This page is devoted to the various tools used to extract placer gold in the field and the methods for final separation of the yellow stuff from the heavy black sands usually associated with gold.

Panning Sluice Boxes GoldSpear Drywashers VacPac Black Sand

Gold Pans

The gold pan is the most versatile mining tool you can use. They are very portable so you can move around sampling different spots till you find an area that has some gold. When you get good at it, panning will save more fine gold than most other mining equipment. No matter what other equipment you use you will probably end up panning the concentrates at the end of the day.

There are many different kinds of pans - metal and plastic; some with smooth sides and some with riffles; some with smooth bottoms and others with gold traps. It is beyond the scope of this page to get into pans and panning methods. There are many books and videos on the subject and if you are just starting out, it is a good idea to get one or two.

Sluice Boxes

Setting up:
Try find a shallow place where the current is moving fairly fast and will flow straight into the box. The current should be somewhere around three ft. per second. Sometimes you have to build a little dam to either direct the water into the sluice or slow the current down. The water going through the box should be a couple inches deep. Another thing to look for is a place where there is a hole at the tail end of the box or the current is such that the tailings don't build up so you don't have to keep shoveling the tailings away. A twig dropped at the top of the sluice should take about a second or a little more to go through. When it is about right, put a flat rock on top to keep it in position. You can be pretty sure it is right by dropping in a shovel full of dirt. Two thirds of the carpet between the first and second riffles should be visible about 30 to 45 seconds after the last of the dirt leaves the top of the box. The water usually speeds up as it goes through the box so the lower riffles may clear before the top ones. If it takes much longer than that or the riffles never clear, then the current is too slow and the sluice won't concentrate. If the riffles clear right away then a lot of gold will blow right through the box. Make adjustments by changing the flow and/or the slope of the box. Also, the material behind the riffles should be even from side to side. If it isn't, the sluice box is not level or the water is not flowing straight into the box. You can adjust the slope by propping up the front or lowering the tail end of the box by moving rocks around under it. None of these adjusments are super critical so be aware that you can spend too much time getting everything exactly right. You want to spend your time digging gold, not diddling with your sluice box.

Operating:
Some people run the material through a classifier before sluicing, others don't screen it at all. If you have to carry buckets of material any distance, it is probably better to screen it so you don't have to carry the worthless rocks to the stream . If you don't screen it, you will have to pick the larger rocks out of the sluice box. Large rocks and your hand in the sluice will cause turbulence and may cause loss of gold. Take a look at some pretty good classifiers you can put together.

Don't feed the sluice too fast. A half shovel full at a time is plenty and let the riffles clear a bit between shovels. Never dump in so much stuff in that the riffles are covered - you will lose gold for sure.

Cleanup:
The larger sluice boxes can probably run all day before cleaning up. The smallest ones, maybe twice or three times per day. To cleanup, fill a 5 gal. bucket with water and set it in or very close to the stream. Carefully lift the sluice box out of the water and try to keep it as level as possible. Set the tail end of the box in the bucket, unfasten the riffles, roll up the carpet and slide it into the bucket. Using a gold pan, dip some water out of the stream and splash all the rest of the stuff left in the sluice into the bucket. Unroll the carpet while it is in the bucket and slosh it around until it is clean then set it aside or put it back in the sluice box. You are now ready to process your concentrates although many folks prefer to spend all their time in the field sluicing and take their concentrates home to be processed.

A couple things you can do to improve your sluice:
Take out the riffles and carpet and spray the box in the area where the top of the carpet is flat black. Roughen the surface with steel wool and clean it with paint thinner before painting. Give it about 5 coats because the paint wears off fast. Many nuggets and larger flakes of gold don't make it past the carpet at least until the next shovel full of dirt and you can see them better. DO NOT paint the riffles - you will get real excited when the paint starts wearing off especially if the riffles have a gold colored coating.

If your sluice didn't come with it, get some black ribbed rubber floor matting and a can of 3M 77 spray contact cement (someone told me that cement for attaching vinyl tops to cars works better but I haven't tried it). The matting has about 8 ribs per inch and is available in most hardware stores. Again, roughen the surface with steel wool and clean it with paint thinner. Mask off the vertical sides that you don't want covered. If your sluice box has a bolt on flair part, apply the cement per instructions to the bottom of the matting and to the flair piece. Cover the whole flair with the rubber with the ribs running crossways. Be careful, you only get one try to align the matting and be sure it is really stuck down. If water gets under the rubber, it will eventually come off. If your sluice box doesn't have the bolt on flair, cover the whole area above the carpet with the matting so the matting butts up against the carpet. The matting holds the fine gold for a little while so you can see it and it keeps the dirt from going through all at once, overloading the riffles.

These improvements give you some confidence that you are getting gold - if you don't see any after a few shovels, dig somewhere else.

Gold Spear

Ed Note: For those of you who don't know what a Gold Spear is, here's a photo. As you can see, it looks like a metal detector except it has a pointed probe (inset) that is meant to be pushed into the ground. It makes three different sounds when the probe touches gold, other metals or black sand.

Top of this page

Back to home page