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Classifiers: No? Yes? Which? How Many?


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I understand that there are multiple reasons for panning especially when you include professionals all the way to occasional, recreational prospectors.  I'm definitely near the right end of this spectrum, but I'd like to get better, faster, more efficient.  To be specific, I want to find all the gold in my bucket, and I'm not trying to make a threshold cut at return per time spent.  Here are some questions I have:

1) Does classification help enough to make it worthwhile to buy, carry, store one or more in the first place?  (If 'no' then I guess the rest of these questions are unnecessary.)

2) What sizes should one use?  I know there is an array of sizes, but how many of those are useful?

3) Do you stack multiple sizes in one operation?

4) Do you still investigate the materials that the classifier rejects as too large?  For example, with the wire mesh types do you dump the contents onto a clean, metal free area and run a detector over them to make sure there isn't a nice size chunk of the magic metal in your rejects?

5) I know the GPAA sells a set of screens that you swap in/out of a single housing.  Is that the best direction to go if you are going to use multiple sizes?

If I've missed any important points, please enlighten me on those as well.  Thanks in advance for your answers.

 

 

 

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When I go out panning/crevicing, I use a No. 4(1/4 inch) mesh that sits on top of my pan(or bucket).  Just check the oversize before I discard it.

If I'm panning cons, I might use No. 12, No. 20 and maybe? a no. 30   All depends on material

Don't forget a magnet to get out most of the blacksands when you get near finishing the pan.

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I almost always use a classifier when panning. It both greatly speeds up the process and you also get better recovery. Double benefit. Personally I normally used one of the standard plastic classifiers.

Always at minimum give the oversized discards a quick eyeball - you don't want to toss a large nugget!

 

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I deal with beach gold and to recover that from your cons you Must classify. The golden rule as Mile Pung of Gold Cube would say is that if everything in the pan is the same size... Gold rules.

Now with all that said. What exactly are you panning for?

Is it prospecting? If so then I would suggest a 4 mesh, 20 mesh, 50 mesh, and 80 mesh.

If you have a bucket of cons to cleanup then I would suggest you first run those cons through a super concentrator like the Gold Cube or Gold Hogs Multi Sluice. Which you will have to classify to 1/8" Then classify those super cons through 50, 80, 100, and maybe even finer depending on the gold of your area.

I classify beach cons through 80, 100, 150, 200, 325 mesh screens. Depending on which beach I get my material from .. there is one beach that has +80 mesh gold, veritable nuggets by beach standards :biggrin: but most of the gold is still in the minus 100 and 150 mesh size range.

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 Disregard all of the above. Get a good quality steel pan preferably one built about 1953. Never use plastic. Classify with your panning technique. Practice and be consistent. Develop Incredible Hulk type back muscles. Fortune will soon follow.

I would add more but I'm headed out prospecting. If I can catch that damned burro.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks to all of you for your help and advice.  I should have known this but based upon what you've said and linked, I realize that there aren't simple answers here as far as which classifiers are best.  Similar to detecting, it depends upon your intended targets, your ground, and especially on the nature of the treasure in your location.  I go forward with new appreciation.  As usual, if it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing.

 

 

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you don't need to classify when you're stream panning, save that for cleaning cons. like klunker said, use technique to clear the pan. if you are out mding, all you need is a pan clipped to your pack. the more panning you do, the better you get. 

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