Gold Pans

The most universal sizes of pans today are the eight to twelve inch pans and these are mainly used to do sampling and for cleaning up. One of the most popular and most liked pans is the fourteen-inch pan because of its multi size use. There are also sixteen to eighteen inch gold pans, however these are generally used by people that have more experience at gold panning. The bigger gold pan load involves more resistance and method.

An expert or professional gold panner can only process around one cubic yard of material in an 8 hour day. However since the hand sluice was made, as well as the rocker and dredge, even the most inexperienced person can process and come up with around ¾ of a cubic yard every hour.

Even though we now have more sophisticated and refined tools, the gold pan is still essential in order to clean up the sluice box. With the pan the concentrate is worked to a point where the hefty gold can be taken out and after this is done what is left is heavy or black sand. If you are going to be doing this make sure you save the sand that remains in order to separate it later on, this can be done by jigging or any type of process in which you are able to save gold sized at 100 mesh or above which would be very hard to get by just panning.

Just make sure you hang onto the black sand concentrates you have. Believe it or not those black sand concentrates can have a value of anywhere from one to ten dollars a pound, making it a very important commodity, without a doubt.

Recreational mining has become very popular in some countries, especially within the United States, and one of the main tools used for this hobby or recreation is the gold pan. There are a lot of big resorts all over the world where the activities focus primarily around gold panning. There is perhaps anywhere close to of three million gold pans that are sold every year within the United States alone. 

Getting into this hobby of gold panning might just be something you will highly enjoy and it could prove to be one of the most entertaining hobbies you have ever known about. The chances of obtaining a pan full of material and finding out you have precious metal in any amount, whether only a gold flake or loaded with nuggets, is a feeling that simply cannot be described.