Anyone into prospecting/panning/using similar tools to get shiny things while you're /out/? I recently bought a kit and tried it out yesterday, seems like a fun hobby. With the currency at all time lows it might even be lucrative.Might head up into the White Mountains this weekend and try my luck.
>>2833665Last time I tried to share my rockhounding and prospecting advice, /out/ had a whole dog pile thread about how it was gay and not /out/, so nope.
>>2833667/out/ hates /out/ activities, news at 11.
>>2833667Weird, doesn't seem any less /out/ than fishing or homesteading or watching a survivalist TV show.
>>2833665>tried it out yesterday,Got anything?How many hours/minutes were you prospecting/panning?
>>2833665House prices have never been lower.....if paid in gold....
>>2833733I messed around in the water for around an hour and a half, upstream from a local waterfall (southern NH). Trying to get the hang of it. If there was small gold, I probably tossed it out with my messy panning hahaI did get a few shiny yellowish bits that I think might be gold, but they also may be yellow tinted mica. I also got some small reddish gems that I think are garnets.The gold heavy streams in this state are up in the mountains, or so I hear.
>>2833665Ive always wanted to try it. >>2833667There's been good rockhounding threads before anon, forget the crabs, share with us!
>>2833665I've been crushing rocks and panning them this year. Gold is high enough I'm making more money off prospecting than I do working. So far I've made about an ounce per monthColorado, I've been panning my whole life. I know where to get the gold.
>>2833862same anon,I've also been selling some of my best gold ore on ebay and made a few hundred dollars so far
>>2833862this is what my ore looks like. It's quartz with gold and silver off an abandoned mine near my house. I've got a few buckets of this rock to crush up, probably about $15k in gold in total. sorry for pic quality, this was just shot with my phone camera and it's not great at macro shots.
>>2833866I take a big steel pan and fill it with this ore and then roast it in my fire pit to make it more brittle and easier to crush. The pan keeps all the rocks together and also catches any metal that melts out of the rocks.
>>2833867Once the rock is roasted I dump it in a steel pot and crush it to powder with an air hammer. Then it gets screened into a gold pan.
>>2833868After that I pan it down and snifter up the visible gold.
>>2833869Once I have all the visible gold picked out I hit the concentrates with mercury to pick up any gold and silver I didn't see. Probably half of my cleanup has been in the mercury, so a lot of the gold isn't visible.
>>2833870finally I clean the product with nitric acid to remove copper, silver, lead, mercury, whatever is mixed in. This gives me a nearly pure gold dust.later I'll go back and work with the nitric acid to get my mercury and silver back out of it. Copper as well, though that's not particularly valuable.
>>2833871this is my cleanup for the last couple weeks.next I'm going to build a rock crusher using an angle grinder to speed up the crushing part. The air hammer works but it's tedious and gives me blisters.
>>2833870>>2833871also obviously working with mercury and strong acids is dangerous. I use all the required ppe and take classes every year on how to safely work with the stuff. I wouldn't advise anyone to play with that stuff without some training and preferably someone to show you how to work safely.
>>2833781if you want to practice your panning technique you can buy a tungsten rod online (the cheapest and smallest will work fine, just make sure its reasonably pure) and make some shavings out of itmix a measured amount of the shavings with some dirt from outside and youll know how efficient youre being when you pan it
>>2833893this is good advice. I used small fishing weights but that's how I learned to speed-panpanning extremely fast without losing any gold is the only way to make it pay most places.
>>2833665I find it soothing sitting by a creek swirling some dirt, finding something is just a bonus.
>>2833900what? isnt this like 300 dollars in gold? how long does this take to pan if youre in a good location?
>>2833902That took about 4 hours, but I had to wait 5 years for the water level to drop low enough to get in there. Most of the easy spots have have been hammered for the last 150 years, but every now and then a flood or drought will uncover something good.
>>2833912whyd you stop? i would have been there until my knees gave out lol did you go back?
