if any host rock it was in, its profitability when mined etc. This willl increase your chance of success in Highbanking considerably.

Below you will see a map of Sebastapol where Lord Raglan lead crosses the Yarrowee river, after reading the exerts from The golden chain I now know that this lead was difficult to work and produced very little gold. I have seen the gold in this area and it is fine indeed, or as we call it in the prospecting game flies poo :)

The Golden Chain
A History of Sebastopol (Victoria, Australia)
with special reference to gold and mining

Evan D Jenkins & Arthur J Jenkins