Thai villagers pan for gold – in pictures

theguardian.com, Friday 28 March 2014 15.57 GMT

Villagers from Wang Nuea in northern Thailand look for gold in the river every year during the dry season. They can make about $15 a day, though two years ago they reached $200 in a single day when the river level dropped more than usual. The workers begin to search at 10am and work until sunset, often doing second jobs in order to survive.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/mar/28/thai-villagers-pan-for-gold-in-pictures

OMG! THey are doing it the old way. I could set up a dredge from parts from the dump and increase the production by more than what they are doing. I have a little 2 1/2 inch dredge. I can do about 200 pans a day but with the dredge I can do about a thousand pans a day.

I would love to gather all those people in the pictures and each run the dredge for an hour in the morning and hour in the afternoon. Then at night pan out the riffles and share the gold equally.

I had a friend with a dry washer and we would switch off all day, pan it out at night then sell the proceeds in Las Vegas. We did pretty good. (smile)

I could set up a dredge from parts from the dump and increase the production by more than what they are doing.

In Thailand, you need a licence from the government to mine minerals even if it were your own land.

People seem to get away with picking up the gold from "the ground", but extracting it with a dredge I'd imagine is a different matter.

Chatree Gold mine, Phichit, Phichit Province, Thailand. GPS 16.2880986024, 100.648900918

http://www.strahlen.org/vp/th/chatree/chatree.php

According to this, the prospectors can only be local villagers.