Gold Panning & Techniques

The world has a great amount of gold, however it can mainly be found in low concentrations and therefore a great amount of gold mining equipment is purchased by small scale miners, more commonly known as recreational or weekend prospectors and the one piece of equipment that has been being used for a long and that remains popular to this very day is the famous gold pan. The gold pan is still one of the most necessary and essential parts of gold mining equipment a person who is interested in prospecting can have. The gold pan was one of the first tools used in searching for gold and is one of the last used and they are even used in commercial mining to verify the value of ore being processed. The gold pan can be used in any place that gold occurs in which is close to seventy five percent of all the countries in the world. There are different types of gold pans that to choose from which include the steel pan and the plastic pan.

Gold panning technique
To start gold panning, you will need to fill the gold pan around half ways with the gravel and sand, which has been dug as close to bedrock as possible. With some practice at it, you might prefer filing the pan level up to the top. Whatever you decide, you will now need to submerge the gold pan in the water at around six inches to one foot in depth. Remember that the water you are submerging the pan in needs to be still water, otherwise it will carry away all of the material inside of your pan. The material will now need to be knead until all of the clay has been dispersed and the lumps of dirt have been broken and crushed completely. You can do this with your hand. If you are working in shallow water you can even place the pan on the bottom and there work with both your hands. If not, you will need to hold the pan with one hand and work the materials with the other hand. You will need to take out the bigger rocks, pebbles and worthless debris and throw them out. Once the gold pan is held down flat you will need to shake it under the water so that the heavy gold settles down to the bottom. You will then need to tilt the pan and raise it rapidly, while still under the water, and start doing a swirling motion which will wash off some of the lighter materials that are on the top of the pan. You will need to continue doing this with a rotating motion, lower one wrist first and then the other one and every once in awhile shake the pan under the water or with water in it to where the gold and the heavier materials remain inside on the bottom. You can also tap the pan as this will help these to settle down better. With the right kind of maneuver the material will concentrate at the edge of the bottom of the gold pan. You will need to be careful to not allow any of the gold to work its way up to the top or get on top of the dirt. Continue with the whole process; slow down towards the end, until you do not see anything else but black sand and gold in the pan. You can pick out the nuggets and the coarse gold with a pocket knife and if they are very small you can use tweezers. The difficult part of the process really is separating the black sand from the gold. Nonetheless, it can be done successfully and almost completely by swirling the contents very gently and carefully as previously mentioned but make sure that the gold does not work its way to the top of the pan. This part of the process is usually carried out on top of another pan or in a tub so that if any of the gold falls out, it does not get lost. The concentrates of the pan will need to get dried. In the case of black sands, that are mainly made of magnetite can be taken out with a magnet or by blowing over them very carefully on top of a smooth surface. In the case of the magnet, you can use an ordinary one, just make sure to wrap it in cellophane, you will see that once you take the cellophane off of the magnet, the magnetite will fall off of it. The last thing you want to have to do is pick it off of the direct magnet. If the sand is lighter than the gold though, they can simply be gently blown away. When sampling is done, the prospector will need to be careful to not lose any of the gold. When large scale mining is done, nonetheless, the extra time that is required to make sure all the gold has been saved will not be reasonable because the value is not very big.