Gold miners are always thinking about being a D.I.Y.er.  Hell, they always have it in their heads “why spend good money on something I can do myself”?

Well, that may be well and good if you would rather spend your time trying to re-invent the wheel rather than digging for gold or recovering that fine stuff from your concentrates and making money instead of finding ways to waste it.

Everyone pretty much has the idea they can save a ton of money by building their own. It looks simple enough, can’t be all that hard, now can it?

Well, the short answer is that can actually cost you much more to build one, than what it costs to buy it.

Let me explain.

Take our MotherSucker Hand Dredge for instance, it isn’t something you go grab a few pieces of PVC, and throw together in a couple of hours.  The MotherSucker Prospector has no less than 36 parts, some of which need modification to be unique to the product.

You need to take time to locate and source those parts, but what parts do you need, how do they go together?  Unless you know exactly what you need and can get them all at once from one location, you will find yourself running around town, spending all kinds of money, a huge amount of time, and a ton of gas, buying parts you think you might need, and experimenting.

There will also be the inevitable mistakes that mean you have to run back out, spending more time and more gas buying more stuff and throwing the useless junk away that didn’t work out. Don’t forget, it’s likely you won’t have the right tool either and need to either rent or buy one.  It’s never ending.

We didn’t build the MotherSucker prototype’s in a couple of measly hours ( yes, prototypes, we built several).  We worked on it, experimented, tested and started from scratch again for almost a year before we had something that we felt was worthwhile to put out on the market, at a price reasonable enough that a few grams of gold would easily pay for it.

The development and research costs for this unit was in the “Thousands” in time, money, tools and labour.

You will spend time looking at components and thinking, will this fit?  How will this go together? Or, you will find 1/2 of what you need and find something else at another store (retail by the way), and other stuff yet somewhere else.  Then you may find yourself actually having to send away for something because it isn’t available where you are.

How much gold do you think you could have recovered on your claim if you spent that time actually working the claim, rather than spending time, money and gas, shopping and tinkering around trying to D.I.Yer??

What you are going to save (if any) will cost you in lost production, and that could be very, very expensive indeed.

There is an old saying “Being Cheap can be Expensive”.

Spend your time recovering gold using high quality equipment that engineers and professionals already investigated, planned and built – you are just wasting your time and money instead of making it.