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How I Built a 6 Inch Highbanker (Backpackable) - With Cyle Haddon

By: Dan Hodgins

Building an ultralight backpackable highbanker is a challenging process that is fun and rewarding.

The following is a transcript of a conversation I had with Crux Prospecting founder Cyle Haddon who is the inventor of the Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker, the best 6 inch highbank on the market today.

Before launching the Gold Trek product Cyle had done some DIY highbanker builds with varying success. But they all guided him to where the Gold Trek is at today.

Read on to discover some of the challenges, highs, lows and learnings that Cyle had in the process of prototyping, and then inventing the world's best 6 inch highbanker.

My 6 Inch Highbanker Build (DIY) - With Cyle Haddon

Dan:

Okay, so take me back to the moment when you decided that you wanted to build, as opposed to buy a 6 inch highbanker. What inspired you to start the project?

Cyle:

I distinctly remember the moment when I was hiking out of a really steep canyon and I had a 40 pound highbanker on my shoulder. And my buddies at the time were carrying all my other crap.

One had my backpack, the other guy had my hoses, and we had been shoveling all day, and we were just slogging it out of this creek canyon.

And this was after having hiked all of the equipment in there, and having a pretty unproductive day in terms of gold. I knew there was a lot of potential on that creek. And so, at that moment, I decided that I needed to build something better, or find something better.

I then spent some time researching trying to find something that I thought would suit my needs for a small, backpackable 6 inch highbanker and nothing really existed. And so I decided to build my own, and that is where my DIY highbanker adventure started.

Dan:

Amazing. So let's talk about the first highbanker prototype you made. What did you do to mock up your first prototype? Did you make drawings on paper, or did you model it out in CAD? Or did you have it all in your head?

Cyle:

I generally work from my head when I have a concept in mind. For this one, I did end up doing a sketch because I got a local highbanker manufacturer to actually help me build it. I didn't have a metal brake for bending the aluminum pieces of the highbanker. I didn't have any of the tools required really to make the thing I wanted to make. So, instead, I overpaid for a guy to do that for me (laughter).

I also bought a sluice leg kit that my original system sat on top of. It was an off-the-shelf solution, and really, that was just me trying to make it work. It ended up being very expensive. That first aluminum prototype highbanker probably cost me over 1,000 bucks. It functioned very well. But I learned a lot from it.

So that was how the project got started. But once I start a project, I go all-in, and if it's gonna cost money to get it done right then I'm gonna spend the money to do it right.

Dan:

So I have seen, and used, your first 6 inch, backpackable highbanker prototype made from aluminum. It's ultra light, and it can fit in a five gallon bucket pretty easily. Amazing machine really, and that was what sparked you on your quest to design the current machine you're making.

But let's go back to that first prototype again. What were some of the specific design decisions you made in terms of the highbanker hopper, spray bars, grizzly screen, crash box, sluice box, matting, legs and pump?

Cyle:

For that first prototype you actually just mentioned one of those features. I was very rigid in my original design where I needed it to fit in a five gallon bucket.

For me that was the maximum constraint for size. When it all collapsed down I wanted it in that 5 gallon bucket. And in my mind a prospector lives inside a five gallon bucket (laughter).

Everything goes in 5 gallon buckets, you're carrying them down, they're cheap and cheerful you can get them anywhere. And so if you can fit inside that constraint, then you really get an advantage for highbanker packability because you know it will fit in a five gallon bucket. So that was one constraint.

The other constraint is the sluice couldn't be any wider than six inches. I wanted to make or buy a highbanker that was 6 inches, as opposed to something wider like 8, 10 or 12 inches.

And the third thing is I wanted it to be able to be broken down into two half pieces. I wanted the full 36 inch sluice length and at that time, the sluice box matting I was operating had a drop riffle design that was really nice. I enjoyed it.

And I thought it worked really well. It was also very expensive, by the way, and I basically built my highbanker to fit that exact drop riffle mat so the whole thing would go inside a five gallon pail.

