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Should I Buy a Highbanker?

By: Dan Hodgins

Highbankers are amazing machines that help you multiply the amount of gravel you move in a day by an order of magnitude. If you have the budget, storage capacity, and a place to use it legally such as a claim then you should buy a highbanker.

If you are a beginner and have never panned or used a highbanker before, we invite you to read The Pickaxe Guide to Gold Panning For Beginners.

Highbankers - The Key to Hand Mining Productivity

There's no doubt that hurling shovel after shovel into a highbanker will increase your gold take at the end of each day. But, like any machine, highbankers aren't perfect, and they have their advantages and disadvantages depending on where you are, and what type of material you are working. A highbanker that isn't set up properly with excessive water flow can lose gold.

Pros / Advantages of Highbankers

Highbankers enables you to move a lot of material very quickly. This will enable you to get more gold compared to other concentration methods such as panning.

With a gold panning you can move somewhere around a quarter yard to a half yard depending on the difficulty of digging and/or your level of experience. With a highbanker you can move 1+ yard per day (40 x 5 gallon buckets of gravel), and even more if you were working with a partner.

When considering a highbanker purchase there are a number of factors to consider.

Highbanker Efficiency

If you think about it plus or gold mining really comes down to efficiency and volume. And when it comes to operations, there are fewer production lines more efficient than Toyota. Every step of every worker, every motion, and every movement is analyzed to increase efficiency.

Like a factory, when it comes to high banking you want the shortest distance between the material and the machine. The ability to shovel directly into the hopper is perhaps the biggest benefit of owning a highbanker. You can simply drop your shovel load into the header box and let the material wash and process as you step back to the hole for your next shovel.

It's about doing things in parallel rather than in series. You want to be very economical with your motion and reduce the number of steps and turning motions to have the most direct path from your crater to the header box.

A small 6 inch backpack highbanker, in comparison to a bigger machine such as a trommel, enables you to hike into remote areas that may be less worked. This means the possibility of finding old side channels, or even paleo channels increases.

A highbanker is the most portable machine for hand mining at scale.

Highbanker cons and downsides

Despite the many benefits of high bankers there are also some disadvantages to using them at times. Highbankers can be very frustrating to use if anything breaks. Anyone that has done any high banking will be able to relate to equipment breakdowns or problems.

Whether it's a leak in a lay flat hose or a pump breaking down it's not uncommon for technical issues to shut down your highbanking operation. This is extremely annoying when you go to all the work to pack the highbanker into your car, drive it to the work area, take it in and set it up.

Depending on the machine it can take a long time to set everything up. If you were the type of person that does not test pan or do sampling you might be running really poor material with low gold values. This can lead to extremely poor cleanouts and even a complete skunking if you haven't done your test panning properly to identify a rich deposit including its layers and lines.

Bigger highbankers (8 inches or more in width) can be heavy and difficult to pack into a claim. Whether you're carrying the machine by hand or strapping it to your back, the bigger 8, 10 or 12 inch highbankers can weigh 50+ pounds including hopper, sluice, legs matting, hose and pump.

If the hike into a claim or dig area is steep this can be overwhelming physically. There are times when I've hiked a heavy highbanker and pump into a clean area and cursed the fact that I did so and vowed to never do it again.

This is why the new lightweight 6 inch highbankers on the market are so compelling. Instead of carrying around 50 to 60+ pounds on your back you might only have 30 pounds sluice, hopper, grizzly, legs, matting, hose, cam lock fittings and pump.

A 30 pound load in the backpack is more than doable for anyone even with average fitness levels. You could easily hike up a steep trail for a long period of time without that amount of weight on your back.

Although highbankers enable you to move a lot of material, an improper set up can cause high loss rates. Depending on angle, water flow, matting, viscosity, clay content and operator experience some highbankers can lose more gold than one would like (although losses are seldom weighable on the scale for hobbyists).

In contrast a machine that is set up properly can have an excellent capture rate. Thankfully modern highbankers are quite forgiving in set up, and can capture gold under a wide variety of settings.

Here is an example of how well the newer highbankers can capture gold -- even when set up improperly, in one video, Dan Hurd ran his Dream Mat backwards, and still caught gold. This is testament to the power of correct water flow, pitch and active exchange in the cells, plus the ‘stickiness' of the mat surface.

Price - How Much is a Highbanker?

Depending on which type of highbanker can you get one of the disadvantages can be the cost. If you're buying a new machine, highbankers can be quite expensive.

You can expect to spend anywhere from US$300-US$500 and up all the way to $5000+ USD depending on the type of machine you get, and whether it's custom made by a fabricator or not.

Regardless, the increase in gold that you'll get with a high banker, plus the amount of enjoyment you'll have, makes a highbanker purchase more than worth it in my opinion. Just be sure to tell your significant other so there aren't any surprises ; )

Storing a Highbanker

Lastly you need a place to store your highbanker, pump, hoses and other pieces of prospecting equipment. People who live in an apartment or condo may not have enough free space to be able to store all of this.

Or some places may not let you store a gas pump and jerry can. But, if you have the space, highbanker is an absolute beast in the field and can take your gold capture to new heights.

So if you have the budget, the room to store it, and the motivation to shovel yards and yards of gravel per day then a high banker might be for you.

Check out some of our other articles on high bankers as well as our recommendations on what highbanker to buy.