There is nothing quite like the feeling of waking up on a goldfield knowing that a massive piece of gold was pulled out of the ground just twenty-four hours earlier. If you follow our family prospecting journeys, you know that the thrill of discovery is what keeps us coming back to the water's edge. Yesterday, our good mate Nick from Picket Prospecting absolutely smashed it, detecting a beautiful, heavy 3.31-gram gold specimen nugget tucked away in the bedrock.
When a nugget like that shows up, it sends a clear signal: the source is close, and the surrounding gravels are bound to be holding the smaller, heavy flakes and microfine gold that weathered off the same vein.
So, today we did exactly what any self-respecting prospector would do. We packed up the gear, grabbed the buckets, and headed down to the banks of the historic Turon River for an all-out, high-stakes gold sluice showdown.
The mission? To find out exactly where the rest of that gold is hiding—and to put our latest equipment designs through the absolute ultimate field test.
The Contenders: 3D Printing Innovation vs. Battle-Tested Custom Steel
This wasn't just a casual day of processing dirt; it was a battle of engineering philosophies.
On one side of the river, Finn and I deployed our brand new, custom-designed ChrisUndertaking 3D-printed prototype sluice boxes. We have spent countless hours modeling these units, calculating fluid dynamics, and refining the capture zones to create the perfect micro-vortexes. The goal behind these prototypes is rapid innovation—using advanced manufacturing to create lightweight, highly portable gear that features custom riffle profiles specifically optimized to trap stubborn, flat, microfine gold flakes before they can carry out of the box.
On the other side of the river stood Nick and his legendary Franken Sluice. The Franken Sluice is a beast of a machine—a heavy-duty, heavily customized hybrid setup that blends robust traditional metal construction with a specialized indicator matting system designed to take an absolute beating while locking gold in place. It’s got a reputation for handling massive amounts of unclassified material, making it the perfect benchmark to test our new sleek, 3D-printed designs against.
Setting Up on the Historic Turon River
The Turon River holds a legendary status in Australian gold rush history. For generations, its banks and bedrock crevices have yielded incredible wealth, but today, finding the gold requires moving beyond the easily accessible spots and dialing in your equipment configuration perfectly.
When we arrived at the creek bed, the first order of business was reading the water. Sluice boxes don’t work on magic; they work on physics, gravity, and fluid dynamics. If your water flow is too slow, your sluice box will "load up" with heavy black sands, packing the riffles tight and turning the matting into a smooth highway that gold will skate right over. If the water flow is too fast or raging, the extreme velocity will create too much turbulence, lifting the fine gold out of the safety zones and washing it straight out into the tailing pile.
We scouted a section of the river where the natural current narrowed through a rocky chute, giving us the perfect high-velocity, steady flow needed to feed our gear. Finn and I carefully wedged our 3D prototype into the current, using local river stones to anchor it firmly and adjusting the pitch to achieve that beautiful, smooth, glassy exchange of water over the riffles. Nick did the same with the Franken Sluice just a few meters away, setting up a brutal testing ground where both rigs would process the exact same heavy, compacted creek dirt.
Pushing the Rigs to Their Absolute Limits
With the water running perfectly, the real work began. Prospecting is a team effort, and having Finn out there digging and classification testing alongside me makes these trips incredibly special. We targeted a deep depression behind a massive boulder bar—a natural low-pressure zone where heavy minerals settle during heavy flood events.
Bucket after bucket of heavy, clay-heavy gravel and packed ironstone sand went into the hoppers. We didn’t baby these machines. To truly test a prototype, you have to push it to the breaking point. We ran unclassified material, dumped fast buckets, and watched carefully to see how the riffles responded.
What we saw inside the ChrisUndertaking prototype was incredibly encouraging. The custom-engineered drop riffles created perfect, tight vortexes. As the lighter quartz and river gravels washed cleanly out of the box, the heavy black sands stayed locked in the capture zones, dancing dynamically without compacting.
Meanwhile, the Franken Sluice was doing exactly what it does best: swallowing massive amounts of material. Nick fed his machine a steady diet of rough creek dirt, and we could see the brilliant contrast of the gold starting to show up and lock into his indicator mat right at the top of the box.
The Moment of Truth: The Epic Clean-Out
After hours of shifting rocks, lifting heavy gravels, and running non-stop material through the current, it was time for the moment every prospector lives for: the clean-out.
We carefully lifted the sluice boxes out of the river one by one, ensuring not a single drop of concentrated material washed away out of the mats. We washed the concentrates down into clean, pristine blue gold pans. The contrast of the rich, black iron sands against the bright blue plastic always makes the gold pop beautifully.
First up was our custom 3D-printed prototype. As I swirled the pan back and forth, washing the heavy black sands away grain by grain, a gorgeous trail of fine gold started to fan out across the bottom of the pan. It was packed with microfine specks and beautiful, bright flakes. The prototype had done its job flawlessly—the fluid dynamics worked exactly as simulated, trapping the finest gold that traditional riffles often lose.
Next up was Nick’s Franken Sluice clean-out. Because the Franken Sluice features that specialized high-visibility indicator matting, we already knew it had done some serious damage. But when we panned out the final concentrates, the results were undeniable. The Franken Sluice didn't just catch fine gold; it had locked into an incredibly rich pocket of coarse gold, small flakes, and heavy bits that settled deep into its heavy-duty mats.
When the final tallies were made and the scales settled, the Franken Sluice officially took the crown for the most gold recovered today! Nick’s battle-tested machine proved that raw processing power and solid matting are incredibly tough to beat on the Turon fields. However, seeing our 3D-printed prototype hold its ground and successfully trap the finest gold flakes gives us massive confidence as we continue to design, iterate, and manufacture the next generation of specialized prospecting equipment.
Join the Adventure and Support the Journey
Every single trip out to the river is a learning experience, and we love being able to share the raw, unedited highs and lows of the goldfields with all of you. From finding big specimens with detectors to dialing in custom-built gear in the running current, this is what the prospecting lifestyle is all about.
This journey wouldn't be possible without our amazing community. If you want to support our family gold prospecting adventures and see where we head next, please take a second to SUBSCRIBE to the channel, LIKE the video, and SHARE it with your fellow outdoor enthusiasts! Every single view, comment, and share directly helps us keep packing up the gear, exploring historic regions, and bringing you along for the ride.
For deeper technical breakdowns of our gear, custom 3D printing design updates, historical prospecting articles, and exclusive community news, make sure to check out our official home on the web at chrisundertaking.com.
Until next time, get outside, explore your local history, and we’ll see you on the next creek! ⚒️🤠
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