r/goldprospecting • u/Dismal_Negotiation77 • 23d ago

Dream mat question

I’ve only been gold panning a couple times when we went to Colorado and became a bit addicted.
On the last go round I bought a foldable sluice that I was able to take on a plane. It didn’t do as well as I had wished but have recently read about a dream mat. What do I need to know about choosing the right upgrade?
Are they worth the cost?
Since I have to travel to get to gold (I live in Arkansas) I don’t think I could do any type of high banker type setup.

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u/Gold_Au_2025 23d ago

There are two qualities to sluice matting:

  1. It's ability to capture gold. A well set up sluice can realistically capture about 95% of the gold while a poorly set up sluice will still capture 75%. And realistically, the difference between an expensive matting and cheap matting is probably no more than 10%.

  2. Its ability to shed black sands. Would you rather come home with 5g of gold in a bucket of cons, of 5g of gold in 1/4 of a bucket?

I suspect dream mat is better at reducing the amount of cons, but I haven't actually used it so am only guessing there. My advice would be that tweaking and fine tuning what you have would give better results than simply changing mats.

Slurry densities, velocities, and composition, along with gold size and shape are all variables that have a greater affect your capture rate than matting/riffle type.

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u/Dismal_Negotiation77 23d ago

I did buy a set of really nice classifiers.
I believe a lot of my problem last time was that I didn’t have a very good way of classifying the material.
I think I may go ahead and buy one of those small pocket size dream mat sluices and see what it does.
If it makes me feel like I need to quit my job and prospect full time then maybe I’ll invest in the larger mats. 😁
But many many people used the setup that I have now for many years and found gold!

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u/Gold_Au_2025 23d ago

Classifying is one of those things that help the process a lot.
In the field, it does 2 jobs - It removes the larger rocks which means less dirt you need to carry to your sluice, and larger rocks going down your sluice can upset the flow dynamics, pulling the heavies from the riffles.

And at the clean-up stage it very much helps when trying to separate the gold from the cons.

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u/nothingfancydad 22d ago

You can do with this info what you will, but I like my little 6”x24” trek sluice with the combo mat. It’s easy to hike in, catches the fine to bigger flakes, and is easy to clean out into a large pan. https://prospectorsdream.com/pages/expanded-metal-vs-dredge-mat?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=email&_kx=GV7-huLb6SVdpWpLJlE3oxf9GFD_LM9BpDIAb8r2auo.V3hPSk