How to make your own gold pan - make your own mining equipment

hey i'm chris ralph the professional prospector and today i'm starting a new series on making your own mining equipment so if you ever had it have had an interest in making your own mining equipment and maybe saving some money hey we're going to get started on doing a series of that and if you haven't subscribed yet you might want to subscribe so you can catch all the issues of how to make your own mining equipment today we're going to be starting off with how to make your own gold pan and gold pans you know they're critical tool for prospecting and testing ores and doing all kinds of stuff every prospector who's serious about prospecting has at least one pan some folks have a zillion of them look i got a pile of pans i got all different ones different kinds and sizes and colors and by no means is this my complete set it isn't even half of them now after looking at that you may wonder what does a gold pan really look like and i gotta tell you most people think of something like this now a long time ago when the 49ers first started getting going with mining gold when they first made the discovery actually in 1848 and in elsewhere part of the united states they were mine and gold before that but in 1848 when they found gold in california they didn't have any pans like this nobody thought to have them there may have been some pans like that back in georgia and north carolina and some other places like that but nobody on the west coast had anything like that because they never thought of mining gold so when they first started they actually started using basically spoons made out of horn that looked something like this you can see that this isn't anything fancy basically all they did was take the horn off a bowl and cut it and make a kind of a spoon with it and by carefully washing the material in this they could separate the gold from the gravel it wasn't very efficient you couldn't do a lot of gravel like this but it worked now while most people think of a pan that looks something like this you know i showed you in my little collection there i got pans that are square i got a pan that's hexagonal i got pans that are big and round small and round i got some other pans and i showed you that the original 49ers started off with a spoon made out of a bull's horn so pans actually look a lot different depending on where you are and when you are until about more or less 50 years ago pans gold pans looked like this they were made out of steel if you left water in them they would rust and you know in fact the the first pan i ever bought was a steel pan and i left water or wet black sand in that pan so many times that eventually it got pin holes in it and you could hold it up and see the light through it and well once it's got holes in it that's not a good pan that you want to be using so i've got other pans and i've been you know i showed you that collection i use those pants all of them from time to time but pans you know don't need to look the same now all the original pants looked like this because they would take a piece of steel and a press and then have a mold that it went over and then press it into this shape but once people started getting going into plastic injection molding and making plastic gold pants well you could make pans with all different kinds of crazy shapes you could make pans with you know they have the little riffles in the wall of the pan you could make pans that were square or round or big or small it didn't really make any difference because plastic can be made into whatever shape the mold wants it to go in now it's expensive to make your own mold if you ever really wanted to make your own pans and make some kind of g whiz golly whiz bang super duper pan you could get some ideas and have somebody make a mold for you and then you could pay a plastic injection molding company to to make them for you but and you can make them in whatever colors you want because of course plastic it can be pretty much any old color depending on what you order but you know making your own plastic pan that's that's not cheap it usually costs literally thousands of dollars to to make a mold and then to have a run of plastic pan well that just makes a difference in what you what you see and what product that you would end up with like i say there's all kinds of pans plastic from round square rectangular of course your original classic metal pan so let me give you a tour of what gold pans look like these days now one of the oldest types of pans is this battea it's called these were used in south america and other places and basically it's just a simple cone made of steel and the bottom of the cone of course gold is so heavy it'll work its way down to the bottom it's very popular and these are still used all over the world and in fact they're coming out with a plastic version of it and uh who knows if i see one of these at a show these plastic ones i i may buy one because i always wanted to try this pan design out now pants don't need to be made out of steel there's also copper pans that they make you know it's uh in the the copper design pan is not made for general use usually it's more expensive it's used for using in conjunction with mercury perhaps the most significant feature of just about all plastic pans is some sort of riffle system as you would see on the left of this this has a really deep inset riffle but it's popular now to make pans with a series of different ripples deep and big like this a medium and small and and so that you could use different size pans for cleaning out different size materials and in fact i mentioned that pans of course can be square or rectangular like this one sometimes they're a combination of squarish and roundish sometimes they're even very unusual shapes like this banjo pan this basically is a pan on one side and a little mini sluice on the other another popular type of pan now is called the gold claw which is basically a series of different riffles and surfaces with which to wash your gold now i mentioned that the most prominent feature about most plastic pans is the riffle systems they have here's one that has not only riffles on the side of the pan but riffles in the bottom there's also pans that in the bottom have a drain plug this is the pyramid pro pan and it's made by a friend of mine by the name of dennis katz he also makes the rectangular pan i