How Much GOLD Will A LEGO Highbanker Find?

Today we build a Lego gold mining machine that we're gonna fill with dirt and see how much gold it can recover. Oh yeah. Hi, we are back at our famous location where over the past few years we have found a ton of gold. Now like usual, we're gonna be using a high bank here only this time we're gonna build it out of Lego. Now I probably don't need this much Lego but we'll bring it just in case. Got my Lego Crocs. So this thing of Lego is way heavier than I thought. Luckily we brought Bailey, he's gonna help us out today. Now I've been playing with Lego since I was a little girl but that doesn't mean I'm any good so I decided to spend the time designing a prototype that I'm gonna try building here today. Hi, Baku. Step one is to build the hopper. It's pretty complicated, I know, it's a square but it's the main box where you shovel dirt into where it gets washed so that the gold can be separated from the dirt before dropping down into the sluice box. So to build a hopper, it's pretty straightforward. You just gotta build a box where the dirt is gonna go through. Let's take a moment and look at how much Lego I've brought and how much little Lego I'm probably gonna need. Sorry, I'm distracted. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna build the platform, basically where the dirt's gonna go and then I just gotta build a wall around it. So as many of these little bricks as I can find, I'll just attach them like so and this is gonna take a little while. This is gonna take a long time so eventually I ended up with something like this and I'm still not sure if it's gonna work. Okay, it is slowly coming along. I don't know if that's too small or too big but this is the size we're gonna use because I honestly don't know if we have enough Lego bricks to actually put this hopper together. I actually shouldn't be doing that, there's probably so many boogers on this Lego. This is all from Facebook Marketplace. But the hopper is coming along, I just need to put this piece to this piece. It's not supposed to be perfect but it's Lego. Ah, it doesn't fit. I just realized something. This whole area needs to go because I need to make a little grill so that when the dirt lands in here, it could all drop down into the sluice box. So, all right. There, just like that. It's not perfectly symmetrical but it will do. So step two is building the sluice box. This is probably the easiest thing to build but arguably the most important. This is where any gold that's present will get trapped so if done incorrectly, the gold could slide off the end resulting in little to no gold at all. Now the sluice box is very important to do right. I was actually thinking of making the sluice box upside down because on Lego, there's a lot of holes in the bottom and I feel like it's more of a chance that you can capture the gold. But then I don't really know if that's cheating or not. I don't know. We'll try the option that I have in mind first and if that doesn't work, then we'll think of something else. I think this will be our platform for the sluice box but it is really flimsy. I'm not really sure if it's gonna work. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut this to size, make it a little bit bigger than the box so that we just have a bigger sluice and see if that works. This is a stupid idea by the way. Don't try this at home. Oh, I used to be a chef so I know how to break Lego. Perfect. We have two. Should be perfect. Now I don't imagine the sluice box is gonna be pretty but as long as it holds gold, I can relate. No, I mean, I'll be happy. So I spent a ton of time carefully finding the right Lego pieces and snapping them in place. I even tried to make it look somewhat like a real sluice box so I added black pieces to replicate a rubber mat and then green pieces to replicate miner's moss. Check this out. Somebody's child made this car. I need this piece. And eventually, once it started to take shape, I found the flattest rock in all of the land to make sure every piece was securely snapped together. I'm not gonna lie, this is actually really hard to do. I do have Gorilla Glue. I might actually use that to secure every piece but let me see if I can do it without using that. Lego's supposed to be easy. Okay, sluice is done. I went ahead and added riffles, all from the top to the bottom and I went ahead and reinforced all the edges so the gold won't fall off. I built this up a little bit so that when rocks fall down this thing, it doesn't actually escape and we capture as much material as we can. Adding those riffles took about, let's say 40 minutes. I didn't think we would have enough pieces of Lego but we did luckily. So now let's figure out how to attach this. Oh wait, I know how. So attaching this hopper to our sluice box was gonna be one of the hardest things to do because there's no piece of Lego that actually holds this thing on an angle. Luckily, I know a guy who knows a guy. His name is Syle at Crux Prospecting and he built me these custom anglers or whatever you wanna call them so you can attach the hopper to the sluice box which gives it that angle needed to actually run material off and hopefully find some Lego gold. Also because he is more prepared than I am, he went ahead and designed me these Lego hose attachments so that we can actually pump water to our system. Imagine me building this whole high bank here and forgetting how we're gonna attach water to the machine. Luckily that didn't happen so let's put this thing together and hopefully find some gold. So I don't care what anybody says, I'm actually gonna glue this angled piece on here so that it doesn't fall off. It's not even attaching. So I'm not really sure what to do here now. These Lego pieces don't actually click in