Shakers - Jonathan Hare's diary

Production team

Day 9 - Rest Day
Get up about 10 am after getting to bed about 1:30 am. Spent last night with the two Mikes having a drink or two. After breakfast I did some more drawing and then headed off to walk the Roberts Track from Franz Josef.

The Roberts Track starts from the Glacier Road and then turns left across a large wooden suspension footbridge that spans the icy cold bubbling glacier river. The walk is a very exciting and beautiful one but quite demanding and in places quite slippery. I fell over twice but didn’t hurt myself. The walk took me about 4½ hours up and down and on the way I saw only a few people. There are footbridges, cliff walks, paths that follow the fast streams and boulder-hopping routes that take you far up - it’s a great track. Finally the path takes you to a look-out spot from where you look over the Franz Josef Glacier in all its glory. Blue sky and strange low misty clouds hang around and from up there is an incredible white and blue light from the Glacier. Make it home very tired but very happy!!

Day 10 - Auto Panning System
Mike L, Kathy and I are given the challenge of making an automated gold panning extraction ‘plant’. Mike L and Kathy make up the sluicing cradle and I crack on making the water wheel to power it. The idea is to make a compact sluice box in the form of a sort of cradle that can be rocked. As the gold-carrying water runs down the machine the gold particles are collected in the various sluice trays and the rocking disperses the rocks evenly and makes the filtration more effective. Ideally the waterwheel could power the rocking of the cradle and also power a water pump to make sure the sluice never runs dry.

All 3 of us had a great day today. All the crew mucked in - Sandra, John and Derek all doing their own share of sawing when they could, and bit by bit by the end of the day we had made all the parts for the equipment. Tomorrow we assemble and see how it all works out. That night we had various ideas for the water pump. I thought we might be able to make an Archimedean screw pump but looking at my designs I don’t think I am going to have time. Mike L has a nice design for a tennis ball water pump so we will see how it goes.

Day 11 - Auto Panning System
Today started off cold and it took a while for all of us to get going, despite a brief sawing spree to warm us up. Sawing through a thick plank is a really good way of getting warm on a cold frosty winter morning.

Rough Science is all about trying to do what you need to do in the limited time available - its all about time. This one was really going to be difficult timewise. By lunchtime Mike L and Kathy had finished the cradle and we had attached it to the waterwheel. We had also tried making a pump using the tennis ball, but although it worked well it didn’t look as though it was going to do much at the speed the waterwheel would rotate at. We showed it working by hand.

Before lunch Kate and I did the last knocking in of nails and final touches to the wheel and then we did a test run on dry land to see that everything all turned and moved OK (in principle). 

After lunch we took all the gear down to the river (about an hour's drive) to see where it should be set up and try it out in the water. We spent the rest of the day looking for and experimenting with different places to put the wheel. The best flow is in the middle of the river but of course this is not practical if we need to drive the cradle, and it would have been difficult to fix the wheel in place. But at least the sand flies don’t seem to be in the middle of the river. Everywhere else they bit and they bit!!

Kathy and I tried the wheel in a number of locations and there was nowhere that was perfect. In the end we had to compromise and we found a place fairly near to the waterside but with enough water passing to drive the wheel round with some force. With hindsight we should have thought about looking around way before we got to this stage of the project, but in Rough Science you often don’t know what the best thing to do is until afterwards, the time factor making things difficult. We wasted a lot of today so that by the end of the second day we had still not used the machine.

So by the end of day 2 we had shown that the waterwheel drives the machine, just, but not enough to get the pump to work. Ended cold and in need of some food.

Day 12 - Auto Panning System
Not feeling very positive about today. Wearing two pairs of trousers, two T-shirts, 2 fleeces and a pair of waterproof trousers and still cold!! We decide to set up the waterwheel and cradle in yesterday's location as we have little time and need to get cracking and we could easily use it all up trying to get everything to work perfectly.

The waterwheel spun round slowly today, so we set up some wooden sheets in the water to direct the water into the blades of the waterwheel. This helped a lot but again used up time. When it was connected up to the cradle it rocked it like a dream!

All of us were tired and so we tried our best to load up the machine but it was hard work. The best gold digging area for the mud was some way from the best place for the sluice, and so we had to dig and carry buckets to the machine - very hard work! Kathy seemed to have energy and she spurred us on. We spent about 2 hours feeding the cradle with sand and rocks from the river. All the while the machine rocked and we poured on water.

I was very sceptical that we would catch anything in such a short time. We decided to go on till about 12 and then take it all apart very carefully, collect as much of the wood, punga and silt from the machine and then pan that to see how much we had got. When we panned the result I was amazed at how much we had got. Within a few mins the main bulk of the lighter stuff had been thrown away and in about 10 mins we had a pan of lovely gold flakes!!

In just 2 hours of using the machine properly we had got about 0.6g of gold - not bad. I was really pleased. What I had thought would be a bit of a disaster turned out to be a really nice project.