>>2833862Wow, an ounce per month? That's wild. Do you sell it all or are you stockpiling it?>>2833893Thank you anon, I definitely need practice.
>>2833866thru>>2833872(couldn't quote them all system thinks spam)I really appreciate you walking us through the process, seems tedious but if it pays so well then why would you do anything else?I've seen some guys on youtube who go into old abandoned mines and find all the stuff the old timers figured wasn't worth scraping together. They seem to have left a surprising amount.Exploring a mine one day sounds fun, even with how terrifying the underground is. Panning in a wide rocky river mantled by mountains seems more idyllic though.
>>2833948>Do you sell it all or are you stockpiling it?I'm selling the stuff the mercury catches and saving the stuff I see. So I'm selling about half of it.>>2833951>seems tedious but if it pays so well then why would you do anything else?It's extremely rare to find ore this rich laying around where I can legally take it. Also I pretty well cleaned out what was left behind. So it's a good side-gig but it will end soon.>Panning in a wide rocky river mantled by mountains seems more idyllic though.absolutely. The mountains are overrun with tourists though, and there's not that much gold in the creeks.even the place I get my gold from-- I used to see maybe on person a day up there. Now it's literally thousands of people per day. And that's normal. There's no empty wilderness in the colorado mountains anymore. Nowhere you can go and not see people.
>>2833951>They seem to have left a surprising amount.yes, gold was worth like $16-$18 per ounce when the mine I'm picking over was being worked, so it wasn't incredibly valuable. At that time miners got paid $3 per day, so an ounce of gold was about a week's pay. The mines got worked over again in the 70's and 80's but back then gold was in the $35-$400 range for most of that time, which again wasn't super valuable compared to today. So a lot got left behind. Obviously those prices have to be adjusted for inflation, but even after counting inflation gold is something like 5 times more valuable right now than it was in the past. So quite a lot of good ore got left behind simply because it wasn't worth mining. We're experiencing another gold rush right now. Mines are re-opening after 50 years sitting idle. The current price makes gold worth going after again for the first time in a lifetime. Trump's tariffs are set to make it go up even more. I'm seeing a lot more interest in panning and mining in my area. Just because the price is so high.
>>2833665This goofy bastardhas got your back with the panning knowledge.https://youtu.be/zGnwHO4E13E?si=h2NN--scXxPUVMw9
>>2833935Yeah, my knees gave out and it got dark. It's a 5 hour trip to get there and when I went back 2 weeks later the water had risen and cut off access. One day I'll have to get a pack raft and some dive gear and try to work it underwater.
>>2833935This was a good little pocket in a spot nearby that is accessible when the water is up, but most of the good crevices there have been cleaned out.
>>2834073spectacular stuffis this west coast US or Oz?
>>2834072>dive gearkek surely not, you dont mean panning underwater? would it be better to get a bucket and fill it up with the shit on the bottom and haul that back to your raft? you wouldnt need dive gear (im assuming its sub 10 meters deep)and how did you know it was a good spot? what clues do you look for? >>2834073>0.99gi thought it was about double that considering the density
>>2834077>dive gear>kek surely not, you dont mean panning underwater?NTA...he's probably dredging and then panning
>>2834077https://youtu.be/Z-xnfRsCPDs
>>2834075West Coast of Tasmania. https://youtu.be/gcmKBPz2_wA?si=wBQ8UQN2eWMWlL75That's not me, but because I live in the land of a million rules we aren't allowed to use dredges and have to scratch around and suck up every little bit individually.
>>2834077It's a spot on a river that was worked for gold 150 years ago and I'm guessing that over the years floods have uncovered a shelf of bedrock that was covered by metres of gravel when the old timers were there, so it wasn't worth their while shifting it all. The perfect bedrock is soft and rotten so gold can sink down into the cracks and gets stuck then it's fairly easy to break up and sieve into your pan.There's about 2.5g in the pan, the stuff on the scales is from a different day.