showed you earlier that's called the maverick dennis company is called fossakers but there's still i mentioned that the old timers used a horn spoon well there's still spoon like things that are being used in countries across the world today here's a guy in that took a picture in africa and he was panning with this little spoon some very fine gold that he'd recovered this type of spoon can be used not only wet like this guy was using it but it can be used dry and you can literally very carefully blow the black sand and other stuff away from the gold all around the world people use basically whatever is convenient for a gold pan you can see this guy's using just a plain old wash tub and in fact in mongolia where these guys are you can see that plain old wash tubs well that's the order of the day everybody uses the plain wash tub they're not too big they're a little bit on the large size and in fact the small scale miners here have been given a funny name they call them ninja turtle miners because when the wash tubs are green and they put them on their back it looks like they have a turtle shell so you know wherever you are there can be just a whole variety of gold pans that get used by modern day miners so now you've seen all the different and unusual different kinds of plastic pans that are out there and you've seen about riffles and things like that that they have and other features you might wonder what kind of pan is best you know what's the best pan out there is it metal is it plastic is it square round hexagonal some other shape well in order to understand what the best pan is the first thing i think you should understand is how a gold pan works so we're going to get into the workings of gold pans right now so this is a view of your pan from the side and you can see that there's water and gravel now it doesn't start off with the gold on the bottom the first step and i'm going to describe it to you is to shake the material in your pan back and forth under water so you've got water and gravel in your pan and you shake it back and forth now a lot of people ask well how violently should i shake it i see people in videos shaking that's so hard material sloshes out of the pan and goes flying you're not trying to mix things up you're trying to settle things down you're trying to shake it moderately not slowly and weekly but just a moderate amount that will allow material the heavy material to settle downward to the bottom of the pan like i'm showing in this illustration and the lighter material to move up to the top and then the whole section of panning is letting water into the pan and then pushing it back out or letting it flow back out and wash the lighter stuff out of the pan so you let some water in and then let the water wash the light stuff out of your pan and after you've done that several times you shake it a little bit some more and then you let the water wash out you let some water in and let the water wash out the light materials that are on the surface well you keep shaking the heavier stuff keeps settling down and you wash more and more light material out of your pan until you eventually get to this situation where there's only a small amount of the material left and you keep doing it where you again shake a little bit and then let the water wash the light stuff off the surface shake a little bit let the water wash the light stuff off the surface it takes a little practice but you will get used to it and pretty quickly it becomes a very easily thing that you can just do with hardly any pain much of attention it doesn't take a lot of real concentration to do this properly once you get down to the last teaspoon or two of material you pull the pan up to a more horizontal level and then you swirl the material in the pan and this is what's illustrated here you swirl the water around and the lighter sands and gravels will fan out and the gold and heavy black sands will be at the the start of the point of the fan that's why this is called fanning your material and when you do this it will reveal the gold that you have acquired so now you've seen all the crazy weird shapes some of them aren't even you know shapes that you would recognize like a round or square some of them are you know like you saw the kind of unusual shapes now that you've seen all those different kinds of things and you know i would tell you that all of those pans work and the truth is really a lot of what pan is best is what pan you prefer right if you're used to something and it's comfortable in your hands and you think it's the kind of pan you like okay there's nothing really wrong with that that can be good so the best pan is really the pan that you're most comfortable with now in order to talk about how once now you've understood how pans work and all the different strange kinds that are out there how do you want to think about making your own pan well since you've seen that there's all different kinds of shapes and people use all different kinds of things for pans you know you can make anything into a pan that's kind of the message that that this video is usually pans are not very expensive unless you live in some really remote place where getting a pan would be difficult you know it's it's cheap enough to buy a pan but my point is sometimes you might be out camping or out on a trip and think hey this area looks like it might have some gold i'd like to test it but i don't have a gold pan well how would that work well i've shown you that different things get used tubs and all kinds of stuff get used as pans so you can use different kinds of things here is what they call a sierra cup for drinking water take it for backpackers it's a very small pan but i could easily use this as a pan and take gold out of a cup full of gravel just to see is there any color in a cup full of gravel you know a panel or a cup like this would work just fine another thing a mess tray a simple mess tray now this one because it's so shallow might be a little bit difficult to use in the water but i could make a pan like this work i guarantee i could another thing is just your basic pan this is actually a pan out of my camping equipment kit i've taken it camping before i've made you know bacon or eggs or whatever and stuff like this easy enough to use this as a pan it's made of aluminum but hey aluminum is is a good sturdy metal you know i could definitely use this as a pan and it would work just fine