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As little as 5 feet in one direction can mean the difference between 5 colors and 20 in each pan! Panning for gold is actually very simple. In your pan you are trying to recreate on a very small scale what Mother Nature does herself in the riverbeds. You will be attempting to concentrate the heaviest materials gold into the bottom of your pan.
Basic Gold Panning Procedure: Find a good spot to do your panning. It's best to choose a spot where the water is not too deep and moves just swiftly enough to keep the water clear from the panning. Pick a spot where you will be most comfortable. Wear rubber boots or hip waders so you can get further down to the water level and not wreck your back by stooping all day. Use at least a quarter inch screen 4 mesh. While gold is heavy, very small flakes will have a difficult time displacing the larger rocks.
Screening or classifying material down will make this much easier and speed your panning greatly. Submerge the pan just below the rim and shake side to side or around and around fairly vigorously. Be careful not to wash a lot of material out of your pan while doing this. The old and other heavy material black sands will work their way down to the bottom of your pan while the lighter and valueless materials will rise to the top.
You will repeat the process often during your panning with the goal to keep the gold in your pan last. You want to be sure to rinse off any large rocks and break up any clay balls or roots. Clay balls are gold robbers - break those up. Mud and silt will float up and out. Do not concern yourself about losing any gold when this happens. After the entire contents of the pan have been thoroughly broken up, take the pan in your hands with cheater riffles on the far side of the pan and shake it, using a vigorous left and right motion just under the surface of the water.
This action will help to break up the contents of the pan even more and will also start to work the heavier materials downwards in the pan while the lighter materials will start to surface. Be careful not to get so vigorous in your left and right shaking that you slosh material out of the pan during this step.
It is this same liquid state of suspension that allows the heavier materials to sink in the pan while the lighter materials emerge to the surface. As the shaking action causes rocks to rise up to the surface, sweep them out of the pan using your fingers or the side of your hand.
When picking the larger rocks out of the pan, make sure that they are clean of clay and other particles before you toss them out. Clay sometimes contains pieces of gold and also has a tendency to grab onto the gold in your pan. Working the raw material through a classification screen into the gold pan during Step 1 or Step 3 will eliminate the need to sweep out larger rocks in Step 6.
This will also allow you to pan a larger sample of the finer-sized material which contains all the gold you will find in a pan sample. Continue to do steps five and six, shaking the pan and sweeping out the rocks and pebbles if present , until most of the medium-sized material is out of your pan. Tilt the forward edge of your pan downward slightly to bring the forward-bottom edge of the pan to a lower position. With the pan tilted forward, shake it back and forth using the same left and right motion. Be careful not to tilt the pan forward so much that any material is spilled over the forward-edge while shaking.
Carefully, by using a forward and backward movement, or a slight circular motion just below the surface of the water, allow the water to sweep the top layer of worthless, lighter materials out of the pan. Only allow the water to sweep out a little at a time, while watching closely for the heavier materials to be uncovered as the lighter materials are swept out.
It takes some judgment in this step to determine just how much material to sweep off before having to shake again so that no gold is lost. It will just take a little practice in panning gold before you will begin to see the difference between the lighter materials and the heavier materials in your pan.
You will develop a feel for knowing how much material can be safely swept out before re-shaking is necessary. When you are first starting, it is best to re-shake as often as you feel that it is needed to prevent losing any gold. When in doubt, shake!
There are a few factors which can be pointed out to help you with this. Heavier materials are usually. You will notice while shaking the pan that it is the lighter-colored materials that are vibrating on the surface. You will also notice that as the lighter materials are swept out of the pan, the darker-colored materials are uncovered. Materials tend to get darker and heavier as you work your way down toward the bottom of the pan, where the darkest and heaviest materials will be found, they being the purple and black sands, which are usually minerals of the iron family.
The exception to this is gold, which is heaviest of all. Gold usually is of a bright and shiny metallic color and shows out well in contrast to the other heavier materials at the bottom of the gold pan. One other factor to keep in mind is that the lighter materials sweep out of your pan more easily than do the heavier materials. As the heavier materials are uncovered, they are increasingly more resistant to being swept out of the pan, and will give you an indication of when it is time to re-shake.
