When I teach people about finding gold, I often explain that it is helpful to think of any river or stream that carries gold as being something like a sluice box.

Once you get down to the black sands or a few tablespoons of material, the technique changes dramatically.

I pulled out the nuggets I had worked on previously and looked at the size of the wire basket that the items to be cleaned are placed into. It looks much like a miniature french fry deep fryer.

While recovery rates are important, they must necessarily be secondary to the volume of material processed. Running more material at lower recovery rates is generally preferable to increasing the efficiency of the system.