How To Use A Gold Panning Kit (Gold Panning Kit Instructions)

For those new to gold panning, getting a good gold panning kit is the perfect way of ensuring that you have everything you will need to pursue prospecting. However, for a total newcomer, it can be difficult to understand how every piece of equipment should be used. And since your success will be at least be partially dependant on how well you use your equipment, this is something I would like to cover in this article!

Read on to get more detailed information about each tool in your new gold panning kit, and how to use them!

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If you yet haven’t bought a kit for yourself, I have written an extensive guide where I recommend the best gold panning kits on the market. You can find it here.

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Table of Contents

Classifier

In simple terms, a classifier could be said to be a sort of sieve/screen that is usually made to fit on top of a gold pan or bucket. The main job of the classifier is to sort out larger rocks and debris so that they don’t interfere with the panning process.

Benefits of using a classifier

Here is how a classifier helps you achieve better results!

Panning gets easier: When panning, you remove the lighter materials by submerging the pan into water, raising it, and letting the water that escapes the pan carry the lighter materials with it. Bigger rocks will simply stay in the pan and require manual removal, which is time-consuming. A classifier screens out these rocks so that they don’t end up in the gold pan in the first place!
More Gold: As the panning process can be carried out quicker, you will be able to pan more material and collect more gold. And as you throw away the larger rocks they will not interfere with the panning process, often resulting in a higher recovery rate.
Less to carry: If you are collecting streambed material in a bucket and moving it to your panning location, having a classifier obviously means that you can toss away heavy rocks and only carry the valuable streambed material.

How to use a Classifier

To use a classifier, you just follow the steps below:

Place the classifier on top of the gold pan/bucket.
Take some gravel and pour it through the classifer net
Now only finer pebbles and sands will end up in the pan, while larger rocks stay in the classifier.
Before you remove the classifier and toss away its content, make sure that the rocks are clean from mud and dirt. If not, submerge the pan and the classifier underwater and give them a shake. That way you don’t risk throwing away any gold that might be contained in the mud or dirt.

Here is a video where the instructor uses several classifiers on top of each other, to separate materials of different sizes through several steps. However, the principle is exactly the same!

Gold Pan

As a prospector and small scale miner, your work will be centered around the gold pan. It’s lightweight, easy to carry, and can catch really tiny gold in the hands of a reasonably proficient user!

Today, most professional miners use a gold pan mostly to look for gold and explore new locations, or in the final cleanup process, when the black sands and gold are separated from one another. Gold pans are seldom used as a large scale production tools as they are pretty limited with regards to the quantity of streambed material they can process.

For the hobby prospector, however, they’re the perfect tool to get started with. And if you would find at a later stage that you want to upgrade your equipment, that’s easily done by getting yourself a sluice box, which will be covered shortly in this article as well.

How to Use a Gold Pan

Having a good technique when panning for gold will ensure that you lose as little gold as possible during the process.

Here is how you pan for gold in seven simple steps:

