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Dredging old pond. Suggestions anyone? :shrug:

K

khouse

Active member
I secured permission to detect a small 1/3 acre pond. What is special about the pond is that it was spring fed and said to be healing if bathed or swam in. There even was a slide for the kids to use. It it said wealthy people from all over traveled to the pond to swim and bathe. The years it was open was 1880 to 1954! The pond is about 6 feet deep at the dam side now. It used to be deeper but has silted in at least 1.5 feet. I want to get down to the original pond bed. I know I could take my detector into the water and scoop and sift. But this will be tough work as I hope to be scooping hundreds of targets. This lead me to think about a dredge. What if I took a dredge pump and hose and ran it to screen? I can have a helper help in breaking up the larger clods and recovering the finds. I thought I could just start jabbing the suction pipe downward cleaning a path as I walk. Will this work? I was hoping someone has tried this before on loose silt. Thanks!
 
Sounds like fun but with environmental laws today I don't you can dredge it without permission from the town and then where do you put the dredged material? I think you are looking at a can of worms.. We would never be allowed to do that up here in CT without permits and such..

If its only 6 feet deep get in the water and use a sifter..
 
I guess I just wanted to do it the easy way. But this is a small town. There are no fish in this pond either. I was just thinking of pumping the mud and water up to a header box that dumped into a large screen box. Then letting the sludge run back to the pond.
 
Sounds like a good idea to me. I know that in some areas you might have to worry about enviromental stuff, but that would be the least of my concerns. Not that I'm all for tearing a place apart, I just don't see a problem with returning everything but the goodies right back to the same place it came from. I haven't dredged any, but my brother in Texas has quite a bit and he swears by it. Get on the internet and browse around, I'm sure you can come up with several different methods of doing it without breaking the bank. Anything that works as a gold dredge would be a place to start I would think. There are several books on the subject. You might want to start off with just hitting where you can reach with your machine (do you have a water detector?) to see if it's going to be all you hope it's cracked up to be, and if it is investing in a dredge might be the way to go.

Steve
 
I think that's a good idea to detect in there to get a feel for the targets. I have already researched dredge pumps and suction. It's simply a water pump rigged in such a way that your targets do not pass through the pump and get torn up. I can build such a pump assembly for little money. Then I would simply pump the silt and goodies to a large screen. I was thinking about a 1/2 mesh over a 3/8 mesh below. Then setting the whole thing up right on the bank. I want to here from others that have dredged silt and get some tips. This is private property and I don't "think" I'll have enviremental issues.
 
Let me start by saying I've never dredged only to remove silting, or specifically recover coins/jewelry.

That being said, I would suspect you are about to undertake moving much more volume of sludge than you have considered.

You shall almost instantly cloud most the water in the volume of the pond!
Best to run your discharge over the dam, or on selected areas of the bank, after screening.

Most dredges run a jet tube, which is an aspirator. They feed the output of a gas powered centrifugal pump to a nozzle in a venturi tube that creates suction in the hose, and dumps output into the sluice, or in your case, a changeable screen setup.

I'd suggest buying a used dredge.
The suction hose... Kanaflex... is expensive.
3 or 4" would be minimum I'd advise.

You'll probably want a minimum of 20-30ft. Will take more power to run much more than that.
Sluice box, especially with riffles would be of minimal value, except for holding a grizzly and screens.
Screens that can be changed by a helper, on the fly, would be most beneficial.

Point of discharge would need to be at your classifying station, unless you could fabricate chutes to carry it further away.

Keene Engineering website is probably as good a place to start as any.

LoL You'll also need a hookah rig...

All told, sounds like great fun to me!

HH
rmptr
 
I have the Keene book. What I really thought was building the suction venturi assembly myself since I'm a plummer. Then connecting my gas powered trash pump to it? Or just looking at buying a used dredge with the attached sluice box. Shouldn't this trap jewelry and coins? I was thinking that might work as good or better than a screen box I was planning to build? I'm not sure just how much material the dredge can suck? I don't want to work a small area all day.. I have yet to wade into the pond but estimated the silt to be 1.5 feet deep with a stick. I believe I can dredge 80% of the pond by wading. If by then some treasures come up I would invest in a hookah unit. I'm not worried about mudding the water up as I should be wading. The first thing I'm going to do is hunt the land where thousands of people gathered for all the activities. This is estimated to be about 20 acres and about 35 structures to detect around.
 
Sounds like a great project to me khouse I watched a program on TV recently where they used a dredge pump to prove a shark attack in a river somewhere in the southern US the theory was that if in fact a shark had done the attack the teeth would have been lost from the shark in the area, this was going back a long time for the attack and the silt that has built up over the decades would be great and on the program they did hit paydirt and got the teeth but it took a fair bit of time well done show it might have been in New Jersey don't remember but while watching the program all I could think about was gold. Now I need a pond. Dan
 
Interesting! Thanks for the info. I may be getting ahead of myself in this dredging thing. I'm just excited to get to hunt where thousands of people bathed and swam. Heck maybe they threw gold offerings to the gods there! LOL. I have so much land to cover there anyway. But as soon as it gets warm I'll be in the water swinging my waterproof Ace 250 I built. I guess I better get to building my floating screen!
 
Wow with a place like that you could metal detect the grounds and find enough to pay for the dredge and hookah, then go for the water...
HH
 
I have a friend that has a mining claim in Alabama and uses a 6 in dredge he can open up a hole a few ft. deep and twenty foot sq. in a short period of time. He uses a Hookah, for air supply, just be careful with the end of the suction line can be dangerous. HH
http://www.goldgold.com/stories/outfitting.htm
 
Six inch is a REAL dredge.
Things happen REAL fast.
rmptr
 
If this were my project and I had full reign over the site, I would stake in a wood plank dam across the middle of the pond creating two halves. Then I would use my sub 8" dredge to move the silt from one side to the other while screening the discharge for targets. After de-silting one half of the pond to the other side, I then would detect the firmer bottom mud for remaining targets. Then repeat this process for the other side by dredging all the silt back to the cleaned out side. Probably take about thirty gallons of gas and a week of hard work wrestling with the 22 ft dredge hose and swivel nozzle, but worth it if some rings and coins show up. We used to dredge salmon holes for a friend on the Trinity River to fish from with this setup. Dredged two holes from knee deep to 20 foot deep in one week. This was a Keene sub 8 w/two 11 hp Vanguard engines.
 
If I metal detect a lot of good finds I will contemplate dredging. But I don't think I could justify the price of an 8 inch dredge. I may have to go with a smaller used dredge or rig something of my own. It sounds like you have had a lot of adventures with your 8 inch dredge.......
 
This sounds like a wonderful opppurtunity. Need any help???? I would DROOL over finding a lead like that!!


Congrats and I hope you strike it rich!!
 
I'll slip in the water when it gets warm to see if there's any treasure. If my finds get too heavy for me to carry I'll let you know! :super:
 
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