1What is the basic idea of panning?
Shake to settle the heavy grains to the bottom, then wash the light material off the top. Every panning style is some version of those two steps repeated: stratify, then strip.
The motion, the mistakes, and how to keep fine gold in the pan.
Shake to settle the heavy grains to the bottom, then wash the light material off the top. Every panning style is some version of those two steps repeated: stratify, then strip.
No more than about two-thirds full, and less while learning. An overfull pan cannot be stratified properly and gold rides out with the gravel. Small, careful pans beat big, sloppy ones.
Submerge it, and shake it side to side and in small circles for a while — longer than feels necessary. The heavy grains work their way to the bottom during this shaking, not during the washing. Insufficient shaking is the main reason gold is lost.
Tilt the pan slightly away from you so the riffles are on the low side, then dip and lift with a gentle forward motion so water carries the top layer over the edge. Between every few washes, level the pan and shake again to re-settle.
Almost always from washing too hard or too soon. Fine gold floats out with the light sand if the pan is not fully stratified and if the water moves fast. Shake more, wash gentler, and finish with very little water.
They catch heavy grains as the light material washes over them, giving you a margin for error. Keep them on the low side during washing so anything moving toward the edge has to cross them.
Yes. Screening out the stones bigger than a pea lets the pan stratify quickly and cleanly. Check the screen for any coarse gold before discarding, then pan the fines.
When only black sand and heavies are left, add a little water, tilt gently and swirl so the black sand fans out in a thin crescent. Gold, being heavier, stays at the top of the fan while the black sand spreads below it.
With a thin layer of concentrate in the pan, tapping the pan’s edge makes gold walk toward the tapped side while lighter grains stay. It is a way of separating the last bit of black sand from fine gold without water.
With a snuffer bottle for flakes and dust, or a wet fingertip for single flakes. Squeeze the snuffer, put the tip on the flake and release; it sucks the flake and a little water into the bottle.
Dark green or black pans show gold clearly; blue and grey also work. Light-coloured pans hide fine gold. Avoid greasy or waxy pans — grease makes fine gold float.
Plastic for almost everyone: lighter, non-rusting, with moulded riffles, and it does not need seasoning. Metal pans need the factory grease burned off and can rust, but they last for decades.
A medium pan for general work, a small one for finishing concentrates. Large pans process more but are tiring to shake properly for long periods, which leads to losing gold.
Moving water washes the pan uncontrollably and carries fine gold away. Pan in a calm pool or a tub. If you have to pan in current, keep the pan low and shielded by your body.
Neoprene gloves, and short sessions. Numb hands lose control of the pan and gold with it. In winter many people carry gravel to a tub of less cold water.
Not properly. Dry panning — tossing and blowing — recovers only coarse gold. For dry beds, carry water for a pan or use a dry washer designed for the job.
Seed a pan with a few pieces of lead shot or a known flake and pan it; if all of them are still there at the end, your technique keeps gold. Do this regularly, especially after a break from the hobby.
A pan of gravel from one spot, panned to see what it holds. Take several across a bar — head, middle, tail, and down to the hardest layer — and compare. The pattern of the results shows where the pay streak is.
Location, depth, what layer the gravel came from, and the count and size of the colours (flakes). A note and a photo per pan is enough; a season of those notes is worth more than any single find.
Visible specks of gold in the bottom of a pan. Prospectors count colours as a rough measure: a pan with several colours from a small sample is worth digging deeper on; a pan with none is a reason to move.
Black sand is mostly magnetite and other heavy minerals, and they settle for the same reason gold does. Where you find black sand, water has been sorting by weight; gold, if present, is in that same layer.
A magnet pulls the magnetite out (keep the magnet in a bag so the sand releases easily). The remainder can be panned in a small pan or worked in a finishing tray with very little water.
A sluice processes much more gravel, but it does not tell you where the gold is; a pan does. Prospect with the pan, and use a sluice only once test pans have shown a spot worth processing.
Feed it slowly and evenly, keep the slope correct so the riffles clear but do not blow out, and classify the feed. Check the tailings with a pan; if there is gold in them, slow down or reduce the slope.
A small glass vial with a tight cap, filled with water so the flakes do not stick to the sides. Label vials by location and date — that is data as much as gold.
GOLDONGO scores entire stream networks for the trap geometry this guide describes — slope breaks, inside bends, junctions and bedrock. Pick your region and see where it stands.
This guide is general education, not advice for a specific place. A score, a map or a sentence here is not a licence to dig: the rules for prospecting, land access and protected areas differ from place to place — learn the ones that apply where you are before you go.