Gold Panning Equipment

Gold Panning Equipment… OK, so from the first episode you know that gold is dense and that’s why gold panning works. Now we’ll spend a little time talking about the equipment you’ll need and some that will just make panning easier and more productive. So, here’s a snapshot of the equipment that I’ve found convenient:

Panning Equipment

We’ll go over each piece of equipment in a moment, but for convenience, here’s a list:

1 shovel
2 buckets
1 gold pan
1 trowel
1 hand pick
1 classifier (sieve)

The shovel, trowel, and hand pick are pretty familiar and common gardening items so I won’t be going into more detail about those other than to say that I’ve chosen mine to be easy to carry or put into a pack in case I need to tote them a ways. If you’re interested in getting your own equipment, I’ve provided links at the end of this article. The most important item of the bunch, and the only one that is really necessary is the gold pan itself.

Gold Pan

Modern gold pans are almost always made of plastic and have some sort of ridge structure to help keep the gold in the pan as water is being sloshed around. The one I like the most, shown here, is about 14 inches in diameter and green in color. There are many sizes, styles, and colors of pans available as you can see from this collection:

Variety of Gold Pans

Black 10″
Blue 10″
Blue 12″
Green 10″
Green 14″

You can probably see that the style of ridges is different in these pans as well. The green ones have a single set of deep cut ridges. The blue pans have one set of deep cut ridges and one set of shallow cut ridges. I suppose that the theory is that you can move to the shallow cut ridges as you get down to finer and finer material while panning. Personally, I have not found this very useful and do just fine with the single set of rides. The black pan is one of the type you’ll find in many hardware, sporting good, and novelty stores. It’s made of plastic but is designed to look like an old fashioned steel pan. I really recommend against them as they are not nearly as efficient as the others shown. What I do recommend is that you go with the largest pan you can get, with the deep ridges, that you can handle with it full of dirt and water. One of the keys to panning is to go through as much material as possible in the shortest amount of time. So, the larger the pan, the faster the panning!… unless it’s too heavy for you and you drop the whole thing in the creek. OK, let’s move on to the next piece of recommended equipment, the classifier. It’s really just a sieve, but they call it a classifier because they come in several different grate sizes so you can “classify” the size of material that gets through. Here’s what it looks like:

Classifier (or Sieve)

You see it sitting on top of a bucket because that’s how it’s used. They’re designed to fit a standard 3 or 5 gallon bucket. To use it, you dig up a shovel full of gravel and dump it in the classifier that’s sitting on a bucket. Then, you use a second bucket to pour water over the material to wash the dirt, sand, and small gravel down into the bucket. You may need to use your hands to get all the larger material washed off and down into the bucket. What you’re trying to do is get all the fine gold that may have been hiding in the sand and mud down into the bucket. If there’s a hunk of gold large enough to be captured by the classifier, trust me, you’ll see it when you toss out the stuff that’s left after you’ve washed the mud off. So, that’s about it for equipment. Pretty simple! You need a pan… of course. You need a classifier so you don’t have to stick 6 inch diameter rocks in your pan. You need one bucket to collect the panning material and another to get water to wash it off in the classifier. And, you need something to dig with. Whoops! Almost forgot… Of course you are going to be lucky and find some gold so you need something to put it in. One of these little glass vials works great: