Day 6: Accurate Weighing Balance - First Day of Filming

Last night Mikey B and I had a sauna and chilled out in the spa bath instead of going to the local bar. Consequently I am out of bed by 7.15 without my characteristic ‘Rough Science headache’. Jack Frost has been here big time and the ground is white. It is still fairly dark, and with very little light pollution from the small town of Franz Josef, the stars are brilliant, even in the dawn sky. Inland I can see the snow-covered mountains glowing as the sun still skulks under the eastern horizon. It is a beautiful morning and I know that the first ‘task’ of the day would be a helicopter ride.

Helicopter trip to the old sawmill
What a way to start filming. After a brief safety talk (which for once made sense) I pile into a helicopter with Kate, Kathy and camera man Derek. Kathy wants to sit by the window but as I am a whole lot bigger I would have hid her from the camera, so I was put there. I sit in a trance as we weave between peaks and fly low over the Glacier. In the distance I see a thin wisp of` smoke coming from the chimney of a scruffy looking hut. It is our destination - an old sawmill built years ago on a thin ribbon of flat land between the mountains and the sea. We circle a couple of times so that Kate could film a ‘piece to camera’ and introduction before we land. It is about the most enjoyable flight I’ve ever experienced. Good start!

When I look around the sawmill I am in heaven (almost). The main building and outhouses are full of weird machines, clapped out cars, motorbikes and home made ‘Mad Max’ vehicles. Cool! Judging by the graffiti the place has been home to petrol heads for generations. It is now a little cold, but very sunny. We have a warm tearoom heated by a wood-burning stove, plenty of tea and a comfy old sofa. I look out of the window. What a view. We even have a clapped out old pushbike – soon fix that.

The Challenges
OK, so to work. Ellen and Mikey get to pan for gold - cool as long as the weather holds. J is asked to build a metal detector from old radios and I have to weigh any gold that the gold panners find. Surely that’s got to be dead easy.

Scales Design
I quickly knock up a hangman type contraption so that we can suspend a set of scales like those on the Old Bailey. Kathy constructs wire baskets in which saucers could be suspended. These are hung under each end of a thick piece of gas welding wire. I soon give up on the idea because they fall apart if they become unbalanced and there isn’t really enough work for two people.

As there is a razor blade in the kit that we were given I guess that we are supposed to use it. The razor blade will make a very accurate fulcrum with next to no friction, so I make a set of very accurate scales which are based on the traditional ‘kitchen scales’ type design. In order to help weigh very light weights I calibrate the arms in 5 cm increments. This means that if a 1g reference weight is placed 5 cm from the fulcrum it would be balanced by 0.1g of gold placed 50 cm away from the fulcrum on the other side of the scales. In theory I thought that we could measure weights down to about one fortieth of a gram, which should be good enough even if Mikey and Ellen have a hard time at the river. A problem I have to overcome is cancelling out the effect of any container that the gold is weighed in, but it is a minor problem which I leave until later. A more pressing problem is finding a reference weight.

We were given a 500g bag of sugar in the kit, but this is far too big to use as a weight unless Mikey and Ellen are very lucky. Dividing the sugar will be difficult because we could lose some, so I fill a cardboard tube and measure how much room 500g sugar takes up. As it happens the length of tube filled is exactly a metre. Therefore a 1 cm length of tube contains 5g sugar. This is a bit rough and ready, and leaves room for massive errors, so I decide to take a 5 cm length (25 grams) and place it in a smaller diameter tube so that I can get an accurate 1g weight. I don’t have time on day one, so leave it until day two.

Night Filming
During Rough Science III we are to be filmed in the evening as we eat a meal prepared by our charismatic and very skilled chef, Ricky. We are supposed to ignore the camera and behave naturally, which to a bunch of media tarts such as ourselves should be dead easy, but the over-acting is PAINFUL.

Day 7: Accurate Weighing Balance - Second day of filming and I’m taken off the case

I’m up at seven, ready to leave at eight. The evening filming went fairly well but it does mean that we work a fourteen-hour day and have little time to chill out. Everyone acts a little for the camera (naturally - who wants to be on film picking their nose or swearing) so the evening meal is pretty full-on, even if the food is great. To be honest, the meal is one of the best I’ve tasted, and I’ve just flown over from two weeks in France.