As you work your way down through your pan, sometimes gold particles will show themselves as you get down to the heavier materials. When you see gold, you know it is time to re-shake your pan. There is another popular method of sweeping the lighter materials out of the top of your pan which you might prefer to use. It is done by dipping your pan under the water and lifting it up, while allowing the water to run off the forward edge of the pan, taking the top layer of material along with it.
Once the top layer of lighter material is washed out of your pan, re-shake to bring more lighter materials to the top. If you continue to shake the lighter materials to the top and sweep them off, eventually you will be left with the heaviest material of all, which is the gold.
It does not take much shaking to bring a new layer of lighter material to the surface. Maybe 5 or 6 seconds of shaking will do it, maybe less. It all depends upon the consistency of the material and how much gold is present. Continue to pluck out the larger-sized rocks and pebbles as they show themselves during the process. Every few cycles of sweeping and re-shaking, tilt your pan back to the level position and re-shake.
Make sure they are washed clean they should be after following these steps. Repeat these steps until all the large-ish rocks have been removed and the heavier concentrates such as gold and sand have settled at the bottom of the pan. Hold your pan just under the water, making sure that it is fully submerged. Tilt the pan slightly away from you so that it looks like you are trying to catch the current of the water. Swirl the pan from side to side.
Be cautious but use enough force to move the surface of the pan and the lighter gravel out over the edge of the pan. Level the pan flat. Shake it back and forth while it is still in the water. Leveling and shaking the pan will cause the gold to settle to the bottom of the pan and the lighter material to come to the top.
Repeat this process several times. When you finish this part of the panning process, there should only be about two cups of heavier material left in your pan. There should not be anymore rocks or pebbles. The materials remaining in the pan are the heaviest. Raise the pan out of the water. Make sure there is about an inch of water left in the pan.
The water is necessary because you will continue to sift the sand from the gold when the pan is taken out of the stream. Tilt the pan towards you slightly. Swirl the water and materials slowly in a circle. Doing this allows you to check and see if there are any larger nuggets or pieces of gold that can be picked out by hand. This could be a legitimate gold sample bottle purchased at a store, or a jar or pill bottle found at home.
There is another popular method of sweeping the lighter materials out of the top of your pan which you might prefer to use. Submerged gold from the pan can consequently be sucked up through the tube. Views Read Edit View history. Then the remaining concentrates are poured into a small coffee can or bucket and allowed to accumulate there until the end of the day, or week, or whenever enough concentrates have been collected to make it worthwhile further process them. Place a magnet on the bottom side of the pan and slowly move it around the pan. Feel free to Email us with your ideas. You can likely find a local jeweler or gold buyer who will buy it from you.
Submerge the pan in the water again. Repeat the steps of part three alternating back and forth between swirling the pan and leveling and shaking it. Make sure to be extremely careful when using this step--if you shake your pan too vigorously, you may lose some of your gold.
Use a magnet if you have a plastic pan. Remove the pan from the stream, keeping as little water as possible in the pan.
Place a magnet on the bottom side of the pan and slowly move it around the pan. Black sand is magnetic and will be attracted to the magnet. This process will quickly separate the black sand from the gold. If you choose to use the magnet, you can either scoop the trapped black sand out, or use a gold snifter bottle. Snifter bottles have a sucking tube attached to the top just like eye drop bottles, which you can use for a store bought snifter.
When you squeeze the bottle, a vacuum is created. When you release the bottle, it will suck up whatever its pointing at in this case, gold and water. Your gold will then safely be in the bottle. Pour the rest of the black sand and gold into a bottle. Once you have sifted as much black sand as possible from the gold, it is best to pour the combination into a bottle.
You are now a genuine prospector. Go to a stream or river where you have heard gold has been found. Streams and rivers carry small flakes and nuggets from upstream deposits. Every winter, storms unearth more gold, and that gold could be yours. Pick a spot along the side of the stream or river. The spot you pick should have water that is a minimum of six inches deep. If it is any shallower than that, the water might be too muddy or filled with leaves and other debris to get a good look at your pan when it is under the water.
Pick a spot with a slow current. The water should be moving fast enough to carry away the silt and debris you sift out of your pan, but slow enough the water will not upset your panning motions when your pan is submerged.