>>2834079>>2834080it would have been phrased differently if he was using dredges i think >>2834092>aren't allowed to use dredgesdo they come around and check? whats the punishment and chance of being caught? have you tried doing the risk/reward math?>>2834094>worked for gold 150 years agomakes sense, i was just wondering if there was a way to tell just by the geology or river bends or something >2.5g in the panah lol so i did guess right. how do you sell it all? do you sell it all? sorry anon its just that this is really interesting, and ive been wanting to go panning for ages and maybe make it a part time job one day
this shit isnt #out
>>2834099KYS thread nazi
>>2834095Yeah, people still use dredges, but if it's possible to get a dredge in there, it's probably already been dredged. Plus the engine noise ruins the ambience which is half the reason I'm/out/ there.Apparently all the gold in this state belongs to the government and you have to pay for a claim/ environmental bond if you want to sell it, but like most of the nanny state's rules, it's impossible to enforce. I've tried prospecting areas based on geology, but usually find nothing and quite often come across test pits and trenches where the old timers tried it already and gave up. Most modern gold discoveries are deep, hard rock gold, usually only extractable by chemical processing.
>>2834092>West Coast of Tasmania.ah yeah!I've been watching his videos lately, that place is sick!those nugsyour ground is better than anything in the US outside alaskaIt's how I imagine california back in the day
>>2834102Unsurprising if you consider that you are at the very tail-end of literally millenia of humans wandering around looking for gold
>>2834106everything has been worked over and over but they left literal tons of gold that was hard to get.
>>2834110It's theorized that gold originally obtained its value by being easily found (tens of thousands of years ago) due to its luster and the ease of working it, even cold. Our ancestors used to pick nuggets the size of your fist off the river bank. You sift dirt for dust.
>>2834111>You sift dirt for dust.yes. exactlythe value now is because it's so fucking rare and takes so much work to get.literally entire cities of people working all day and all night to get a few ounces out of solid rock.
>>2834112hey bro do you work in Morenci? Can you get me some malachite/azurite/chysocolla?
>>2833665>With the currency at all time lows it might even be lucrative.Don’t let this thought linger for too long
>>2834147I don't work there. I only have a couple bits of copper mineral, nothing great.
Went to a river near my father's today, dug into the riverbank and got this after a couple pans. I'd call it "proof of concept". What do you guys use to suck up the really little dust? Those eye dropper things?
>>2834370good little bit. I'd definitely keep looking around there.I use one of those plastic eye dropper things to get smol gold. It's cheap and easy
>>2834474That's what I figured, thanks. I'll definitely be going back. Very nice area.
>>2834549gorgeous spot. Is that where you found gold? Seems pretty random for a gold deposit. Still water doesn't usually pile up much gold
>>2834676Yep. I dug into the riverbank. Lots of roots, and it must flood.
>>2834677very excitingI pan in the Upper Arkansas Valley in Colorado, a major gold placer zone. A good location will yield 3 or 4 tiny flakes per pan, and will usually be claimed and worked constantly.from the looks of it you've got a very rich spot there. Do the tooth test to make sure it's gold. Bite a flake, it shouldn't crumble to dust between your teeth. But if that's all gold it's a very interesting spot you have.
>>2834700And if you get a sudden dose of bloody diarrhea followed by multiple organ failure it was probably arsenopyrite. Maybe just hit it with a hammer if you want to make sure it isn't crumbly.
>>2834700>>2834718Ha, beginner's luck I suppose. If I die horribly I'll be sure to let you know.
>>2834718yep, hammer or pliers work tooyou'd have to eat handfuls of arsenopyrite to die. The stuff isn't very dangerous because it's difficult to digest.
>>2834024Yeah that guy's pretty good, though he has a really really rich area seemingly. I also like Vo-Gus Prospecting and Ask Jeff Williams.
