Your Gold Panning Supplies Source
A hearty welcome to all you fellow outdoor adventurers. We are here to show you how to get what you need for your gold panning adventures. Your basic supplies.
My name is Edwin Brown. I was introduced to gold chasing by my cousin many
years ago. He showed me how to pan for gold. And “gold fever” got me in its grip.
Gold Panning
Summer comes and hearts turn to fun outdoor activities. Each year brings fresh excitement, and for me that means a new place to pan, or a new technique to try. Each summer/fall is a new gold panning
adventure. And I have enjoyed good success over the years as I have learned how to find gold and the best ways to recover it.
The purpose of this website is to point out to you the basic gold panning equipment you will need to get the most out of your forays into the field.
Valentine Day is coming. Do you or your loved one need something more to get the most out of this fascinating hobby?
The nice thing about gold panning supplies is that you don’t need to spend
a fortune to get going. Here is a simple list of what you need..
a good gold pan
a snuffer bottle
a digging tool
a classifier
a bucket
That’s it to start. And after you get some experience and want to increase the
amount of material you can process in a given period of time, then you can
start thinking about more advanced gold getting tools like
sluice boxes
rocker boxes
high bankers
dredges
concentrators
As you make your way through this site, you will find information on where to
look for gold, some tips on how to do gold panning, and access to a good
source of gold mining supplies run by a real life gold miner himself.
Fine Gold Recovery Systems
Most gold you will get out in the field is fine gold, and when you bring your gold laden black sands home, you will need some one or more of the fine gold recovery systems available in the marketplace.
There are three basic kinds of mechanisms for fine gold recovery. First, there are the tiny little sluices which usually are set up with a small battery operated pump in a recycled water setting. You spoon in the black sand, and your gold is caught by the sluice riffles.
I have one of these inexpensive systems, and they work pretty well if you go slow and run your material at least twice to keep reducing the black sand. But in the end, you will still need to so some very careful panning to get rid of the last of the heavy iron sand.
Then there are the spiral gold wheels. These work also, but are a little slow and care must be taken regarding the rate at which you feed the material. Some wheels take the fine material, while some can take bank run material that has been classified down to smaller pebbles and sand.
Gold wheels cost more than the little sluice type gold concentrators, but they range in price. I like the Desert Fox personally, and it is one of the least expensive wheels. The Desert Fox is especially popular among prospectors who work the old tailing piles in the deserts of the Southwest. They are able to get quite a bit of the fine gold the old timers left behind.
A third type of gold concentrator is called the blue bowl gold recovery system. This is the one I use most. You can run it with a little pump in a water recycling setup or just with your garden hose from the house.
The blue bowl is a simple system which uses centrifugal force to isolate the gold from the black sands. I find that if I am careful in how I run my water, I can get both the fine and the really fine gold dust from my concentrates. It can make for a pleasant afternoon, seeing just how much tiny gold you actually have in your concentrates.
Besides taking care how you run your water, it is also critical that you have the bowl level, so I would recommend you buy the leg levelers when you get the bowl.
And here is another source.
Metal Detectors For Gold
Hunting for gold is fun stuff, but it can be a lot of work too.
Using metal detectors for gold can make your gold nugget hunting a lot easier. You only need to dig when you think you have a good signal.
Metal detecting for gold has come a long ways in the last 20 years. Improvement in technology have made a big difference in how easily and how deeply you can detect gold in the ground. And more than that, some gold detectors are so sensitive they can pick up on tiny gold nuggets that the old machines would have missed.
However, having said all this, you really need to learn your machine. Even with the best detectors, you will get occasional false signals, so you will be digging trash sometimes. That is going to be unavoidable. And even when you are not digging a lot, metal detecting for gold can be tiring. You have to have patience for the big payoff.
One good idea is to buy a small gold nugget (called a “picker”) and practice “finding it” with your detector. Bury it in a well marked spot and try different depths to see how your machine does in picking up your precious little target. You could put it in a little baggie so you can find
it easily when you do dig it up. You could even do this in the area where you plan to hunt for real. Then you get an idea of how your detector behaves in that kind of soil/gravel.
The patient guy or gal can make one find that could easily pay for his or her whole detector. With that in mind, it is always a good idea to do your research of gold mining areas to see what the history is for finding gold nuggets there. Are there reports of the old timers finding big chunks of the good stuff? Is it public ground, or do you need to contact the property owner?
Some detectors are designed primarily for gold nugget hunting for all sizes. Others are dual purpose, being good for both gold nuggets and for coins. It all depends on what you want. If your real heart’s desire is to find gold nuggets, then go with the detector designed for that, and buy a second detector for coin hunting. If you don’t want to get two, buy a good quality machine that is pretty good for both. You may have to spend more than is convenient, but that’s your decision.
One nice thing is that many detectors designed for coins also do a pretty good job finding gold and silver jewelry, too. So you can go for the gold on the beach or lake shore if you want, without having to travel to far away gold fields.
So, if you are looking to buy metal detectors for gold, here are some suggested models with a history of being used successfully in the gold fields for uncovering those beautiful gold nuggets.
These detectors vary in price. Some are what could be called entry level machines, others are somewhat more advanced medium level.
Garrett Scorpion Gold Stinger Metal Detector
Fisher Gold Bug-2 Metal Detector with 6 1/2″ Elliptical Search Coil
Fisher Gold Bug-2 Metal Detector with 6 1/2″ Elliptical Search Coil
Dredge For Gold With Gold Suckers
Did you know you can dredge for gold the easy way, with simple and inexpensive tools for gold?
(By the way, these make a great Valentine present!)
Gold suckers, also known as hand dredges, allow you to dredge gold in the cracks and crevices of underwater bedrock and clean them out just fine. Working behind boulders and in fast water is another great way to suction up the gold trapped there.
Gold hand dredges come in many configuration but one thing they have in common: you will not be shelling out the thousand or more dollars a regular surface suction dredge would cost you. You will have no need for motors of any kind to run and maintain. And many great gold suckers can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
These inexpensive tools for gold can be used by regular gold dredgers to sample an area before bringing in the bigger equipment.
If you are a gold prospector with some experience, you know how frustrating it can be to dig out and clean a crack or crevice that is underwater. The wet material keeps falling off your little trowel or spoon, and you have the added problem of just getting a hold of the last remaining gold bearing debris deep in the crevice.
What you come to realize pretty quickly is that you need GOLD SUCKER POWER. And when you get it – oh, what a difference it makes!
Valentine Day gift anyone?
One little difficulty you will encounter with hand dredges is that you have to have somewhere to stow the material you are vacuuming up. You do have some options. You can have a bucket handy to dump the load into each time your sucker tube is full. A better system is to have a hose going from your gold sucker to a collection bucket. That way you spend more time gathering material without have to constantly empty the tube manually.
That’s why I like the Gold-N-Sand system. It’s a sweet working little tool for gold that you can use to get bucket after bucket of rich gold bearing material, quickly and efficiently. If you have ever tried to shovel up gold bearing gravel that is underwater, you know what a pain that can be. This answers that difficulty perfectly.
A further refinement of the Gold-N-Sand system is that you can even use a “boomer box” adapter so that your hose leads directly into a nearby sluice box setup. The result is that the gold bearing materials you are capturing are being immediately concentrated by the sluice. You end up with far less gold material you will need to pan out later.
How about some videos of the Gold-N-Sand at work? Take a look.
