Gold Pans and Metal Detectors

If used correctly, having a gold pan and a metal detector can be very useful for the gold panner or weekend prospector. Metal detectors can help a prospector locate nugget deposits, which are good locations to pan in. if you are looking for nuggets in a creek or a stream bed that has rocks with mineral content, having a good ground balancing and sensitive metal detector will help you a lot. As a matter a fact it would be almost impossible to find gold nuggets in this type of location without a metal detector.

Metal detectors are very useful along with a good plastic gold pan because they can help save time. Instead of having to spend a lot of time digging and giving up on a target that may have gold inside of big pile of gravel or rock, metal detectors can help you to stay focused on the spot you need to and not waste time on useless spots.

Plastic gold pans are very vital because they help to scan the samples in a very effective way and this would not be possible with a metal pan.

Plastic pans are valuable because the conductive target responds to it. If you do not get a response from it, simply dump the pan out again and scan the area again until the metal detector signals it. Once you have found it, shovel it up into the pan. There is not much to it except following the steps and with a little bit of practice you can become quite the prospector in very little time.

Using this technique will help to make the recovery of gold a lot easier and it will save you a lot of precious time. You will see that plastic gold pans that have traps in them are very efficient when it comes to sorting through gravel and sand to find the metal object your metal detector has located.

The techniques that you use for recovering gold with a plastic gold pan will be the same ones you will need to use when you are looking in a dry wash or placer deposit, only the object will be easier to find that in a stream. Looking through old dredge tailings might be a little bit more difficult to find gold targets and it is possible you will over look some before you get on hand on how a good technique works. If you are working in an area that has loose material, the gold can easily slip down and work its way deeper into the pile of tailings. After they have been lost it is very difficult to find them or recover them again and it will seem that each time you dig deeper to get to them they just bury themselves even deeper.

When this type of thing happens it is very normal to feel like giving up on it and going on to a new area, however you will be surprised at how quickly a person is able to learn how to master certain techniques and how it is possible to become very good at recovering the metal object, which may very well be gold.

One very good way for the weekend miner or prospector to find gold these days is by using a modern metal detector (the ones that can be efficiently ground balanced). A modern metal detector will help a prospector find gold deposits, and once they are found a good plastic gold pan can be used for panning. Whether or not you find a lot of gold or not, simply having the opportunity of sitting at the edge of a stream or a mountain can be one of the most gratifying experiences for anyone.

There are plastic gold pans that can be used for both wet and dry panning and old stream beds and washes can be made to create gold. Most of the gold pans these days have built in riffle traps that are useful because they trap the gold even when you are in an area that has no water. Keep in mind that dry panning is a little more difficult than wet panning and it requires a bit more practice. In some cases dry panning has proven to be more profitable because there are areas that have dry streams that can in some cases be very productive. Keep in mind also that the old time miners in the past did not have the tools we have available to pan these days and needed to work with running water because it was easier to pan this way. It’s possible that you just may happen to spot a dry location that has never been panned before, who knows?

There are a lot of different innovative tools available for the prospector today. One such tool is known as a sluice. There are different size sluices available which range from very big ones to hand held sluices.

The pans we have available for prospecting these days, as well as the electronic detection equipment has made it possible for us to discover new areas with gold. Whether you take prospecting up as a hobby or as a business, you will find that it can prove to be exciting, fun and very profitable at times.