Bored without my workshop! 8/18/2020.
Soooo, what kind of fun can I have with limited space in my workshop? Our eldest daughter moved in some months ago and the housecleaning never seemed to end. Eventually, all the unwanted “things to get rid of” pile, ended up in the only open space (my workshop), that was not undergoing the volcano of sorting and repositioning of most of our belongings. Oh well, this was all long overdue anyway . . . . .
With my workshop floor space compromised until we were done with all the sorting, I kinda had time on my hands. What projects I could do, were done. Therefor, I watched a lot of videos on YouTube.
After watching some gold panning videos, I found out that dirt was for sale that had gold in it. On a shelf in my workshop I had two old fashioned gold pans, we had messed around with them before at a local creek, but didn’t know what we were doing. Yup, still had the pans and now I could buy some paydirt!
Found some inexpensive paydirt on Ebay. I was willing to risk something for a chance to really pan for gold, so $26 and free shipping got me three pounds of Virginia paydirt.
I could not see anything in the bag but sand, but all the videos said panning would work better if the paydirt is run through strainers, they call it “classifying the paydirt”. We had two strainers in the kitchen, while appropriating them I did promise to clean them up when I was done.
This was great, I opened the top of the bag and poured some out into the course strainer. Then I used the kitchen strainer to separate the gravel from the fine material.
It was in the small gravel segment, of the first batch of dirt that I poured, where I found those two small pieces of gold in the pictures. They were near the end that I chose to be the top of the bag. There was no other trace of gold in the remainder of the bag. No grains of gold, no powdery gold mixed into the heavy black sands.
I’ve since ordered the best plastic pan out there, the Garrett Super Sluice” gold pan. When it arrived, I tested the paydirt again. No gold. Now to be fair, I bought this paydirt because it was cheap and there was a guarantee of gold in every bag. Sure enough, there was gold in the bag, probably dropped in at the beginning or end of the bagging process. Now that I have some experience panning, the next paydirt I buy will be from a seller that guarantees a minimum specific amount of gold per bag. The paydirt will cost a lot more than I paid for my first bag, and I’ll let you know how it goes!