The dredge is described as either a floating workhorse or a mechanical gold pan.
Gold Dredge No. 8 extracted millions of ounces of gold from the frozen Alaskan ground.



Dredge No.8 was manufactured in 1927-28 by Bethlehem Steel Company, Ship Building Division.
 The equipment was shipped from Pennsylvania by transcontinental railroad and
 by ocean-going barge to the Alaskan Railroad to be assembled in early 1928 just west of Fox,
Alaska at the head of the Goldstream Valley.

Gold Dredge No.8 has a 43 foot 9 inch high bow-gantry which supported the belt-driven bucket line,
with its 68 manganese steel buckets, each with a capacity of 6 cubic feet and weight of 1,583 pounds.

The buckets were mounted on a steel digging ladder which measured in excess of 84 feet.

 
The bucket line discharged gravel in to a dump-hopper to a belt-driven trommel-screen,
 where perforations ranging in size from 3/8 to 1-5/8 inches, sized the gravel.
During the process, an occasional large nugget would stick in the screens as the dredged material traveled
down a gentle decline.  In the trommel, the relatively heavy gold fell through the screens;
 the rocks and gravels passed onto a conveyor belt to be discharged.
Nozzles inside the trommel drum were used to wash the gold from the gravel
before it was carried by a steel-reinforced conveyor belt to the tailing pile behind the dredge.
 This process resulted in removal of approximately 97 percent of the gold from the rich gravels.