>>2834718>arsenopyritenot nearly dense enough to be picked up by an amateur panner
>>2835703Even if he managed to find some and keep it in the pan, it doesn't look anything like gold. The exaggerated fear of arsenopyrite seems to be an internet meme passed around by people who've never seen the stuff
>>2833665Wouldn't you get more just harvesting old computer parts?
>>2835813computer parts cost money, you can get gold dirt for FREE! but yeah, there's more gold in a computer than you'll find in a day of panning most places. Good luck finding a free computer every day though. Also harvesting computer gold isn't very fun or /out/doors
>>2833862>So far I've made about an ounce per monthDamn son.
>>2835959funny thing is I've had most of this rock sitting around for 30 years now. The price of gold was just never high enough to make it worth the effort to get.
Heads up to Anons to learn how to read a river before panning.https://youtu.be/cjRjEki3fMM?si=C53TYxOd7Dhn8NQqmore stuffhttps://youtu.be/XOiMxsqrB-c?si=BS_Ohp8VTuJmC6jzhttps://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjyi8ZCd8kjcxinpwEgprxB1ny4RFik0L&si=59Bm1N5nnl4QdF6R
I did a gold-panning thing up in NorCalAfter lunch we used a sluice box and were told that it could filter as much gold in a couple hours as one could pan in a day
>>2837937if by day you mean the full 24 hours then yeah probably kekthe problem is that there are places where panning is allowed but sluicing isnt (or at least its licensed differently)
>>2837937In north cal you can make about an ounce per week, which is currently about $182k per year.this is particularly rich ground. But you also about have to kill someone to get the rights to pan there.
>>2836382why odes the text look AI generated?
>>2838328its probably just ai upscaled
Gonna try panning this weekend because of this cute damned shit...
>>2836382Thanks anon! Very helpful for me, a beginner. That said, the guy in the videos is way too...energetic, spazzy.
>>2838328My guess is it's a scanned document that's been put through adobe's word recognition software.
https://youtu.be/BgRmO93AMGM
remember to keep an eye out for where different types of rock meet in your local creeks. a good quartz vein running across the bottom can be an excellent gold trap, heavy material cant pass it until it weathers away.
Ill just wait until you make a big score and blow your brains out and steal it like in RDR2
>>2838542good night mr. pocket
>>2838545That was a good movie and that was one of my favorite stories in it.
>>2838550I liked it, it was a perfect representation of statistical prospecting and old time potholing.The only part I didn't like was him throwing away huge flakes of gold as he was panning to find the pocket, but I suppose they had to make them huge for the camera. In real life gold flakes that big would've meant claiming the river and its banks and mining the shit out of them also.
I've seen videos of people using the Falcon Gold Tracker MD20($350) But how useful would something like pic(link)rel be for looking for gold? https://a.co/d/ayW9z5z
>>2838844Pinpointers don't have discriminators or ground tracking so they're going to be set off by every chunk of magnetite or patch of black sand, and those things are more common than goldthey also only detect gold at about pea-size and bigger, so they're going to miss all the flakes and dust entirely. Might be good for telling you when you're in the black sand so gold might be near. But you can learn that just by looking at the dirt also. Or by panning out a scoop of gravel. FWIW I have six metal detectors and a couple pinpointers and I don't use them for gold prospecting. Panning is easier, more fun, and more productive where I live.
>>2838470>Rurbro please go to /a/ and ask in the ruri no houseki threads for a better webm of this scene, this is painful to watch did you copy a stream?
>>2838552>I didn't like was him throwing away huge flakes of goldYou'd be surprised how realistic this is for the time.