to the bottom of the other Lego pieces meaning I had to use all my glue just to sit them here and there's no guarantee those pieces are gonna stay. We also have to consider that we have to attach it to this as well on this side of those angled pieces. If it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world. We will make it work somehow. I just don't know how yet. Okay, so that's sort of how I want it to sit but I'm afraid to push it down onto the sluice. I just don't think it's gonna stay. I'm pretty sure I'm out of glue. Oh, there's a little bit. No, don't run out. Just need a little bit more. All right, it's not even clicked in there but our only chance, oh, it is. Oh, what? I think I got it to click. That is the best we are gonna do. It's not really on there. I just realized there's no way to attach legs to this hive anchor. I would have to attach to the bottom of the sluice but these bottom frame pieces don't have anywhere to attach and I am all out of glue. I'm actually wondering now if I should leave the sluice on this rock because it sits at a nice angle. It's a good height but my only concern now is that we will get a pile of overburden right here so as long as we keep shoveling this off, this could actually work without legs. I decided against having it up high on that boulder. I figured it would just work out better if I sat it on my tailings pile from my last high banking videos. How's this gonna work? I wasn't thinking about how I'm gonna attach the hose here. Oh, it snaps into place, wonderful. Nice. So this is what we're looking at right now. Our hose snaps into place nicely. I might just have to leave it on the ground there so I have a lot of room to run tailings. I'm acting as if I'm gonna run a lot of material. It's probably not gonna happen but we will try our best. That thing is ugly. Before we start running, just wanna show you what we're looking at. We have our pump here. You follow the hose all the way up to our ugly Lego contraption. I'm actually really nervous about this. I don't expect for this thing to run like a top or to find a lot of gold. I just want it to run okay and have it support one scoop of material. If we have a chance to find one speck of gold in this thing, that will be a success. It doesn't look too bad. We're gonna dump material into here. These little things will spray water and mix it all up. All the big stuff will slide off kind of down here. I'll try to make sure it stays clean. Any heavy material and gold will fall through these little holes, hopefully land down there into our makeshift sluice box. I can already tell you that this thing would run way better if we can actually have legs and have it raise up a bit but we'll work with what we can. We're gonna start our action camera right here to capture the water start to move. If it doesn't blow up. Come on baby. Come on, don't break. Yeah. Nice. She's alive. That should work okay as long as this thing doesn't break apart. It's not straight, not perfectly straight. We'll fix that. Now I'm just gonna quickly make sure there's no kinks in the hose. I'll turn down the RPM a little bit and we'll start running. I just realized I'm ready to run but I literally don't have any dirt to put in there. So I might shut it off, get some dirt. Yeah, it works. Now I obviously can't use a tarp to put dirt because I ruined it with Lego. So before I run anything, because the high bank is sitting on the ground, I must make room for the water and tailings to go so I don't back up the sluice. I'm an excavator. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna start it with a little bit of material. I'm just gonna scoop it using this plastic scoop here and we'll slowly feed it and just make sure it runs properly. I just noticed the orange sprayer is sitting on a bit of an angle there so it wants to pop off but hopefully it won't. I can't run as fast in these Lego shoes. Yeah, nice. Okay, scoop number one. Start with a little bit. It's not really working. I mean, it's working. I'm just gonna keep feeding it. See what happens. No nuggets yet. It's getting backed up in the top of the sluice so I think I need a steeper angle. Also very hard to do. I just don't want it to break. I'm realizing the steeper the angle of the sluice, the less of an angle the box. So if the sluice is more angled, I just gotta do more work bringing that top stuff down. The whole machine's also really flimsy so I gotta be really careful. So there we have it. May I say the first functioning Lego high banker ever? Now, obviously it's not perfect but I suppose being Lego, being not perfect, makes it even better. It's kind of working. It's holding material. So this is the best sign you could get that there's gold. When you see a piece of gold. Like I said before, this area has a lot of gold in it. That's why I keep coming here high banking. Now I knew at some point we would get gold to go through the Lego machine but I just wasn't sure if it was gonna hold any gold. Right there, there's a piece. I'm gonna push it down through the actual sluice box and see if we actually recover it at the end. Nevermind, it doesn't really wanna move. Oh, there we go. Yeah, look, it's still right there. It's a good sign, there could be gold around. I really wanna make sure that piece of gold doesn't roll down. I don't think it will. And I also just realized that when I'm done this bucket, I really wanna see what we found but I also really don't wanna take everything off and try to clean out the riffles. That's just gonna destroy the whole thing. So I might shut the water off to have a break but I'm not gonna touch what's in the sluice until we're actually done running for today. I just saw another piece of gold go down. It was way smaller than that first piece though. So I probably