How it Works
Easy to use! Even for a person new to gold-panning, the Gear Pan is a revolutionary device designed to make your time out quicker and more efficient: just sit the Gear Pan roughly level on the ground, fill the pump with water, tilt up the screen and start the engine.
How Does it Work?
Vibration and water flow settles and catches the gold in a gold pan under the screen, and flushes out almost all of the rocks and lighter material! Just keep shovelling in the gravel until you're ready to see how much gold you have.
After shovelling on gravel for 1/2 hour (or hours!) all that is left in the pan will be the gold and some heavy material.
Processing Gold-Bearing Gravel
The screen needs to be raised enough so that the rocks will slide off, but not too fast, so they get washed off first. All the finer material less than 3/4" drops into the pan and settles out the gold while the lighter material gradually vibrates over toward the spillway on the pan and drops out of the pan. You can put through a lot of material before you need to clean out the pan. Then you are left with only about 1" of heaviest material to pan out and get the gold which takes only a few minutes.
The gold pan can be removed at any time and the material dumped into another pan, to check the gold while your Gear Pan is still processing gravel!
Close to 100% Gold Recovery!
On tests we have done the machine usually recovers 100% of the gold. The test is 20 pieces of gold from tiny specks to 1/8" mixed into a pile of the usual river material. Usually it recovers all 20 pieces, sometimes it loses one or two of the smallest specks of gold. The percentage of recovery depends on running the machine at the best vibration (speed) and not feeding it too fast.
As you can see in the Youtube video, you can shovel in material at a good rate but you just need to check the tailings once in a while to make sure you are not losing any gold, and if so, adjust the vibration speed and amount of material you are feeding it.