I had to kind of compromise on a few things to make that function but it did work pretty well. But obviously things have evolved considerably since that early prototype.

Dan:

Yeah, the first time I saw that that first unit, the aluminum six inch backpack highbanker, was in a gold prospecting forum that used to exist and I remember looking at it and thinking that was the best small backpack highbanker design I had ever seen.

And when you throw that drop riffle sluice matting in there and use it on that fine Fraser River flour gold in BC, Canada, the gold capture rate performance was was very, very good. And still, to this day, that first prototype is a beautiful little machine, and it's going to become a museum piece now with your current iteration (laughter).

Cyle:

It is a productive machine. And I think that's one thing that I've wanted to make sure to maintain through the whole project is that productivity and that efficiency, and I think I've succeeded there.

Dan:

Okay, so take us back to the first prototype of your DIY, aluminum, 6 inch, backpack highbanker with the drop riffle rubber matting. Tell us about the first couple of times you took it out into the field for a proper test. How did it perform? Did it did it work as well as you thought it would in terms of gold capture and gold loss rates?

Cyle:

Did it work as well as I thought it would? Yes, it did. The first time I had it out to a location that I mentioned earlier, that canyon, was fantastic, and I hiked it in there with 1/3 of the energy it took me to hike down with the other much heavier equipment, my old highbanker that's still gathering dust in my garage by the way. (Laughter)

I ran my old DIY 6 inch highbanker prototype for a few days on a trip. We were there for I think three days during that first trip and I ran it for 2 of those 3 days. And I would run 1/4 yard of gravel at a time, and even with the smaller 6 inch highbanker I was moving more material than probably all the guys that were with me during that same trip who were using much bigger and heavier highbankers (e.g. 8 inch or 10 inch highbankers).

So it was me with my highbanker versus three guys panning and I moved more material than all of them combined. Which was pretty cool. And a lot of fun.

Dan:

It's interesting that you were able to move that much material able with a small 6 inch highbanker. In that case you didn't need an 8 inch, 10 inch or 12 inch highbanker. The dimensions of your current machine, the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek highbanker, are 6 inches wide and 36 inches long, correct?

Cyle:

Yes, that one's 36 inches long. And I mean honestly the water was probably running a little too fast as I had too much water pressure and too steep of an angle on the sluice box.

Luckily, that gold in that area was very coarse. So I didn't really need to worry about thin, flat flakes fluttering away. I could have slowed down the water flow in the hopper as well as the feed rate it down and been just as productive.

Dan:

You mentioned that since your first prototype of a 6 inch backpack highbanker that things have changed quite a bit. What is different about your new machine, the Crux Prospecting 6 Inch Gold Trek Highbanker?

Cyle:

Well, the new highbanker version, the Crux Gold Trek, doesn't fit in a five gallon bucket, which is unfortunate, but that design change was actually pretty important for the productivity and strength of the system.

The original design had a detachable frame that the legs would insert into, and the highbanker effectively sat on top of that frame and I wanted to integrate that into my system. But in doing so, trying to keep inside the five gallon bucket with the six inch run, I couldn't do it without having the legs be unstable.

I wanted a flared angle on the legs to provide a lot more stability when you're running the highbanker. The hopper and sluice box and less likely to tip over, and I felt that was way more important than trying to fit it inside an arbitrary constraint such as fitting into a 5 gallon bucket.

Dan:

Do you have any specific advice for people interested in building a DIY 6 inch highbanker for backpacking in terms of the hopper or header box,the grizzly screen, the sluice box, matting, leg kit or hose fittings?

Cyle:

Yeah, for a newbie building a highbanker I definitely would encourage using aluminum. There are sheet steel options out there for these and the steel is quite a bit heavier and you don't get really any return for that. So that's the first thing -- stick with aluminum.

in terms of spray bars and the hopper, the classic drilled PVC pipe distribution system worked fine for me. I liked to have the whole hopper open so you can sweep material off with your hands without any hindrance. This enables you to wash bigger rocks and process bigger material.

