A list of the common gold mining tools everyone knows about begins, of course, with gold pans. These come in various shapes and sizes, some metal and some plastic. Without the use of a gold pan, it is going to be difficult to know how productive your processed material really is for gold content.
Nothing beats a good gold pan for sampling sand and gravel for gold. But, how the devil do you get those fine flakes out of your pan? Yes, tweezers can work for the bigger flakes. But those tiny flecks, also known as flour gold, can be a challenge.
Black And Decker Drill Set
This is where the gold snuffer bottle comes in. These inexpensive little gold tools can suck out those flecks of flour gold in a flash. And as they mount up, you can see your little gold pile up in the bottom of the bottle, along with some black iron sand. That will be separated out later.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a larger sucking device to pull gold out of the stream bottom itself? This is another gold mining tool that can be invaluable. And you can buy them, or build them yourself.
Gold sucker tubes are usually made of PVC pipe. All the parts are available at your local home supply store, or hardware stores. There are plans on the internet on how to make a sucker tube, or you can finds places online where you can buy one. With the gold sucker tube, you can pull gold flakes and small nuggets from under boulders and out of depressions and cracks in underwater bedrock.
When a prospector has accumulated a mass of black sand concentrates laced with gold, he has the option of working it all out using a gold pan. But when the volume is sizeable, this can be a long and tedious process. To make things go faster, a gold concentrator is a great tool to have.
These gold catching devices can be designed along different principles. Some resemble small sluice boxes to which water is fed with a garden hose or a battery operated bilge pump. The black sand concentrates are fed slowly into the head of the device and the fine riffles will catch a very high percentage of the fine gold. Usually they are set up over a large tub, and the water can be re-circulated using a bilge pump, if desired.
All the debris is caught in the tub, and can be run again later if you have any doubts regarding your gold capture rate.
Gold wheels are another gold concentrator. The wheel turns slowly, powered by a battery, and the spiral grooves in its working face pull the black sand and gold mixture up toward the center of the bowl, dropping out the black sand. The gold exits through a hole and falls into a little catch basin. With these tools, you can also run the same material more than once, to get every speck of gold you can.
Some gold wheels are designed to work with water, and some can be run either wet or dry. But the water option is usually the most efficient.
These are a few basic gold mining tools that may not be essential to the weekend prospector, but are sure sweet to have and use. They make him more efficient, and give him more gold for his effort.