Collect the streambed material: Collect sand and gravel from the river and have them sorted through the classifier before they go into the gold pan. By reading the river for gold using basic geology, you can get a sense of where gold most likely to concentrate and focus your efforts on those locations.
Choose a good location for panning: The panning process involves submerging and raising the gold pan in water, which means that you need to find a place where the water is deep enough. Usually, around 8 inches(20 cm) will be enough. Also, try to pick a spot where the current is pretty calm so that it won’t pick up any gold as the pan is underwater.
Submerge the Pan and Work the Material: Now submerge the gold pan after you have filled it with sand and gravel. To avoid losing gold, the pan should not be filled above 3/4 of its capacity. Use your fingers to ensure that water makes its way all the way down to the bottoms of the pan, and break apart clumps of clay and dirt in which gold may be trapped if there are any.
Start Panning the Material: Now go on to shaking the pan left and right with a steady motion. This will make the lighter materials float to the top, while gold and other heavy elements find their way deeper and deeper towards the pan’s bottom. The pan can either remain submerged into the river or be lifted up with enough water to cover all of the material.
Tilt the Pan and Allow the Water to Sweep the Top Layer: Now tilt the pan around 30-45 degrees, and position it so that only the lower half is submerged underwater. Then lift up the pan in while simultaneously moving it slightly away from you, so that the water that escapes the pan removes the top layer. Any pebbles or rocks that are too big to get flushed out of the pan can be removed by hand.
Continue sweeping and shaking: Now go back to step 4 and shake the gravels so that the gold travels to the bottom of the pan. Then once again sweep the top layer. Repeat until you have around half a cup to one cup of material left.
Swirl With Water to Uncover the Concentrates: Tilt the pan slightly and shake it gently to make the gold particles fall to the bottom. Add enough water to barely cover the bottom of the pan, and then starting swirling it gently. The goal is to make the swirls remove the lighter materials until the gold finally emerges at the bottom. Since all the sands that have made it to this stage are really heavy, you need to proceed slowly and be careful so that the gold, which still is the heaviest element, stays where it is.

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The steps above are taken from my beginner’s guide to gold panning, which covers the whole process and much more in much greater detail.

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Below is a video in which Dan Hurd takes you through the steps shared above, in case you’d like visual guidance as well.

A Second Gold Pan: Clean-up Pan

Some of the popular gold panning kits include not just one gold pan, but two or in some cases three. What’s the point of having more than one gold pan, you might ask?

Well, some miners like to have gold pans of different sizes for different tasks. The most common distinction made is that between a regular gold pan and a finishing pan or clean up pan. The latter is also the most common gold pan to include in gold panning kits, in addition to a normal-sized pan.

The differences between the two typically boil down to that:

Finishing pans have a smaller diameter.
Finishing pans have more but smaller grooves

These differences make a finishing pan slightly more suited for catching really fine gold.

How to use a finishing pan

Finishing pans are used, as the name implies, to finish the panning process and get the gold separated from the black sand.

After having used a normal gold pan to concentrate the material into mostly black sand, you pour it over to the finishing pan to continue working it and getting the gold out of the black sand. The method used is generally the same as the swirling technique mentioned earlier. However, the smaller size and the small grooves will make catching the good much easier.

Vials

Once you have recovered some real gold you are bound to be excited, and probably want to store it in something that does justice to its beauty and luster. Vials are perfect for this, as they not only are transparent but also magnify the gold when filled with water. This is perfect when you’ve found small gold and still want to make something beautiful out of it.

How to easily fill up a vial with gold

Well, it’s all very easy. Just lick your finger and pick up the gold by touching it. Then, put your bring your on top of a water-filled vial so that the gold falls straight into the vial. Simple as that!

If you’re bringing vials out when prospecting it’s recommended to use plastic ones. In case of dropping a glass vial, you risk losing all the gold you’ve worked so hard for!

Snuffer Bottle

The snuffer bottle is a really convenient tool that can be used both for temporarily storing the gold you find, and to squirt black sands during the final stage of the panning process.

How to use a snuffer bottle

To suck up and store the gold, you just squeeze and release the snuffer bottle. The suction will suck up the gold, and the design of the siphon that extends into the bottle makes sure that no gold flows out.

Tweezers

In gold panning, tweezers are used to pick up small pieces of gold from your pan. And even though you could just use a wet finger to pick up the gold, tweezers are ideal for repositioning the pieces your working with, and they are appreciated by jewelers and prospectors alike.

Some gold panning kits will have a small magnifying glass attached to them, to make inspecting the gold easier. However, they don’t provide as great magnification as a jeweler’s loupes, which is the next item on the list.

Jeweler’s Loupe (Magnifier)

While some gold panning kits only come with a magnifying tweezer, others also include a jewelers loupe that offers greater magnification. This is very useful when examining black sand concentrates for tiny gold, or when trying to ascertain whether the glimmer you see in your pan is gold or something else.