And really, the key to building any system is making it stable, making sure you have enough water. In terms of weight you can shave off pounds by using plastic fittings such as 1 inch poly cam lock fittings (barbed or threaded) instead of metal. That's what we're going for with the new Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker.

There's a lot of things you can do to make your DIY highbanker build inexpensive and really user friendly. A lot of guys kind of try to find someone that can weld, but rivets work just fine. My first system had a riveted hopper and sluice box. A rivet tool only costs a few dollars and will get the job done.

Dan:

Tell us about the moment when you decided to start on your newest design, the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker. Walk us through your thought process. Did you see any other machines that inspired you? Or, based on your previous DIY highbanker prototype, did you know exactly what you wanted to make?

Cyle:

At the time when I made the first DIY highbanker prototype I did not have any aspirations to build highbankers for commercial purposes. My original thought was that there's nothing out there for a guy like me who wants something really lightweight and compact that can still move a lot of material.

I want to be able to hike in without draining my energy reserves or needing the help of a team of expedition porters to hike my gear in for me. So I set out to make a design myself, and then I got a lot of positive feedback after posting photos of the finished DIY highbanker build on a gold prospecting forum that no longer exists.

That's when I started to realize that there may be some opportunities in the portable backpack highbanker space. There's a fragmented market, kind of a boutique market where you've got lots of guys in their garages or in their shops, building high bankers, bending metal by hand, and I didn't really want to do that.

As I mentioned previously I have worked in the plastic injection molding industry for many years. So I have a lot of industry contacts. I have a lot of design experience. I have familiarity with specialized markets and manufacturing methods that I think most of these guys that I would technically be competing with don't.

So, that gave me a big advantage to do a highbanker design that would require professional molding. Since the original design of the aluminum prototype DIY highanker, I've gone through at least 20 iterations to get to where I am now with the heavy duty plastic design. So there wasn't a single moment where I realized wanted to do this.

The idea of evolved as it went on, and most of the changes to the design came about because I wanted to simplify the manufacturing process as much as possible. I wanted the manufacturing to be scalable, I wanted it to be high quality. And basically every design change that I made was eliminating metal parts, eliminating the need for third party components, anything like that. Just eliminating complications.

One of the biggest changes in making the Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker model was removing the PVC water line (spray bars) from the hopper and integrating that into the system entirely. In other words - building the spray bars directly into the hopper itself rather than having them as a component external to the hopper in the form of PVC pipes.

The project took on a life of its own, and really grew over the course of the 2 years that I've been working on it to become what it is now.

Dan: So let's talk about the new machine. The Crux Prospecting Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker model is the best backpack highbanker I've seen on the market. I have told you many times it looks like it was built by Tesla or Apple or something, and it looks different than everything else that's out there.

It's lightweight. It's super strong. And you can really move some material through it.

Let's take a moment to just talk about all the features that make the machine unique all the way from the materials to the manufacturing process to the actual usage of it.

Cyle:

When we started this highbanker project, I knew what material I wanted to make it from. What really helped is my day job in plastic injection molding. The company I work with produces handheld containers for the agriculture industry. Their business model is to eliminate single use container packaging, and build things that are super strong, super high quality and get them into the hands of farmers and growers.

These are containers they can use for many years before they need to change them out and get new ones when inevitably they wear out, or they overuse them. They send them back to us. The company I work for has a very strong recycling program. And part of that program is recovery and recycling of this composite nylon that I've chosen for the Gold Trek highbanker system.

Composite nylon is a very well-known and widely used material that is very strong, very durable. Most people know what Nylon is, you know, Teflon, and the competent filler in it makes it very rigid, very wear resistant and I thought that material would be perfect for the Gold Trek mini highbanker system.

For my day job we use 100% recycleable agricultural containers. So those products were kind of the start when we decided we were going to make injection molds to build highbankers from. As the project grew and evolved to be what it is now, we had a set amount of constraints that we wanted to stay within for the product.

