3D Printing A Gold Sluice - 50% scale test print!

Good day fellow builders. Today I thought I would share my progress on creating and 3D printing an indoor sluice for use during our extremely long Nunavut winters. (It's still -10°C and will be until June.) I am using the free web based software, TinkerCAD to design my sluice for 3D printing. My plan is to utilise the extremely long days and snow meltwater to sluice up some gold bearing pay dirt for refining over the winter. My goal for 2021 is to simply find gold on the island. I have bought some KleshKrums from a popular gold YouTuber which will give me a guaranteed 0.5 grams of gold. This is mostly to use as testing material to make sure I don't lose a bunch of gold through the sluice or into the sluice.

Since I didn't want to waste several days of time and several pounds of filament I opted to print a test sluice at 50% scale to see if it would even work. It's so small that an SD card barely fits between the rails! But it works, as you can see in the gif above. Below are the links you would need in order to download, or remix this gold sluice for yourself!

Gold Sluice Top
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/2ZMg3NRf922

Gold Sluice 2nd Tier
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/jIs5WKpPqB2

Gold Sluice 3rd Tier
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/1z5exK4KIHG

100mm Sluice Arms
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/6rHPX7W7qnv

Screenshot 2021-04-07 at 8.09.22 AM.png

1 day, 3 hours, 18 minutes and 272 grams of filament!

With a print that long it's a good thing I made this print fairly support free. Especially for the top, the wedge roof is designed to not need any supports for printing. The only pieces that require supports are the 3rd tier and the 100mm arms, because they have the dovetailing. Make sure to block supports on those models where you don't want supports to form. (the front of the sluice)

At the moment I don't have any gold to test the sluice out with, but it's also a 50% scale version of it, so I'm not sure I would send gold through this sluice. I will be printing 100% versions of every tier over the next few weeks, though. Some of you may be worried about the gaps between lines trapping gold. But I'm honestly not that worried. Nothing a Ninja Blender and a bit of panning can't solve! Right now the sand I'm running is super fine coloured sand from a little potted plant. It didn't have a fancy picture in the sand so I didn't feel bad mixing it all up and running it through the sluice.

I have a feeling that refinements will be made once I have some gold in my pay dirt, so expect a few updates. I will also be doing reviews of other various home made gold prospecting tools assuming I find gold on the island.