Tag Archives: 480D

Mov’in on Up

Gold mining, high banker, digging, dirt, quartz creekGold mining, high banker, digging, dirt, quartz creek

This is how we started out.  The first picture was our first piece of home built equipment for the mine.  It worked well, my wife and mother-in-law are working the equipment in that picture.  This little unit is how we found the first little glory hole that inspired us to upgrade to a larger KEENE HI-Banker(Second Picture), which worked out very well, we went from shovels full to 5 gallon buckets full.  Then to Kubota buckets, and hopefully next year we will be loading dirt with the 480D Backhoe.

I’m King of the World!!!

That is what my Daughter would be yelling out if she had ever seen that dreadfully long move Titanic.  This is when we first placed the wash plant.  Everyone wanted their pictures with it……..It was SO COOL! It is still super cool.  Anyone who wants to come up a visit we will take your picture with the wash plant too, free of charge.  It took a whole weekend with the 480D and Kubota to make a flat spot for the wash plant then a raised area for loading the wash plant.  There also had to be enough room to stage gravel to run in the wash plant, so the loading area had to be fairly large.  We had some trouble with the plywood restraining wall collapsing on the wash plant (It still worked was just a bit more of a pain to dig it out at the end of the season).  We will be constructing a steel retaining wall this winter for use next year.

Just a little father daughter time!

Here’s my daughter and me looking for that glory hole!  This spot did have a little gold but not enough to continue digging.  So we cleaned up the mess we made and moved on to the next speculation.  Lyra loves the tractor, she drives and operates it with a little help from dad, Sometimes we even just go for a cruse in it.
Notice the rag hanging from the Hydrolic cylinder on the excavator arm, I had a leak and the rag made it so the fluid would run into containment when it was sitting during the week.  There was a lot more wrong with the tractor so it went from the mine straight to the tractor doctor.  The parts list to repair this tractor was five pages long….Paying the bill was like passing a kidney stone.