Fourth Step to Dry Panning

After you have around one fourth to one half a cup left in your gold pan, you will need to carefully check the dry concentrates that are left for gold nuggets, flakes, gems, mineral specimens etc. This can be better done by distributing the concentrates thinly over the bottom of the pan. It is also recommended to very gently and carefully blow off the material on top so as to uncover the small pieces of gold so you are able to see them. You can also use a magnifying glass, as this will help you see the gold pieces better. It is essential to check your concentrates to avoid having to take back concentrates that do not have anything in them (where you will later check them). Due to the fact that there is no better way of panning than to wet pan, it is suggested take these concentrates and wet pan them. It is evident that through dry panning and dry washing it is usually only possible to obtain heavier pieces of gold. If this was not the case and were easier to recover this way, most likely everybody would get into this business. Recovering fine light gold is not an easy thing without water. There are a lot of areas that could be worked on and that would probably be very profitable if water were present so that it could be sluiced. Wet recovery is unquestionably easier and a more productive way of getting to the gold and because of this factor, dry washing can only be done on a large scale basis in richer mineral zones. As a result of this, there are a lot of dry areas where there is gold in small quantities, the setback is they are not sufficient quantities to make the exploration really worth it. Even though most placer gold was originally deposited by water, the changes that have taken place in nature over the centuries have caused a lot of placer deposits dry. There are sand washes in gold producing country that sometimes has a lot of fine or what is known as flour gold that can be recovered through dry panning or dry washing. In many cases it is possible to find little nuggets mixed in with placer gold and this can be effortlessly detected with a good modern metal detector.