>>2836382Dude has tiktok tourette syndrome
>>2839004there is no way you would just throw it away though. sure, its not exactly what youd be looking for but its still worth your time picking it up. think about it, if you see a penny on the ground wouldnt you bend to pick it up if just finding money is your job? bending down and pocketing it takes a second, thats more than a hundred dollars an hour. a prospector even back then would think its worth picking even the smallest flakes up
>>2839095NTA.. You're thinking about it in modern terms with gold at extremely inflated prices(currently $3.5k/oz), those flakes add up when that's what you're looking for. What you're not considering is that you are merely finding the flecks they did toss, because they were looking for nuggets and eventually the source and that was a real prospect because this was truly virgin ground as pertains to gold mining.
>>2839095Gold prices pre 1849 are around $16/oz which is about $655 in today's dollar. That's about $25/g in today's dollar. Which isn't nothing, but not the $125/g you'd get today. And again, I have to bring up, you have a famine mentality because that's the current state of "wild" gold.
>>2839099one of those flakes would take me 10 hours of work to acquire now. Granted gold was more common then, but not to the point where five minutes of digging and panning is equal to 10 hours today. That's what, 120 times more gold in his worst pan than I find in my best. The one with 5 colors would be ~600 times more gold than my best place found after a lifetime of panning everywhere in my area.the old timers didn't get every pocket. I still run into some rich stuff right in the middle of their worked placers, but nothing like that. Flakes that big would've started a gold rush with literally thousands of people running across the country to get some of that. Hell, the Colorado gold rush started off much much worse ground than that. Cherry Creek in Denver is a terrible placer ground.
>>2839100>$16/oz which is about $655 in today's dollar.Inflation is brutal
>>2839104I do get what you're saying, but this exactly my point. It didn't take him 10 hours to get one of those flacks, he got them first shovel full into the pan.. And They were most likely exaggerated to show them obviously on the screen. You keep flakes because that's the majority of what you're going to find these days. He didn't because he wasn't looking for flakes, he was looking for Mr. Pocket. He wasn't looking for grams, he was looking for pounds. And, it was a movie(and a silly one at that), so some suspension of disbelief is required.
>>2839157Growing up in the 80s, candy bars were 25cents, 50 for king size. I remember during the first Gulf War when they went up to 30 and then 35 cents. Now they're $2. Inflation is indeed brutal. But that's what happens when money printers go brrrr... They don't raise taxes because it's unpopular, so they just print more money, which devalues the money you have, taxing everyone through inflation. But I have good news!! House prices have never boon lower!!! When paid in gold....
You sure do get a lot of garnets doing this.
>>2839301You will get a LOT of garnets. If you collect a few pounds, you can sell them.
Ok, I did it! I ordered a beginner gold panning kit. It comes with a 12in pan, classifier, gold guzzler and a couple vials. I've watched a bunch of YouTube videos and think I have a good idea of where on my creek to look. I'm in Northern California gold country, so I think I've got good odds of at least finding some flakes. Not planning on taking this further than recreational. I'm just hoping I'll be able to say I've found gold.
>>2839749Dan Hurd is a great teacher. Almost all of his videos are basically tutorials as he goes over his process step by step.
>>2839755I've watched several of his videos. He seems like a nice guy. And he has some good information in his videos. But they can sometimes be a little bit of a challenge to watch because of his TikTok tourette's.
Anyone else prospect in the desert? I work these dry arroyos that seem to bear gold near the lead deposits. I find flakes in most pans and some very tiny nuggets and gold sand but there’s no water for washing gold and it’s a good hike in so I haven’t gotten much at all. I found a small nugget detecting for gold but there’s far too much iron debris from old mining for detecting to work well.
I found a little bit in maine and connecticutNeed to try up in the white mountains sometimeWish there was more in the area
>>2839893that's quite a lot for the east coastnice work
>>2839889learning to dry pan with a sheet or a pan is good practice if you have any sort of breezei dry pan in front of an electric fan at home sometimes just to keep the skills up
Anyone ever bought paydirt?
>>2840053yesthey make money on it because they add the gold to the dirt and sell it for more than they put in
>>2840054So, they're a soap bar scam? They entice you with the "chance" at a big prize, but they actually know what's in there because they put it in and only an accomplice ever actually get's the "big prize"?