Jeweler loupes generally provide a magnification of 10x, whereas magnifying tweezers tends to be 5x or even lower.

How to use a jeweler’s loupe

Well, just place it above the material you want to examine and have a look! It isn’t harder than that.

Sluice Box

Most times, a sluice box is something you buy after you have tried out gold panning for a while and want more effective gear. However, some gold panning kits have taken everything one step further by including a small and portable sluice box, to help you drastically increase the amounts of streambed material you can process.

A sluice box can increase your production rate by a factor of 2-100 times, depending on how big it is. Basically, if the sluice box is big enough, the only limiting factor is how much material you manage to throw at it!

Now, sluice boxes that come with gold panning kits are generally quite small, but that also translates into it being portable and lightweight, which are very important qualitites for prospectors on the move.

How to use a sluice box

Find a spot with enough water flow: You want to have a steady flow of water going through the sluice. Try to find a place where the current is moving rather fast, without causing white froth on the surface. You also want the spot to be shallow enough for the sluice box to be able to stand without being completely submerged below water.
Level the sluice box and stabilize: Make sure that the sluice box is leveled sidewise so that all the riffles get roughly the same water flow. As to the position lengthwise, it should be angled around 5-7 degrees. Last but not least, add a big rock on top of the sluice to make sure that it stays in place and doesn’t float away.
Classify your material: Just as when operation a gold pan, you don’t want big rocks and debris to bounce around in the sluice and disturb the flow.
Feed the sluice box: Feed the sluice at a rate that enables the material to get soaked properly. Don’t dump all the material at once, as it will just make the gold run straight through the sluice without getting caught.
Rinse the sluice box and work the concentrates: Once you have run for perhaps an hour or so, you can choose to clean out the riffles and mattings to see what you’ve got. Use a gold pan to separate the gold from the black sands.

For more detailed instructions, make sure to check out my complete guide to setting up a sluice box.

How to Make The Best Use of Your Gold Panning Kit

To become a successful prospector it isn’t enough to just know how to use your equipment. Finding gold-bearing locations is even more important, as no amount of expertise, or expensive equipment for that matter, can retrieve gold from barren grounds.

To know where to take your newly acquired gold panning kit you, therefore, need to do some research. And perhaps even more important, to keep the spirit up during the difficult first times of not getting any gold, join a local mining club where you can exchange experiences and knowledge with beginners as well as seasoned miners.

Anyway, here are some more tips on how to make the best use of your panning kit, as well as on how to become a successful miner.

Learn Where Gold Has Been Found

Even though the old adage goes that “gold is where you find it”, you are very unlikely to find some just by searching on random locations. The best way to go about is to search in locations that have proven to produce gold in the past!

Research your area

In order to find good gold locations, you need to do your own research and get out there prospecting. Here are some good resources I recommend starting with:

Old Mining Town Newspapers: Once new gold finds became common knowledge, you can be sure that they had them featured in the local newspaper! Just be aware that many places have might have been nicknamed, which can make them quite hard to find at times.
Government and state reports: There are a lot of government reports from the USGS that contain loads of useful information about gold deposits in states across the country. While they are perhaps not as detailed as the local and state government reports, they are excellent when it comes to getting a general idea of the gold production in a state.
MDRS Records: The MDRS is a database that’s maintained by the USGS, and contains various records of gold findings throughout the US. Some locations shared might not be available anywhere else, and with the GPS coordinates included, finding the site is really easy! MDRS can be accessed here

Join a gold mining club

The GPAA ( Gold Prospector’s Association of America) is the world’s largest gold prospecting organization in the world. By becoming a member you not only get to know other similar-minded people, but also get to prospect on their claims!

Conclusion

By reading this article I hope you have got a better understanding of how to use each tool that comes in your gold panning kit. If you want to know more about gold panning and prospecting, the following guides are great to start with!

And lastly, if you don’t have a gold panning kit yet, make sure to check out my top list of gold panning kits.

Happy prospecting!