Dredging Gold for Dummies

This is a dredge, Melanie...

One of our staffers noticed that as the Leaf Group migrates old eHow content into new niches, they usually keep the images submitted by the original author. In this case, that was the first thing that tipped our staffer off that she'd spotted a good candidate. That's because for an article titled "How to Build a Gold Dredge"¹ at OurPastimes.com, eHowian Melanie Fleury submitted a picture of pyrite. Yep, the aptly named "fool's gold."

For this post, Fleury started off more or less on the right track, telling her readers that

"A gold dredge is a necessary tool for anyone who pans for gold as more than a hobby. Gold dredges are machines that pulls [sic] the gold from dirt or gravel..."

This is gold, Melanie

...which is sort of true. Even the most rudimentary definition of dredge, however, includes a reference to somehow pumping or scooping sediment from the bed of a body of water. So, to build a gold dredge, it logically follows that at least part of the apparatus must somehow extract sediment from a streambed – right? Right.

Fleury's instructions, however, don't include anything to perform the actual dredging. No, Melanie instead performed a copy-reword-paste job on an article entitled "How I built a recirculating sluice box for gold prospecting." Hell, Fleury didn't even do a good job of copying that! Here are a few samples of her "creative rewording":

• "1/4 by 1/4 square dowels to use as riffles" became "1-inch wide square wooden dowels"
• "1 x 6 board 36 inches long for the base" became "a piece of plywood to 1-foot long by 4-feet wide"

• "[glue] riffles... spaced 1 1/2 inches apart" became "place another section of dowel... every 6 inches"
• "I decided to build a recirculating sluice" became "[this space intentionally left blank]"

In other words, Fleury 1) posted instructions for a sluice box, not a dredge; and 2) for reasons unknown decided she knew better dimensions than someone who'd actually built said sluice box. Is it any wonder Melanie is receiving her third Dumbass of the Day award? We think not!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_6670320_build-gold-dredge.html

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