use a metal detector looking for the bigger piece and let the caliche gods have the rest

Breaking up caliche? Waste of time. Pan the material on TOP of the caliche. The caliche acts like a concrete barrier preventing the gold from sinking farther down. Good luck.

Hey Matt.I've got lumps of hard baseball size material that's real hard from bank wash that I chipped out with rotohammer cause I got a target with my gold bug..going to rent a cement mixer from home depot and put some rocks in it and see if it breaks it up...

I've heard the cement mixer thing, never seen it tried. I ran caliche once by picking away at it until it was a dust. Took a long time. Ran it through the drywasher, found nothing, The old timers with some of the coyote hole diggings would tunnel into it and it must have paid to build those tunnels or they would have stopped.

With the cement mixer, I doubt a lot of material could be made that way and you'd have to be sitting at a ounce or more a ton to make it worth the run. 35 five gallon buckets to the ton. I think it would be s everal hour process to fill it up with a bucket or two and then spin it.

Search images of gold in caliche and you will find gold in the form of nuggets, pickers, flakes, and of course fines. You may not like the work it takes to recover it, but if it’s in nugget or picker form, I’m guessing it would be worth your time. I now have a hammer drill and may go after what I used to pass up in caliche while detecting a wash. I’ve also seen videos of a homemade crusher. It was a pipe welded to a plate. A sliding ram inside pipe would crush rock or caliche then they panned out the gold. Good-Luck out there!

i use a payvers stamping tool Called a Tamper, breaks up Caliche or hard cemented gravel clumps prior to drywashing. it has a handle and a flat metal square head. you lift and drop on the targets to break them up.
$30-50.00 at Lowes or Home Depot depending on which one you get.

Mathew, i know you use one now, but for anyone visiting this thread, this tool works great.

Hey Craig, I know it has been a while since you posted here but I'm wondering how things worked out with the cement mixer?