One of those was having the capability to break down the unit in half for transport (not literally break it). The highbanker would also have to be super strong and versatile by having the leg kit being interchangeable and usable on other highbankers.

Our sluice box leg kit is compatible if somebody wants to bend up their own DIY highbanker and they don't know how to make a DIY highbanker leg kit. We make and sell the leg kits as well.

So if we're talking about features of the system itself, it's a long list. I wanted to make our flagship mini backpack highbanker system out of recycled material as that is important to me. It's relevant to my company and everything that I do with my day job as well.

And with the actual system itself and the features, I have incorporated everything I ever wanted into a dream mini highbanker system that is lightweight, portable, compact, and strong.

I built this system to be the perfect highbanker for my purposes and for people like me, so that's that's what I've set out to do. And I think we've come very close if we haven't succeeded completely.

Dan:

For people that haven't heard of the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek 6 Inch Highbanker yet - give us the Coles Notes for what it is.

Cyle:

Basically, it's a collapsible backpack highbanker. It replaces the need for a big, heavy metal highbanker that you need to haul in by hand. Our system shrinks everything down to a form that's easier to manage and to physically carry and handle. It's quieter. It's got interchangeable grizzly screens (grizzly bars) so you can change the size depending on the material.

Everything is adjustable. This highbanker is able to cover pretty much any type of ground that you want to work. You can run cobbles, big rocks and anything that fits in the hopper can run really well. And it eliminates the need for any of these larger, heavier highbankers (e.g. 8 inch, 10 inch, 12 inch).

Something that a lot of people overlook, especially early on when they're prospecting, is the idea that you need to have a large highbanker. In other words - the bigger the machine, the more gold you're gonna get. And that is not the case at all for hand mining using shovels and pick axes.

The amount of material you move definitely can equate to more gold, but bringing a bigger machine does not make you physically faster, does not make your shovel bigger or help you dig any faster. It just means you're carrying out a big piece of equipment.

If the ground you're on is difficult to dig, no highbanker will help you dig faster. Compacted cobbles and gravels are hard to break apart, and anytime you need to use a breaker bar or pickaxe slows you down a lot compared to shovelling straight into the hopper without having to chisel out material from a hole or bank.

I find the bottleneck for a lot of people including me is how fast I can physically dig rather than highbanker size. I cannot 'out dig' the Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker.

I definitely encourage anyone that's looking to get away from heavily worked placer gold ground to get out in nature, away from roads, and go do some prospecting in remote areas. The Gold Trek is a great highbanker for that.

Dan:

I'm going to explain the Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker in my words now, because as an outsider who has personally used the product, I have a different perspective than you.

So the Crux Prospecting 6 inch Gold Trek highbanker is an ultra light backpack highbanker. it's an integrated system that is entirely driven by wanting a machine that's extremely lightweight, strong and efficient.

All you need is a one inch gas pump or a bilge pump to run this thing. I would probably recommend using the 1 inch gas pump. Honda has a WX 10 model which is an excellent choice. There's other brands out there but that's one that I personally have.

Cyle:

I also recommend using 1 inch poly cam lock fittings (barbed) with ultra lightweight forestry hose which is white in color. Normally a lot of a lot of people will use the blue 1 inch PVC lay flat hose. We all know it, we all love it or hate it.

It can leak, it's heavy, and it breaks down over time. So the hose that I would recommend for highbankers is white 1 inch forestry hose made from braided polymer.

It's very abrasion resistant. This hose is basically a thinner, lighter version of what you would see a firefighter using, so it's a thinner, ultralight forestry hose for the Gold Trek highbanker. It's about half the weight of the firefighter hose which was probably about a third of the weight of PVC lay flat hose, blue or red. I will never go back to using regular PVC lay flat hose for my 1 inch highbanker as the forestry hose is so much better.