so the bottom line is that in a pinch you can use almost anything for a pan something that's you know has a little depth to it you don't want things that are super tall like this although you saw the conical shape uh batia you know that works fine so now you've seen how many different things are used as a gold pan and how um literally you know it can be any shape or size you know as as long as you know as long as it's something you can handle then yeah just about anything could be a gold pan so what should you think about if you're trying to improvise and make a gold pan well you know i'll start with this uh this little tray cooking cooking pan that i have it it actually has a little thing here that you can hook a handle to it and that way you can use it as a regular frying pan well things that you want to look for when you're going to improvise a gold pan and make your own gold pan you want something that's fairly shallow okay you can see that compared to the height compared to the diameter it's fairly shallow you can start getting things that are too tall and it just gets kind of crazy on you like you saw there they have the ones that are the batia and and their conical shape but you know they're fairly wide and they're still not too deep so a little bit on the shallow side another thing you want is not too huge you know they make tubs that are three feet in diameter we saw the mongolians using wash tubs well if you have a wash tub that's you know 18 inches maybe a little bigger no problem but you start getting to a wash tub that's two and a half feet three feet it gets hard to handle something like that so you don't want it to be too huge and and then conversely you know if it's teeny tiny much smaller than my uh sierra cup yeah you can't really put much gravel in there so the size is important and then sturdy you want some that you know will stand up to a little use you don't want to like a piece of paper just fall apart when you get it wet you know you can't do that so you want it to be reasonably sturdy and strong and then especially if you're using cooking utensils like this you want it to be not greasy all right you know i've used this for cooking it's dirty now i haven't used it for cooking in a long time but uh it could easily be used for cooking and then you carefully wash it out you need soap and water clean it up dry it off get it good and clean then no problem using it as a pan you just don't want to like cook a pile of bacon in there or something and have it full of grease and fat and then try to use it for panning or just basically wipe off the excess fat that's not enough you need to get it good and clean before you start using because uh the the oil in a greasy pan will help make the gold float and small fine gold does have a tendency to float i've shown that in other videos if you're not careful so you don't want things too greasy but there's our little four rules shallow not huge or too small sturdy and not greasy other than that you can pick whatever kind of container you want to use as a gold pan and you'll be able to make your own pan so in a pinch you know what to do now so if you want to continue i'm going to talk more about actually building equipment in some of my future ones rather than improvising like a gold pan uh we're gonna talk about sluice boxes and dry washers um rock crushers and and maybe get to metal detectors although that's a really difficult product a very difficult project to make your own metal detector if you're interested in any of those things sign up we're also going to have a series coming up soon on recognizing or is a different type i've had a real popular video my most popular video about recognizing what gold ore looks like but i've also done one on platinum and and on silver but i'm coming out with ones on copper and uh all kinds of other metals uranium and if you ever wondered what any of that stuff looks like that's coming up so be sure to subscribe and i hope you enjoy this video now if you want to become a better prospector and you want to go out and find your own gold with a gold pan whether it be improvised or a real gold pen you know i wrote a book about how to gain the skills that are necessary to find your own goal because it really is a skill that you learn and if you want to find out more about my book i'm going to tell you a little bit about it right now so let me tell you a little bit more about my book um it's called this full of gold and i wrote it because i want you to be able to go out and find for yourself this full of gold and uh you can see that it's a an encyclopedia with all kinds of information pictures and that sort of thing it's not in color but the color would have cost me a lot more to have printed and so the book would have cost a lot more it's for sale on amazon and you can pick it up i'll put a link in the description below i also serve as the editor for a prospecting magazine it's icmjs prospecting and mining journal and honestly you should check that out we've got stories and information legal stuff everything you know to increase your skills as a prospector i write articles in this every month and a lot of other very experienced prospectors contribute to the magazine as well so check the magazine out also i have a website and the website is at nevadaoutbackgems.com i'll put a link for it in the description below but there's gobs of information there that you will find useful in your prospecting efforts finally i want to say that i really appreciate your comments and thoughts and even a positive criticism don't come on there and just toss out insults because i'll just delete your comments but if you've got helpful things to say and questions to ask do write and and put those in the comments because i answer my comments to people and uh you'll hear from me in you know in responding to you uh so if you've enjoyed this video and you like what you see and you're interested in uh finding out more well then sign up subscribe and hit the uh the notification bell so they'll let you know when i post new videos and you know like it and share it if again you you see stuff that you really are excited about and i'll be coming out with lots more new videos and so we'll see you again real soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 38,693

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Id: rmn67wOWGBA

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020