Travel Or Tour Pictures And Photos Of Alaska Gold Dredge #8

Gold Dredge Number 8 is powered by electricity from Fairbanks in a large coal-fired generating plant. A coal fired boiler creates steam that powers up the air compresser, generators, and pumps on board. The dredge vessel has large steel hull, 50 feet wide, 99 feet long, and has the depth of 10.5 feet. When totally loaded, its draft displaces 1,065 tons, taking in the on board equipment and the ballast of steel.

The dredge buckets are 6 feet wide and can hold a lot of gravel. The seventy steel buckets on the forward end each have a capacity of 6 cubic feet and they weigh 1,583 pounds. The steel buckets are placed on a digging ladder that is 84 feet long. The digging ladder then unloads the items in the buckets into a dump-hopper at a rate of 22.2 buckets per minute

Dredges are able to float on the tops of ponds formed in the river beds, so it is easier for them to scoop out the gold in gigantic buckets with the help of the stacker. Next, frozen muck is removed with huge water nozzles called hydraulic giants. It takes about three seasons to remove it all. Then they drill driving pipes or thaw points into the ground to thaw it and force water down them. The dirt goes to the stacker and throws out some of the extra junk in the buckets. The belt-driven stacker conveyor belt is 32 inches wide and is operated at a rate of 262 feet per minute. The dirt is then put into a big sluice box where the gold sinks and the dirt keeps on floating. They go through several sluice boxes that get smaller. The reason gold panning and sluice boxes work is because gold will sink because it is 19 times heavier than water. Afterwards, the gold is sent to mills to help extract more gold. There, in the mills, the gold is matted and then mixed with mercury to make it become amalgam. Gold is restored from the amalgam where the mercury is separated from the gold. It then is nearly pure gold. This entire development picks up almost 97 percent of gold from the ground.