Also, in terms of pumps, the 1 inch gas pumps are fantastic. If your hose is anything longer than 10 feet, you definitely want to have a gas pump. Under 10 feet of hose length you can use a bilge pump. If you're going that route I would recommend using a 2,000 gallon per hour (GPH) minimum and run it on a 12 volt battery (18 amp hour minimum).

At Crux Prospecting we will eventually be stocking pumps as well as the forestry hose mentioned here. We will have the plastic cam lock couplings and fittings available as well. And these will all be add-on options for the Gold Trek highbanker system and available as separate items if people are interested.

Dan:

Let's talk about some of the features of the Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker from the top down, starting with the header box.

Cyle:

What I've done is I've effectively made the hose attachment molded directly into the header box. It is equivalent size to a 1 inch PVC pipe so you can push-fit any type of 1 inch PVC fitting onto it as your hose attachment.

I want people to be able to use the equipment that they've got on hand without needing anything special without needing to do any kind of fancy DIY or anything like that. It just works.

In terms of the hopper (header box) I've eliminated the need for separate PVC spray bars because it's all molded in now. And the water line for the spray bars is built into the hopper itself. So water from the spray bars comes out of the side of the inside of the hopper, and sprays toward the middle.

You can tune this if you like and I'll have instructions on the website for how to do that. With no hoses or fittings going across the header box it's a very clean and open hopper. It's all smooth. Because it's molded there are no crevices or anything for any material to get underneath. It's very easy to rinse off in between runs. If you're doing a gold sampling program in two different areas you need to make sure that you don't have any cross contamination in the form of material stuck in the hopper.

At the bottom of the hopper there are 2 interchangeable grizzly screen options - a 3/8 inch and 1/2 inch grizzly bar screen that snap right in. You don't have to unscrew anything or undo any fasteners to insert or remove the grizzly screens.

You don't have to take the system apart or even turn it off if you want to change the screen size and just take it out to put the other one in. And with that it keeps everything nice and tidy and easy to change on the fly without needing to reconfigure and shut down and waste time.

You could literally change your grizzly screen with your pump still running to adjust on the fly to suit the material you are running. If you need a finer classification, no problem, just remove the 1/2 inch grizzly screen and insert the 3/8 inch screen.

Dan:

Just to restate what Cyle said - the spray bars are actually built into the hopper itself so you're not going to have 1 inch PVC piping visible around the top. The entire hopper itself including the coupling or the or the attachment for your house is all built into the hopper, and I have never seen that before in any type of highbanker.

Because the spray bars are built into the header box itself you're gonna get a very good quality wash of the material.

Cyle:

Yeah, and with the header box / hopper spray system specifically, I actually added about 10% more holes, and the reason for that goes back to me wanting people to be able to tune this how they want.

So if you cover up some of the holes with black electrical tape, you get more pressure out of the remaining ones. So you're still gonna get the same amount of water, but you get more pressure at each individual hole.

Sometimes if I'm on difficult material or if I want things to wash a little bit differently, I literally take electrical tape and you put it right over one of the holes to shut it off. I will take a roll of electrical tape with me out in the field, and this gives me the ability to tune my machine to my ground or material I'm running.

Most people know that not every machine is well-suited to every type of ground, and I wanted this highbanker to be as modifiable as possible to suit local conditions.

Dan:

So, the bottom surface of the header box has these "V" channel lines, you can call them drag lines, but they just look like the letter V all the way down to the grizzly screen. There is also a diverter below the grizzly screen to push all material to the center. What are the benefits of these things?

Cyle:

There are actually two purposes for that feature in the bottom of the hopper. So the first feature is a diverter to push the gold to the center of the sluice run and reduce possible losses. The second thing the diverter does is adds thickness to the actual bottom of the hopper. You've got to think the hopper box is a high wear zone, and we use a composite nylon it's a very strong material.

But even if you're using steel it will wear out, so over time, you're going to wear out that material, especially if you're using the system a lot. In adding the diverter I've added what's effectively a wear zone or a buffer to the bottom of the hopper.

