A trough or sluice having cleats, grooves, or steps across the bottom for holding quicksilver and catching particles of gold when auriferous earth is washed. Also one of the cleats, grooves or steps in such trough.
“A riffle through the pages revealed nothing more than a running total of household accounts, a summary taken from the housekeeper's records.”
riffler
A mechanical device consisting of a metal box with a series of vertical slats through which material is poured and randomly divided into two samples; this process is repeated to obtain a small representative sample of a bulk material.
“Surfaces can be smoothed down by rasps, files, and rifflers or by carborundum and emery, and the addition of water avoids a build-up of dust.”
“Spinning rifflers use either a rotating carousel of collection vessels and a stationary vibratory feeder or a ring of stationary collection vessels and a rotating feeder.”
