In most cases, the truth is that the more dirt you move, the more gold you will get, so prospectors have designed tools that help them to do just that.
In wet areas like the mountains of the northwest, most prospectors will use a hand sluice, high banker or a dredge.
These tools use the available water to process your material and collect the gold from a days work into a pan full of hopefully, highly rich concentrates. The high bankers and dredges are gas powered while the hand sluice is powered by the streams current.
In dry areas like the deserts of the south west, dry washers and recirculating sluices are the prospectors choice. Dry washers use air to lift the dirt over the riffles and the waste dirt to flow out of the machine. The air also allows the gold to settle behind the riffles holding the gold from a days work into a pan full of hopefully, highly rich concentrates. Dry washers are available in hand crank, electric and gas powered.
Recirculating sluices are used when the ground is too damp to use a dry washer. In the desert there are no streams to pump water from for your equipment, so desert prospectors will bring any water they may need with them to the claim, so they setup a tub under the end of a high banker to catch the water flowing through the tool and use a pump to keep the water recirculating through the machine, they call this a recirculating sluice.
Gas powered wet / dry vacuums have all but replaced the broom and dust pan in most conditions, but when your just grabbing a quick sample, a broom and dust pan works fine to sweep out a crack in the bedrock or a stretch of ruff caliche. Small paint brushes work great for smaller places.
Spiral wheels and blue bowls are types of powered panning machines. Spiral wheels look like a pie pan set at a 45 angle on a stand. The pan has spiral ridges that make it look like a hypnotic spinning pinwheel. The spinning ridges carry the gold from the dirt placed into the bottom of the pan to a small cup in the center of the wheel, where it can be removed and placed into a vial for keeping. A blue bowl works somewhat like a toilet bowl. They pull water from a bucket under the bowl and into the bowl, creating a spinning motion. The spinning action of the water carries the lighter sands up a center cone and out of the bowl and into the bucket below leaving the gold in the bottom of the bowl to be removed and saved.
Gold pans. The age old gold pan has seen many upgrades in their designs lately. Most of these new styles are for specific applications. Large pans with deep ridges work great for sample panning in streams. Small pans with shallow ridges are designed for final cleanup or light sampling of concentrates.
Shaker tables. These flat tables have low profile ridges that stretch across the length of the table. Water is flowed across the table as it shakes. Gold and black sand is placed into the top of the table and is carried over the table with the water. The shaking action carries the gold up the ridges and into a container on the side of the table.
Throughout the centuries that people have prospected for gold, many tools have been designed and built. The tools above are some of the more common tools used today.
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