The purpose of this is to get longevity out of the highbanker before the hopper needs to be replaced. Also, you want your gold to be located toward the center of the sluice box because if it gets pushed to the outside, you could potentially lose gold.

Due to the shape of the diverter any gold that gets trapped in the first I'd say six inches of the highbanker matting slowly gets pushed out toward the outer edges of the drop riffles. That's on purpose because it's your low flow area, and your fine gold will stay there.

I can personally attest to the fact that the coarse gold will hang up just on the edge of the fast water. And it's just it's simply not going to make it past the first or second section of the drop riffle mat there.

I will add we are very happy with the matting design. I'm looking forward to hearing people's feedback on the matting profile.

Dan:

So this is a ridiculously audacious project you've taken on to innovate the humble highbanker that since the invention of aluminum and PVC hasn't had a heck of a lot of innovation in decades.

And if you think about it, what would the design look like if Tesla was taking this on, how would they do it?

So let's just talk about the audaciousness of this. How many prototypes of the Gold Trek highbanker itself have you been through and how many prototypes of the matting?

Tell us about some of the highs and lows, and challenges you've faced going through all these different iterations.

Cyle:

It wasn't like I made a one-part prototype for version three of the highbanker design. It was more like I made a component. This whole system encompasses seven injection molds, which is a lot.

There are seven molds, and every mold makes a different component. A couple of the molds make two components. As an example there's one mold that makes the two the two lower sluice box pieces that snap together and that mold we actually remade, so for that one I'm on the second mold design for it already.

The design and manufacturing effort, and the financial outlay on this has been considerable. But in my mind, as I said earlier, I don't like to cut corners on a project. I don't want to cheap out and make compromises and sacrifice the integrity of the project.

For the sake of our prototyping process, I would say I physically ordered probably five sets of prototypes over the course of the year and a half or two years that we worked on the design for this.

I initially ordered a prototype for the two lower sluice pieces that snap together. And at that point, that was the project. The idea was to manually make the hopper by bending it out of aluminum. It was going to have PVC spray bars, it was going to have metal legs and be a more traditional highbanker. The difference being that the actual sluice box was going to be collapsible and would break down into two pieces, and it was going to be injection molded.

You can see now that the Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker is 100% plastic and we have no more bending of metal of any kind. The development process for this highbanker product was very iterative.

I did a lot of developing in just the 3D space. And I would come up with drawings, and throw out dozens of designs and and changes and I was very choosy about what I prototyped until it got to the end where I actually had to. Also, as I mentioned, we replaced the mold for the upper and lower sluice box sections.

Maybe audacious is the right word for this highbanker project because there is a severe lack of innovation in the recreational gold mining industry (placer and hard rock). There's a lot of new and interesting wash plants that are out on the market, but not a lot of them are scalable and and most of them are for commercial mining operations that are not accessible to 99.9% of guys who just want to go out and get a little bit of placer gold on the weekend.

Dan:

What were some of the highs and lows in terms of getting the injection molds done?

Cyle:

I would say the lowest point for the project was when I I had my first 'shot' done - basically, it's the first mold. If you're unfamiliar with the process, I do the 3D design for the actual product itself. When I feel I've got that to a point where we're ready to make a mold, I send that design to our mold maker, who then designs a tool to injection mold.

So the injection tool that goes to the molding factory, and that's where we produce the product. So before we approve the tools and send it to the factory for regular production, they will send us first 'shots' or test shots of that mold.

And so I got the test shot aka highbanker. I took it out to the field and it was a disappointment. The failure point was -- I underestimated the dynamic forces of shoveling into a box.

The problem was that the arm that locks the two sluice sections together, and holds the hopper up, that was not that was basically resting in notches at that stage. It had a tendency to want to pop out of that notch and there was a risk of it falling down during use which is obviously not acceptable for a professionally designed and manufactured product such as a highbanker. And that was the reason why we ended up throwing away that first mold.

