On tonight’s Gold Rush, the season is winding down, and we will see how Rick Ness, Parker Schnabel, and Tony Beets are faring in the gold department.
However, there’s trouble ahead for Ness who has a run-in with a pipe while excavating in our exclusive clip.
It is no secret that Rick Ness has been having a tough season on Gold Rush on Discovery. The toll of being behind the eight-ball for equipment costs and lack of gold is adding up.
Meanwhile, his competition over in the Beets camp is having an outstanding season, as Monica Beets has proven to be papa Tony Beets’ secret weapon with her amazing girl squad.
What happens to Rick Ness tonight?
A giant wet soggy catastrophe is what goes down for Ness, who has had a rough season.
The exclusive clip opens with Ness in a huddle with foreman Freddy Dodge, who is carefully explaining the physics of pipes and how water travels and what causes drag on a water pump motor.
Freddy is listening to Rick, who says: “I don’t know what’s going on with this pump, Freddy.”
Freddy says: “I think it’s all the bends in the pipe, Rick. you’re pumping, you know, 100 foot up in the air and you’re pumping 900 foot from the pond so, for every two feet of elevation is about a pound of pressure right?
“And for every one of those corners in that pipe is creating friction. So, right now it’s going to the left and banging the side, to the right banging the side to the left…and plumbers say so many 90-degree curves make a dead end.
“So if you can straighten that pipe out and that water is just going straight, you’re gonna have a lot less friction in that line. I bet you can knock the RPM down it’s gonna save you fuel too.”
Agreeing with Freddy, Rick says: “Save fuel and wear and tear, yeah. I’m just gonna jump in that 480 then go down there and straighten it out.”
After getting into the 480, he says, “Well in this case with how much distance we’re trying to send this water and how much height we’re trying to send it.
“If you got curves in your pipe like this it’s just adding a bunch of friction and making the water pump work a lot harder than it needs to so.
“It’s smarter to just have in a straight line where we had it but we’ve been slowly moving it around to make way for our tailings and now it’s just kind of gotten to look like a snake.
“I just need to straighten out a few of these bends and approve efficiency and not make us have to work so hard it’s the only one we got we needed to run for the rest of the year.”
He then punctures a pipe and a geyser of water erupts. Rick curses: “Dammit!”
Who is Freddy Dodge?
A seasoned gold mining expert, Dodge’s hands-on mastery can be seen on Discovery Channel’s series Gold Rush.
Freddy’s expertise refined former Gold Rush star Todd Hoffman’s gold-catching equipment in season one. Freddy co-designed the Hoffman’s season three washplant Big Red and went on a mission for gold in Guyana in season four.
His uncanny ability in gold mining and machinery was honed in part to his upbringing.
He was raised on his grandparents’ cattle ranch in Walden, Colorado. The second youngest of four brothers, his passion for gold mining was evident at an early age, having panned for the metal in a local creek at just eight years old.
Exclusive preview of Gold Rush:
Watch as the best-laid plans get screwed up as Rick busts open a water pipe, setting him back in time and money:
Gold Rush airs Fridays at 9 pm on Discovery.