Gold Fever

Since I have arrived back to Michigan I am been exceedingly busy. That being said it is always good to take a break and relax a bit. This weekend I get to take a few of my pieces I made this summer for my Living History, and a few others, to do some gold mining in 1866, Barkerville, British Columbia.

Overlooking the Black River, St Clair County, MI, April 2016

A few Living Historian friends and I decided a few years ago we wanted to go gold mining, so we started. Here in Michigan, we will most likely find absolutely nothing, but that's true to the history. 99/100 gold miners went home with little or nothing to show for their efforts. We just hard bake sorrow into the experience.

Doing this impression allows us to explore interesting avenues of civilian life during the period of the 1860's. I have become our companies surveyor, using basic trigonometry to build topographical maps of where we are working.

15ft grid, surveying grid work 

Now we prepare for round two of our gold mining adventure. The first event we got to a location and did some basic surveying, some gold panning and general exploration. Now we are on another site, and looking to increase the size of our operation.

While my shop is in shambles, I managed to sneak around the clutter and get at a few of my tools and whip us up some mining equipment.

First I made a sifter. Two people would hold the handles and a third would shovel pay dirt into the top to shake out the material.

I sketched out some handles, than sandwiched the two boards together so when I cut them with the jig saw the handles matched. I hit it with some sandpaper to smooth some rough edges. 

In my research I found an import company that sold mining equipment in the region we are portraying and decided to stencil our equipment with that company. I wanted the stencil and I wanted to see if my 3D printer could make it. One of my least favorite things to do is cut stencils with an xacto knife, and until I get a laser or vinyl cutter, I am going to experiment with 3D printed stencils. 

Import company that our equipment 'came' from. 

My first 3D printed stencil. Worked like a champ! 

 With the shaker made I decided to whip up a sluice box as well. Pay dirt and water are loaded into the box and as the water washes away the lighter material the gold gets trapped in the riffles of the box. 

Funny enough this is not my first, or even my second sluice box. In a previous life I worked at a historic village and did gold mining events that required me to make sluice boxes, however this one of more ascetically pleasing of all of the ones I have made. 

This project let me use my new favorite tool in the shop: an air powered brad nailer. It allows me to put projects together very quickly, and cleanly, not needing to fight hammering nails or using screws. Plenty of projects in mind now that I have an air nailer.

By the time of this post Gold Mining Adventure 2017 will have come to an end, however I am always looking to the future for projects and doing my research for whats next. 

I am starting to dig out my shop, as soon as I have it able to be photographed I will share my shop space and talk about what projects I am hoping to complete in it in the near future. 

Until next week, Ill keep making. Thanks for checking in.