>>2840055Not really a scam since there's a small chance you'll get a little nugget but overall you're not going to make money off it usually
>>2840066I have bought it twice from a shop in the Netherlands. They actually say how much gold is in there so you can use it to test equipment or your skills by weighing it after you're done. It's more expensive that way but you can make sure your high banker is working properly before going out with it
>>2840053These are toys for playing with, not actually for making money.
>>2840053I cant believe this is a real thing people but
>>2840097*buy
>>2840053Yeah once. >>2840097It was nice to practice with before going out and trying for real, and the seller had a listed minimum included gold.
>>2840046That was one day in maineI had a mini dream mat sluice to speed up processing, but i need to go back and try more spots
>>2840070Ok, so the ones that list a minimum quantity are good for practicing on, so you know if you missed some. Nice. That makes more sense.
>>2833667And last time we tried to have a hotsauce thread on /B/, someone kept spamming porn... says more about them than you friend
>>2840054>>2840070>>2840103Any particular vendors you'd recommend or avoid?
>>2840424I did buy it at pan4gold(dot)nlTheir paydirt is sourced from the river The Rijn, which is also the river where I pan most of the times. For me this is great because it means that my testing dirt is as close to my real dirt as could be. Might not be your cheapest or best option if you're not from the Netherlands though.
>>2840424Ashamed to say i bought it from a youtuber called klesh. The prices seemed comparable to other sites so i bought 2 small bags with a discount code
>>2840424Forgot to say, happy with my youtube gold especially if you find a discount code. I recovered a tiny bit more than the stated minimum and he added various other minerals for fun.
>>2840501I just got one of his beginner bags, quarter gram guaranteed $40. It's about a 70% roi, so I bought it to learn on. I've since learned about a couple other sites that offer an even higher roi, in the 80-100+ range. goldnuggetsales and vendetta prospecting. I didn't see many recent reviews of vendetta on youtube but I did se quite a few on goldnuggetsales. They all seemed happy with their bags. If I like this one, I may buy one from them too. His half gram bag beginner bag is $61 plus $7 for s&h. At current market rates that's about an 85% roi. And shouldn't take long to be over 100% if the price of gold keeps going up at its current rate.
>>2840536Well, that was fun. Just over a quarter gram, as promised. I didn't see any small stuff. But this is a beginner bag, so I wasn't really expecting much if any. I'll go over the material again later, just to practice and see if I missed anything small. I'm hoping to get out to a creek to try out some actual prospecting sometime this week.
Is gold going to go higher?
>world in gem and mineral industry>mfw people here are seriously talking about how they bought some buckets of dirt meant for children>mfw talking to people who own sapphire mines in montana about how they sell these buckets of dirt that they put a glass gem in for 20 bucks to people's kids to dig in while the parents dig for real sapphires>the sapphire mine owners buy the glass gems wholesale from us for 2$ ea
How do I get into gold sniping, I live in quite possibly the best country for alluvial gold and the rivers in certain areas are loaded.
>>2840923Buy a dredge and go do it, that's how...
>>2839749Eureka! :D
>>2841000Too much for a guy like me with not that much in the bank, I just want to snipe gold off the riverbed
>>2841049You're going to have a rough time starting then. How cold is the water? Can you afford a wet suit if you need one? Why sniping? Do you know where in a river the gold is going to be?
>>2840908it will always be going higher (at least on a decade scale) until asteroid mining is viable
How do you guys find spots to go prospecting on? I have no idea where to even start. I mean, I've watched several videos on what to look for when I get to a spot. But how do I find a spot that actually has gold to begin with? Is there an app that shows historical gold finds/claims? I'm guessing anywhere easy to get to will already have been picked clean. If I'm on public land, how do I know if there's already a claim on a spot? I'm in southern cascade gold country, so I know there's gold here...I just don't know where to start looking for it.