Fast forward a while, and I've used the newest version of the Gold Trek in in the field a number of times and it it is bomb proof. Here's how we are using the newest version of the 6 inch Gold Trek backpack highbanker in the field.

We fill 5 gallon buckets half full, and rest them directly on the header box while pouring out, or hand raking, the material into the hopper. The machine is just rock solid. It's stable, and strong. Through a lot of field testing and feedback we have clearly identified and improved any of the failure points, to the point where the Gold Trek as strong as any high banker I've seen -- metal or otherwise.

With the changes I made, it added maybe a little bit of complexity to how it sets up and breaks down. But I felt that was a really good trade off for the strength of the system now. There's no worry about it coming apart during use.

I've literally stood on this highbanker on the ground, and it holds my weight easily without breaking.

Dan:

Now let's talk about some of your field tests for the newest version of the Gold Trek highbanker. Tell us about some of the high points when you had it out in the field and it was working well and catching gold.

Cyle:

I think the high point happened this year (2022). The mold maker reported to me that the product is complete to the design that I provided them, in this is version 27.0, I think, by the time we finished up, and they sent me the first shots (test pieces) of every component.

I got a set of 3D printed prototype pieces and I put the highbanker prototype together. I then went out to the nearest claim where I could run a highbanker which was the Similkameen River near Princeton, BC, Canada in the Okanagan region.

I was able to set up the Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker in three minutes. I ran a 1/4 yard of gravel in probably under 20 minutes. The placer claim I was digging on has the most fluttery fine flour gold and so much black sand.

It was probably the most difficult material that I have ever worked in terms of difficulty of gold capture. The Gold Trek highbanker worked absolutely perfectly. And in that moment, I thought: "This is it"!

I was very excited to get the latest manufacturing test run back from the factory in California, begin production, and get the highbanker in people's hands.

Dan:

Okay, so let's talk about the drop riffle highbanker mats. So at the Similkameen River in British Columbia, Canada the gold is all fine flour gold with heavy heavy black sand. Tell us about how the rubber drop riffle mats performed with that material.

Cyle:

I don't even know if I could describe the feeling I got when I saw how well the mats worked in terms of catching ultra fine gold. The way the mats perform in material like that exceeds what I expected that they would do.

And with so much black sand and fine flour gold one can barely even pan the gold in that area. Thankfully, our rubber drop riffle sluice box matting with damper flap managed to succeed in that spot.

Of course, there are inevitable losses, but that type of gold is so tiny that it would certainly never weigh anything or be measurable on a scale. With gold losses, people get sort of wound up and run a secondary or even a third sluice box extension. The reality is they would probably never even recover the cost of buying or making those extensions.

99% of the gold is caught, and remains in the sluice, by weight, when we do our math. So, when the highbanker performs that well in a flour gold and heavy black sand area, nearly everything else is easy in comparison.

In areas where the gold is chunky with not a lot of black sands you know pretty much everything is caught. So we're very confident in the matting design right now. I'm very happy. And I can't wait to get out and do more testing.

Dan:

Let's talk about the drop riffle mats a little bit more. Over the the whole length of the sluice box itself, the mats come in tile sections and they all snap together. There's a lip that fits right in where the sections meet. Can you describe the rubber drop riffle mats as well as the V matting in the bottom of the drops.

Cyle:

I would describe the mats as a drop riffle style. They have very sharp drop off with a curvature on the downstream side of the drop that causes a forced vortex so the water flowing down the sluice gets pushed downward by the bottom section of the leading edge.

That leading edge transfers into a circular motion to create a vortex in each riffle. And at the bottom of that vortex, any fine gold that caught by that leading edge is going to be forced downward into a V mat profile in the bottom of the riffle where it is protected from scouring and water flow.

From the beginning I was focused on the fine flour gold recovery, and I wanted the highbanker to be extremely efficient so we could move a lot of material while decreasing the volume of cons by removing as much fine black sand as possible. And I think we've succeeded with the sluice mat capture rate.