only spent like 10 more minutes carefully feeding the high banker before we ran out of material. So I just finished the bucket. I'm gonna let this thing run for a minute and then we'll shut it off and have a look, I guess, somehow. Okay, so like I said, I'm not gonna actually take this apart to have a look. I'm just going to turn on my flash and have a peek. First thing you see, bingo, one little flake of gold. Is there any more? Not that I can actually see. There might be some powder gold in here. Hey, the riffles are actually, we are holding up. Probably not as good as a regular riffle but I'm not complaining. I don't see anything in there. Now for sure, I did see another small piece of gold go down in there but it's probably captured somewhere deep in the abyss of this Lego hole. So the last time I was high banking here, we actually found the most gold we've ever found in this area. And I'm pretty sure it's because we were digging right on the bedrock. In fact, we broke into the bedrock and we worked underneath this big boulder here. So I'm gonna dig out as much material as I can from the same spot as I did last time to hopefully have this Lego high banker recover lots of gold. Digging here is a little bit tedious because yeah, you want the good material, but no, you don't want this boulder to fall down. We don't need any of these rocks. They can go to heck. A wham! For good luck. Good enough. So we have a full, almost full bucket of material that we're gonna run here. I think this is all the material that I'm gonna be running today because it's just taking way too long and I don't really, I'm gaining more trust on it but I don't really trust to overload this thing. But before we do run though, can you guys let me know if you wanna see more of these Lego videos because I have a lot of ideas and a lot more Lego than this. Because yes, we do have a high banker here which was inspired, by the way, by Sluicebox Carl. He made a Sluicebox. I thought that was cool. I thought I'd do a high banker, but we can go way bigger. Just let me know in the comments. If you wanna see more Lego, then say you wanna see more Lego. Look who just showed up. How you doing? I'm doing okay. You finding anything? Finding some stuff, but not much. Not much? Okay, well, you gotta check this out. We found one little piece in here. I saw two, but there's one right up top there. So this thing is working. Yeah. I was gonna put legs on it, but obviously there's no legs. Yeah, I can't attach it to this thing, so. It is what it is. I would be sniping if I had my wetsuit and I wasn't doing this video, but we'll see how this does. I found a frog. His name is Frog and he is so delicious. Okay, round number two. Congrats. Yeah. That's awesome, actually. It keeps breaking apart. Like this thing keeps falling off, but I'll show you how we're doing it. Where's my scoop? Just doing a little bit of scoops. I can't believe it's actually working though. It's like not perfect, but it's still working. It's not too big of a scoop. You just gotta put it in there, mix it up. And after like four or five scoops, you kind of go under here and kind of do a little dance. We've got another piece of gold right there. I like water. So just a couple more scoops and then I'll be in it. Okay, I'm gonna keep that running for just a minute or two and then we'll shut it off and hopefully find a million ounces. Okay, I didn't want to do this. Taking this off is painful because I know I can't reattach it right now. I'm gonna rinse everything down. I did like nothing. All right, I'm gonna get more water. This is difficult. Hey, look at that. Hey, hey, hey, a piece of gold. Cool. Yeah, good enough. All right, these crocks are coming off. I was gonna make a Lego gold pan, but halfway through it, I got frustrated and I broke the thing. So we're using a regular gold pan. I am actually nervous. There is not a lot of material in here, which means we lost a lot of material, which could also mean we lost gold. Okay, what a relief. We see our gold in the corner there. I don't know if you can see that. So it's a success. Now, how much gold did we find? All right, not too bad. For a bucket and a half maybe, we have probably about nine pieces of gold in there. Still a success. So literally nine pieces of gold in here. Oh, actually no, 10. I can see a piece of flat poop in there. So 10 pieces of gold, including one decent size flake. The flake was the first piece of gold that we found, which actually gave me some higher hopes, but this is Lego and it's really just for fun. So my take, does a Lego high banker work? Yes, you can find gold. Do I recommend it? Not at all. Like I said, I've been playing with Lego for a long time, not as an adult, but I have when I was younger. And I saw Sluicebox Carl's video of him sluicing with Lego. So I thought this sounds like a fun project. So here we are. But again, if you wanna see more Lego videos, just let me know. So I'm gonna suck up the gold, pack up. Oh my goodness. I gotta take all this Lego back out. So let me do that, hike out of here and we'll go back to my house and weigh the gold that we found today. We are back at the house now. Let's have a look. Today's mission wasn't about getting a lot of gold. It was really just about having fun making Lego and seeing if we can capture gold. I feel like because we know it works now, it makes me wanna build something much bigger and actually make it stronger so we can run a lot more material. Under the microscope, our biggest piece looks like this. Nothing too special. I just wish it was 10 ounces. And our smallest piece kind of looks like a tentacle. Should I dare even weigh it? Yes, I can put it all on one finger. A gram, 0.05 grams. So that's about $7 American or $10 Canadian. Absolutely incredible.