Tips for your pro line gold dredge TN Gold

Tips for your pro line gold dredge:

I had a 3 inch proline gold dredge for my first dredge. It was nice, as you can see by the image to the right.

What you shold also see, is that it came with the engine mounted backwards!

Notice the water pump facing the sluic box. This is not right!

Since I didn't know any better, I hooked it all up and went dredging with it like this. It didn't take long, until I realized that the high pressure hose was rubbing against the compessor air hose outlet. This was slowly cutting into the high pressure water hose... NOT GOOD.

I used it for he day that way, after putting some duct tape on it to keep it from cutting into the hose. It worked, and saved the hose, but I couldn't under stand why it was rubbing.

Late in the day, the owner of the mining store that sold me the dredge happened by, and saw the dredge in the water. He asked me what I saw wrong with it...   I said, I don't know, but that hose is rubbing and getting cut.   he explained it was mounted backwards, and told me to turn it around.

I did.. then he asked why I had it that way. Duh,,,  That's the way it was when I picked it up. I know he must have realized that it was sitting that way when I bought it, and he messed up by not noticing it sooner, but oh well,,, it worked fine once I flipped the motor around the other way, and made it much easier to hook up the high pressure hose to the power jet log also.

I told you this, so you could see the picture, and not set up yours backwards too.

Ok, now to set up your sluice box and run it for best recovery. According to Jeff at Proline, you want to run the engine at about 3/4 throtle, and keep the sluice box level. You want to suck up material for 15 to 20 minutes to get some weight sitting in it, then check it to see that it is level. Ajust it, if it is not.
It should let the light rocks pass right on out, without too much building up in the box.

You should not need to clean it up more than once a day, although many dredgers will say, they do a clean up every time they shut off the engine so gold doesn't go out when they start it.

With my proline, I never had a problem with that. I started it at an idle and slowly throttled up. I tested and never found gold coming out. (Different story here with my keene though)

Be careful not to lift your nozzle out of the water if your using a power jet gold dredge. It will suck air and shoot high pressure water spray into the box and it will dislodge some gold. Not nearly as bad as a keene, but it is something you still need to worry about.

Other than that, be careful to not get your foot valve into a pile of sand. It will suck it in, and eat at your water pump impeller and make you replace it sooner. Sand can be a bad thing. I always dig a bog hole for the foot valve if I am working in a shallow creek.

Using a wire mesh trash can from the office section of walmart works great to keep the leaves off of the foot valve too durring the times when there are so many leaves around in the creeks. It shure beats the heck out of loosing pressure every 5 minutes and it is not too costly at less than 10 bucks.

That is the basics about the proline dredge. Move on to my other stories and enjoy the site.
Thank you for reading. I hope this helps someone out that is just getting started into gold dredging with their proline dredge.

Tim LeGrand

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