I get to the sawmill to find that I am off the weighing challenge. It is a major bummer because I am half way through a number of jobs and am certain that the new design of scales would be far better than the ‘Old Bailey’ model. It leaves Kathy to make detailed modifications to the scales that we had made the previous day on her own, but she was well up to the task.

Apparently Ellen and Mikey B need help finding gold, which isn’t a total surprise - it’s a very labour intensive job. My first task is to collect a few bits and pieces including a very bloody sheep’s fleece with the hooves still intact - God only knows why.

Kate and I drive to the river in a four-wheel drive. Then I build a sluice and struggle down to the river with it. The idea of the sluice is that lightweight stones, soil and rubble are washed away by water, whereas gold is caught between punga wood slats, or entwined in the punga wood itself. Ellen didn’t like the legs on the sluice. The rocky banks were close to the ideal 10% slope at which sluice should be anyway.

Panning using a sluice is hard work. There really isn’t much gold in alluvial mud and what there is tends to collect behind boulders. There are lots of boulders to move. Muscle power is needed and that was why I was taken away from the sawmill. It isn’t a bad thing because the river is beautiful. Even so, I am feeling very ill and had little muscle power to give.

The life of a gold prospector must have been very hard. Not only was there hard labour. Not only was the work cold and wet, but the sand flies could be unbearable. We have to wear balaclavas to protect our necks and heads from attack in addition to insect repellent. The idea of working here, day in, day out for years doesn’t appeal at all.

Day 8: Accurate Weighing Balance

I am a team player. I’m sure that I’m a team player, but at home it’s more often than not team leader. Here, I am beginning to feel a little distant from the team in which I am essentially a pawn. Let’s face it, as I’ve said before, what is the use of a virologist here on the NZ West Coast doing the ‘Rough Science’ thing. With the evening filming it’s been difficult chilling out, or even writing my diary. No chance of writing home, phoning, e-mailing, or writing the book that I am so passionate about. If it weren’t so beautiful here, and the local people so friendly, I would be feeling homesick. Rough Science is a great project and a dream job, but it’s not always as much fun as people might think. It’s genuinely hard work - a bit like a university field trip but much longer and much more intense.

Back down to the river. The scales are definitely an aborted challenge because the guys really do need help. Yesterday the weather changed for the worse, and today it is terrible. It’s going to be a cold, wet day - very wet. At least the rain keeps the sand flies down but it doesn’t help filming much. The cameras and sound gear are all suffering and have to go back to the sawmill to receive the ‘hairdryer treatment’. In the meantime, after making a second sluice and doing some prospecting I wander down to a barbeque area at a nearby gold mine and read some information boards on gold. I would make out that I knew these facts but I would be lying. Others might, so check out their diaries to see. Even though they aren’t my facts they do bear repeating. For example, did you know that one ounce of gold is enough to extrude 80 metres of wire? Or that if flattened one ounce of gold could be made into a sheet that would cover two table tennis tables? Cool!

Steve (our boss) arrives at the barbeque area and meets one of the staff, who extends a hand in friendship. “Sorry I had better not” he replied, “I’ve been doing stuff with dead sheep”. Nice quote Steve!

Back to the riverbank. I wouldn’t ever want to be a gold miner but it is genuinely quite a draw. I can see how it could become an obsession, the feeling when you see a flake of gold in the bottom of the sluice is magic.

After what seems like an age we make our way back to the sawmill. There is still lots of work to do. We had squeezed an enormous amount of work into two and a half days and now have to harvest the fruits of our labour. First the punga that had been used to trap the gold has to be dried and burnt to release the gold. Then the gold flakes and dust need to be cleaned up so that we can try the scales that Kathy has made. The scales work fine - a tribute to Kathy’s attention to detail, and we find that we have about half a gram. Not much to show for all the work, but it looked lovely - our own gold.

Content last updated: 17/07/2006