>>2841593I scout spots on maps and look for bends in brooks/streams with large amounts of boulders and gravels. Places with exposed bedrock as well
>>2841593legally any claim should be marked. So personally I just look for areas that aren't marked. The claimholder can't prosecute me if they didn't properly mark their claim, that's their entire job. Same with private property. If there's no fences or signs I assume it's free to prospect because if they don't want me there they're required by law to mark the boundaries.if you want to be legal and respectful you can search for claims at the local BLM or USFS and search private property on the county assessor's map. However I just go by signs. No sign means I'm going to prospect it. It's literally the owner's job to place signs. They can't complain about trespass if they didn't put a sign or a fence. Also anyone too lazy to maintain signs and fences isn't going to catch me anyways, because they're not present on the property often enough to see me.your area is entirely 100% claimed, just like my area. But I'd bet most of the claims aren't legally marked, so that's the owner's problem. They're required to mark claims if they don't want people panning on them.
>>2841593Areas that historically have gold are usually claimed. If they're not claimed it's usually because the feds have prohibited panning in that area. So generally speaking if there's gold somewhere, you're either not allowed to pan it, or someone else has already claimed it. It's very rare to find any place with gold where you're allowed to pan, and nobody has claimed it. you can join prospecting clubs and meet claim owners that will either let you pan their claims or charge you to pan. You can also join national clubs like GPAA that have good claims all over the country that you can use for an annual membership fee.
>>2840923https://youtu.be/_e-Ax5hwtC8
>>2841686>you can join prospecting clubs and meet claim ownersI did a search, and there is a local prospecting group in my town. Membership is $50/year and their website says they own several gold bearing claims for their members to use and hold group prospecting events. They hold a meeting every third Thursday of the month, which is open to the public. So I just missed their last meeting. I'll definitely plan on going next month. In addition, I learned that there are several areas near me that are on NPS, BLM or BOR land that are open to public prospecting and non claimable. So it looks like I've found my starting point! Thanks for the tips guys!
>>2841862Enjoy swirling dirt in a dish, my friend
Does anyone here have the 6x24 trek dream sluice? I just bought one and the mat is not sitting flat in the sluice body. It's got a bump/hump in the middle, like the mat is a little too big for the sluice body. How do I fix this? Shave off a little of the mat along the outside edge? Try and stretch out the sluice body a little? This is my first sluice, and I don't see anyone talking about it in the reviews. So I'm at a little bit of a loss as to what to do.
>>2842062
>>2842067Just sit on it for a couple hours
>>2842062needs to sit flat to work right. I would put weight on it to see if it forms up, and if it still has a hump after sitting for a while I'd shave it on one side.
>>2842067Is it in backwards?
>>2842099No, It goes in small to large. I don't have the lip clamp plate on so that you can see how much it's bulging.>>2842068Not sure if you were serious, but did it anyway. Didn't make a difference. It lays flat when it's not in the sluice body.>>2842083I think I'm going to have to shave it. What would you suggest? A mini planer would be ideal, but I don't have one. So I'll probably use a razor blade and be careful.
>>2842124>What would you suggestif you dont mind waiting scalpels are crazy cheap online and would be easier than a razor blade
>>2842125>scalpel bladeGood call. I forgot I had some. Chewed it up a bit. I ended up having to cut quite a bit from both sides. Lost a couple of the smaller cells along the outside. But I don't think that will have too negative of an impact. And I finally got it sitting flat.
>>2833871>anon just casually mentions working with mercury nitrateI hope you have your PPE down pat. also couldn't you just get the gold out using HNO3 followed by aqua regia, skipping the Hg altogether?
>>2842459The mercury is for taking flour gold out of several hundred pounds of dirt that also contains several pounds of base metals mixed in.I'd need a few hundred gallons of acid to do the same job as a half pound of mercury.
