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. 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.

GOLD PANNING INSTRUCTIONS - LEARN HOW TO PAN FOR GOLD

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.

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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.

Panning Down All The Way To Gold

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. This is optional but a large rock that you can sit on while prospecting will make your day much easier and your legs and back will thank you. 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.

How to Pan for Gold (with Pictures) - wikiHow

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.


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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.

Gold panning

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. This keeps any gold from being allowed to work its way up the forward-edge of your pan.

Continue the above steps of sweeping and re-shaking until you are down to the heaviest materials in your pan. Black sands consist mainly or in part of the following: Once down to the heaviest black sands in your pan, you can get a quick look at the concentrates to see how much gold is present by allowing about a half-cup of water into the pan, tilting the pan forward as before, and shaking from left to right to place the concentrates in the forward-bottom section of your pan. Then, level the pan off and swirl the water around in slow circles.

This action will gradually uncover the concentrates, and you can get a look at any gold that is present. The amount of gold in your pan will give you an idea how rich the raw material is that you are sampling. A magnet can be used to help remove the magnetic black sands from the gold pan. Take care when doing this. While gold is not magnetic, sometimes particles of gold will become trapped in the magnetic net of iron particles which clump together and attach to the magnet. I prefer to drop the magnetic sands into a second plastic gold pan, swish them around, and then pick them up once again with the magnet.

Depending upon how much gold this leaves behind, I might do this several times before finally discarding the magnetic sands. Many beginners like to stop panning at this point and pick out all the pieces of gold colors with tweezers. This is one way of recovering the gold from your pan, but it is a pretty slow method. Retrieved August 30, Retrieved December 30, Call number 90A in four series.

Series 1 deal with correspondence to Patents and Printed Materials. Hydraulic and Placer Mining. Glossary of Mining and Metallurgical Terms. American Institute of Mining Engineers. Retrieved 29 August Metallurgical assay Non-ferrous extractive metallurgy.


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