Spooning for Gold....Panning and the dreaded floaters!

[Kenmitch]

1st off this is a awesome site! Been lurking for the last couple of months! I really enjoy reading the words of wisdom on here!

Currently I just have a Gold cold....Time will tell if it develops into the fever!

I recently took a 5 day scouting/site seeing trip to Northern CA mainly to do the 49 run and visit interesting spots along the way. Started the adventure at Empire Mine State Historic Park after the dreaded 8hr initial drive from where I live in SoCal. Intended to start my adventure from South to North but do to campsite availability I had to do it the other way around. Guess in the end it worked out better anyways!

I decided that prospecting looks like an interesting hobby to take up. After doing some reading on here! Thanks guys/gals!

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On to the subject:

So after watching a few videos for pointers I decided to play around with panning for gold. It really seems somewhat simple in the end too me at least.

So seeing how I didn't really do any prospecting on my adventure I didn't bring any dirt home with me. I ordered me a couple of pans and some other supplies off of Amazon along with some cheaper paydirt. Guess it'll sound somewhat funny but I just ordered the dirt for the dirt. Figured if I was going to learn to pan I'd really need dirt similar to what's up their. I wound up ordering two 1lb bags in the end. 1st one was pretty much concentrated black sand with some smaller gravel. 2nd bag was Yuba river paydirt which pretty much looked very similar to what I observed during my adventure. I figured there wouldn't be much gold in the paydirt so I wound up doing some prospecting on eBay for some finer grained gold along with some sample/target nuggest for my metal detecting adventure/plans.

Panning seems simple enough if you follow the basic rules. At this point I guess I'm more or less just trying to get faster at it. I'm currently in the experimenting with panning panned dirt with a set amount of gold dropped in faze. The dang floaters seem to be an issue at times. I smack them down as long as I see them before they go over the edge of the pan. Once in a while I'll see one go over and try to keep a mental tally on them for later. I'm using a 10" pan over a larger 16" safety pan I call it. I tend to pan toward the center of the safety pan just in case. Today when I was practice panning i found a kind of silly but effective way to recover the floaters. I usually just pan my panned material a 2nd time just in case. Today I wound up using a black plastic spoon like the ones you get from fast food places. I kind of applied the panning technique to the spoon and just scooped up small amounts from the center of the pan. With good sunlight and the floaters being pretty lightweight spotting them was kind of easy as they tended to stay on top of the material. The spoon I had was a teaspoon so it doesn't hold much material but it's pretty much really quick to see gold or no gold in the spoon. Seemed a lot faster than the panning of the panned material approach I've done in the past. Had to dig a little digging with the spoon to get the last couple of pieces. Just though I'd share a little pointer back with you guys. Black spoon probably the best for a quick see or no see. I'm going to throw some larger black plastic spoons in with my prospecting supplies.

Thanks guys/gals!

 

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[kcm]

Add a drop or two of Dawn dish soap to your water before panning. That will break the surface tension. Anything that continues to float will not be gold.

Keep in mind, however, that if oil somehow gets added to the water after the soap, you may again have water tension problems and have to add another drop of soap.

Lastly, the dirt that you order may or may not be similar to what you might find in actual mining areas. I know of sellers that salt dirt from gold country, so there is a chance that the customer may get more gold than what anyone realizes. THEY get lots of repeat business!! However, there are other folks who will take plain, ordinary sand that has no gold, salt it with a known amount, then bag and sell. If you really want to know you're getting good product, I've heard that Dirt Hogg products are very good. They've built up a good reputation. Then again, some people swear by some of the lower-cost material available on eBay. So I guess to each his own.

 

[Rob in KS]

Use a little Jet Dry, it will foam less than soap. We have a well with hard water so we have a softener. I was having a really bad problem with stuff floating. A LITTLE jet dry solved the problem.

 

[Kenmitch]

Thanks for the responses!

I'll try some Dawn dish soap or Jet Dry in the future.

Dirt wise I just wanted to get something that looked similar to what's up north in the creeks, streams, and rivers. I double panned both bags already to make sure there is no more gold in them. Both bags actually had more gold in them than I was expecting anyways. I'm going to just mix both bags together as the 1st one had a lot of black sand and the 2nd one had very little but had lots of sand, gravel, small chunks of rocks, quartz, etc. Figure mixed it should be similar to what I'd expect to see in the real world scenario.

My intention with the dirt was practice panning with a know quantity of gold salted in. Today's experiment was .5 grams of #30 mesh salted in the already double panned dirt. I don't think there was anymore gold in the dirt before I salted it. End result was I got my .50 gram back out of it with a single panning and a couple minutes of spooning. I'm trying to get faster at panning so the set quantity of gold seems like the best test method I can think of.

 

[WesternMassGold]

Never heard of anybody spooning a gold pan. Usually works better with girls . just my opinion.

 

[arizau]

You have kind of stumbled on to one of the things that I usually do when trying to recover small mesh gold*.....that is, I usually pan a small quantity at a time (oftentimes a tablespoon or less). The other thing I do before final panning is to classify the material to like sizes. When gold is the about the same size as the other material it is about 3 or more times as heavy as any other piece it's size making it much easier to separate by panning.

Jet dry is pretty much essential when panning small mesh gold!

Good luck and welcome to the forum.

*I consider anything less than 30 mesh as small mesh gold and usually classify using 10 or 20, 30, 50 and 100 mesh screens and pan each fraction separately.

 

[Kenmitch]

@arizau....Thanks!

I still got to buy some classifiers and buckets. Still debating on which ones to get. Thinking smaller buckets and classifier would be best for the finer sizes?

 

[wtetro]

Gold cold?! Maybe this will help invoke a fever