I wanted to have a sluice box with plenty of length in order to maximize the recovery area, but I didn't want to remove the entire mat everytime just to do quick checks for gold. So, I broke the mat down into sections that interlock with each other.

Typically what I'll do when testing new ground is pull out the bottom three mat sections into my concentrates bucket, and I'll pan down the top mat section alone. This will tell me whether or not I'm in a good area or if I need to move on and go somewhere else.

The mat sections are attached to, or supported by, another molded piece which is a wrap that is attached at the top of the sluice. We've got about a 2 or 3 inch crash box area at the top end of the sluice box where the hopper dumps into the back and then you've got a couple of inches there for material to kind of turn over and stratify.

In the crash box area you have a small slick plate area to an up-ramp where the gold will have already, in all likelihood, sunk (stratified) by then. The odd piece of gold does escape the first few drop riffles of the top mat section. But it's almost always caught in the top half of the highbanker sluice box. We don't get much gold at all in the second half of the 36 inch sluice.

We also stopped using a catch pan in coarse gold areas with little black sand, as we simply were not getting enough gold in the catch pan to justify panning it out. Often, we get nothing in the catch pan, so we stopped using them in most places.

Dan:

Can you talk a bit about the damper flap or dampener you added to the Gold Trek highbanker, what it does, and why it's valuable.

We added a damper at the top of where the drop riffle matting starts. The way it works is it creates a little bit of back pressure on the top of the water surface and it just makes the water pool a little bit deeper there and slows down the entry to the sluice to really even out the laminar flow.

It smoothes out the bubbles and knocks down any gold floating on surface tension of the water, and it's kind of added insurance for the highbanker to improve the gold capture rate and decrease sluice box losses.

In any gravity concentration system there will be losses, but we use a proven system to reduce them to as little as possible.

Dan:

Damper flaps are used very commonly in large scale industrial sluice boxes up in up in the Yukon and Alaska. In the Freddy Dodge's Mine Rescue TV show on Discovery Plus Freddy and Juan Ibarra use damper flaps uses them when they are trying to improve fine gold recovery for commercial sluicing operations with high gold losses.

Often Freddy and Juan will add one or two of these damper flaps on a long sluice run to break the surface tension, slow the water down a little bit, let the water pool briefly and just to give that that that fine flour gold a chance to drop out of the flow and get caught in the in the matting profile.

In terms of highbanker quality, this damper flap is not a DIY, scissor cut thing. It's a professional flap that fits the unit properly and is custom made for your particular highabnker. When when I hear the word neoprene I think of a wetsuit, and and the material that your damper flap is made up is nothing like a wetsuit to me, it feels more like normal rubber.

Cyle:

Yeah, it does. And that's because there's different types of neoprene. The neoprene used in wetsuits is made with a foaming agent, and the amount of foaming agent you add will dictate how dense the rubber is.

The neoprene we use in the damper flaps does not have any foaming agent in it. I chose neoprene because it has a weaker memory and is less likely to warp.

Dan:

Excellent, makes sense. Is there anything else you wanted to add about your new Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker product?

Cyle:

Above all, what I want is for people to get access to gold. I want people to get out to areas where the ground is as untouched as possible.

This product, and the knowledge on how to use it, is something I wish I had when I was first starting out. I wanted access to good ground. I wanted to be able to go out prospecting to areas where your average person won't go because the access is difficult and it requires hiking in.

I'm super excited to see what recreational gold prospectors people can do with the Gold Trek system. I want to hear feedback, I want to see pictures. And then I want to see people use this thing and have success.

Dan:

Where can people find Crux Prospecting and the Gold Trek highbanker online? We're going to have it for sale on my website, CruxProspecting.com And we are going to have it available through some affiliate and retail partners as well.

There's going to be lots of opportunities out there for people who are on a budget. And if you have any questions, message me directly through the Crux Prospecting Facebook page.