Gold Prospecting Equipment & Supplies

The equipment you need to start gold prospecting depends on how you plan to find gold: panning and sluicing creeks, or detecting for nuggets. You can start small either way and add gear once you find good ground.

To pan and sluice: a gold pan with riffles, a classifier to screen out rocks, and a snuffer bottle and vials for fine gold. Once you find a productive spot, a sluice box lets you process far more material.

To detect for nuggets: a gold metal detector, a pick and a pinpointer.

Either way: a shovel and bucket, and a check that you're allowed to dig where you plan to hunt.

Our gold panning guide walks you through your first day in the field.

The difference between gold panning and using a sluice box is volume. Gold panning is done by hand: you shake and swirl the pan to wash lighter material over the edge while gold settles to the bottom. It is ideal for sampling new ground and testing whether a spot is worth more time and equipment.

A sluice box uses running water through a riffle-lined box to process much more material, and you clean the gold out of the riffles and mat at the end of a run. A sluice needs a water source and some setup. Most prospectors use a pan to sample and a sluice to work ground that has proven itself. Our sluice box guide explains how one works.

You should choose a gold detector or gold panning equipment by the ground you work, and many prospectors use both because they find different gold. A gold detector like the Minelab GOLD MONSTER 1000 covers ground quickly and finds nuggets in dry washes and on bedrock where there is no water to pan.

Panning and sluicing recover the fine gold in creek gravel that is usually too small for a detector to signal on. A common approach is to detect to find a productive area, then pan and sluice to work it thoroughly. Shop both in gold detectors and gold pans and gold panning kits.

A gold spiral wheel is a rotating, tilted pan with a spiral rib that separates gold from black sand concentrates. Water sprays across the wheel as it turns, washing light material off the bottom edge, while the spiral carries heavy gold up and into a center cup. It works on fine and flour gold that's hard to pan out by hand.

A spiral wheel is a cleanup tool: you run your pan or sluice concentrates through it at home or camp instead of panning every cup. Most machines run on 12-volt power, some Gold Magic wheels also turn by hand crank, and larger wheels process more material per hour. See the full range in our gold wheels and spiral panning machines collection, including Gold Magic and Camel Mining.

A shaker table in gold prospecting is a finishing machine that separates gold from black sand concentrates. It has a sloped, riffled deck that vibrates back and forth while a thin sheet of water flows across it. Heavy gold works along the riffles to one end of the table, while lighter material washes off the side, so you can collect nearly clean gold.

Shaker tables are mostly used by larger operations that process a lot of concentrate. For hobby-scale cleanup, most prospectors get the same job done with a spiral gold wheel, a Blue Bowl or a Gold Cube, which cost less and take up far less space. Our guide to recovering flour gold covers the full cleanup process.

To separate black sand from gold, first classify and pan your concentrates down as far as you safely can, then remove the magnetic black sand with a magnet, and finish with a fine-gold recovery tool. Gold is not magnetic, so a magnet pulls the magnetite away while the gold stays behind.

Put a strong magnet in a plastic bag and pass it just over dry or damp concentrates, then drop the black sand into a separate container. For the non-magnetic heavy sands left over, a gold spiral wheel or a Blue Bowl concentrator separates fine gold with running water, and a snuffer bottle picks up the last flakes.

Screening your material with classifiers first makes every step easier. Our guide to recovering flour gold covers the full cleanup process, and our How to Pan for Gold guide covers the panning steps.

The gold panning equipment you need comes down to three pieces, each with its own job. A classifier on a 5-gallon bucket screens out rocks first, so you pan only the smaller material. A gold pan with riffles does the washing: you shake and swirl it so lighter material washes over the edge while gold settles to the bottom. A snuffer bottle then sucks the flakes out of the pan so you can drop them into a vial.

Many of the kits in our gold pans and gold panning kits collection combine these items. Our best gold panning kits for beginners post compares them, and our How to Pan for Gold guide covers the technique step by step.

You can buy gold prospecting equipment near you at the Serious Detecting showroom at 3901 Bestech Dr #100, Ypsilanti, MI 48197, or order online and we ship across the US. Local pickup is available at the showroom.

Questions about a specific pan, sluice or concentrator? Call (844) 771-0707 or email support@seriousdetecting.com. To see what you need before you visit, start with our beginner gold prospecting equipment guide, or shop gold detectors if you plan to hunt nuggets with a detector.