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Tools for Gold Mining

"There's gold in them thar hills!" Forty-niners heeding this call rushed west in 1849 with a pan and other hand tools to make their fortunes. According to SierraFoothillsMagazine.com, as of 2010, the "easy gold" near the earth's surface is gone. Gold pans, sluice boxes and even metal detectors will not uncover enough gold to make you rich. Mining gold with tools such as these, however, is an inexpensive hobby in the 21st century.

Classifier
- The wire mesh screen has 1/2-inch holes.
  
  The classifier is a sieve made from wood, plastic or aluminum. The wire mesh screen has 1/2-inch holes. Classifiers fit over the top of a 5-gallon bucket or nest inside it. You shovel bedrock onto the wire mesh screen that filters out the larger pieces of bedrock. You shovel this "classified" material from the bucket into the top of the sluice box. For smaller sluice boxes, you may use a plastic scoop instead of a shovel.
Sluice Boxes
- Sluice boxes use a stream's rushing water to wash out gold.
  
  Sluice boxes are non-powered boxes placed on top of a flowing stream to find concentrates of gold carried in the flowing stream water. Powered sluice boxes have more government regulations concerning where and when they can be used. The running stream water carries the classified material over slats that create a back-flow, collecting the gold concentrates in the water as the other material washes out. You pour this water in the slats into a gold pan to "wash" again. You use a plastic suction bottle to pick up the material left in the pan ripples. The gold is stored in clear plastic or glass vials.
Metal Detectors
- Metal detectors are for finding gold near the surface.
  
  Metal detectors help to scan for gold nuggets on land or in the water. They are cost-effective and easy to carry, but are only effective if the gold nuggets are not deeply embedded in the rock. Divers use metal detectors to scan for gold nuggets in riverbeds or deeper lakes and rivers. Commercial dredges that are very expensive and subject to regulation must be used for retrieving gold at great depths.
Hand Tools
- Use hand tools dig gold from cracks and crevices.
  
  Rock hounds carry hand tools to find the gold trapped in earthen bedrock in a rock hound bag. The rock pick has a hammer on one side to break the rock and a pick on the other. The pick is small enough to break up hard, packed material in cracks and crevices with one easy swing. The crevice tool scrapes gold from rocks and crevices. It can be a screwdriver, bent spoon or a manufactured tool. A brush sweeps gold dust from under rocks or bedrock slabs.

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