>>2841018Found my third speck of gold. I'm thinking there's just not much out where I'm looking. I'm looking in what I'm pretty sure are prime locations for any gold to collect. And I'm getting tons of black sand. But so far I'm only getting one tiny speck per trip out there. But at least I can now say I have found gold up there. I've only taken samples from spots in two, currently dry, seasonal creek beds and a couple spots down in the year round creek that they feed into. I'll probably still try a few more locations. But I'm not expecting to find much. There are other areas not too far away I can check out that were actually historically gold producing. And they're on unclamable public land, so anyone can recreationally prospect there. So I'll definitely be checking them out too at some point.
Anyone prospecting in New Zealand?
Are sluice boxes worth it?
>>2842985generally sluice boxes with a screen can handle about 10x what a pan can but it takes time to set up flow and angle. It's difficult to find a good spot or dig a good spot for a sluice. But once you have it set up it's great. Highbankers are better because flow and angle are easier to set up.most places in the US don't allow sluices or highbankers though.
I'm looking at sluice boxes. For a beginner, should I get a 30 or 50in? And what kind of gold trap? Classic miner's moss, dream mat, gold hog riffles? I'm seeing 30s and 50s int he $70 range for miner's moss sluices, chinese probably. Dream mats are starting at $125 for aluminum body models. And the Gold Hog mini is $100.Does anyone have any experience with any of these or others I missed?
>>2843750I have a mini dream mat (18inches) and it catches gold. The longer ones are great too I'm sureAlso if you have high water flow rate the snake river fluid dynamic sluices are pretty damn nice
bought a MAPP gas torch today. Seems to be paying off. $70 torch to melt $270 worth of gold
Beginner at gold prospecting here, how deep do I have to dig and where do I dig? I only have a gold pan and a shovel. Pic is the river I am camped up at.
Neat thread. I really need to get /out/, panning again. Ironically, the best spot close to me is in the city of which I moved out a while ago. But I really gotta test all the tributaries to my main stream. While none of them are “officially” gold bearing, they all got various lead-zinc ores, some even mined not that long ago, in their hill sides, and they always tend to have some Au as a side mineral.
>>2843867Lmao
>>2844799I'm not in a great gold area but I've found some in fairly shallow holes around a foot or so deepI used pics like this to get some sort of idea of where to look. Near boulders, heavy gravels, and bedrock intrusions are good places to start
>>2844799I'm pretty new myself. But I'd look around the base of that big rock in the bottom left. If you can find a lever to roll it just out of the way, I'd dig right around there. Or I'd look around in that big pile of rocks next to the creek. Roll them over and dig underneath, down to bedrock if you can. Across the creek, all of that undercut bank could be good. Anything that was in the sediment that's been eroded out, but too heavy for the current to carry, should stay pretty close to where it was.
This little unmarked creek has been good to me lately. Had to hack my way through a mat of tree roots and shovel off a foot or so of mud and gravel, but once I got down to the slate bedrock there was gold in every pan.
>>2833875This whole write up was one of the best things I've read on all of 4chan in a very long time
>>2845276In fact this whole thread might be the best thread I've ever read on 4chan. Good thing this is a slow board and it stays up
I went out for my first time with a pan, shovel, and my buddy, he didn’t get any but I found some flour and one small flake, it was real fun and beautiful out there. Gonna go back this week I hope and take some more knowledge with me, I was mostly winging it that time (:
Was out today. Last day of the season as the snow has started and every thing is freezing up.Hit a lot of prospects this summer and found a few likely producers.Kind of funny hobby to have since my regular work is at a gold mine.
>>2843867don't melt it, gold buyers would rather buy it raw
>>2846227that's stuff that I amalgamated, they won't buy it in mercury. Not that I care since I've never met a buyer that will actually pay extra for raw gold. Yeah, they make more money selling it raw, but I don't get any of that money so I don't sell it to them raw.
