Prospecting and rockhounding gear: where to buy
Much of the best gear for gold and gems is built in small workshops and sold online, not in big stores. Pick what you are looking for and see every shop and maker we list, with a link to each one's website.
What each kind of gear is for
Metal detectors
Metal detectors find metal buried in the ground. Prospectors use them to hunt gold nuggets in deserts, on hillsides and on old diggings, and to find meteorites, most of which contain some iron. Gold detectors are built to cope with mineralized, iron-rich ground.
Gold pans & classifiers
The gold pan is the basic prospecting tool: you swirl gravel and water until the light material washes out and the heavy gold stays at the bottom. Classifiers are screens that sit on the pan or a bucket and sort the gravel by size before you pan it.
Sluice boxes
A sluice box is an open trough set in the creek, with no engine: the current carries the gravel through while riffles and mats on the floor trap the gold. It runs best on gravel screened beforehand and washes far more material than a pan.
Highbankers & power sluices
A highbanker is a pump-fed sluice with a hopper on top. Its strength is that you shovel raw dirt straight into the hopper without screening it: a spray bar washes it and a grizzly lets only the fine material into the sluice. A power sluice has the pump and a header box but no hopper, so it takes material that is already screened.
Dredges & parts
A suction dredge is a floating machine whose engine and pump suck gravel off the bottom of a creek through a hose and run it over a sluice. It reaches gold on bedrock underwater, and it is the most regulated kind of prospecting equipment.
Drywashers
A drywasher recovers gold from dry dirt with air instead of water. You shovel onto its classifier screen, the fines are metered onto a riffle tray with a cloth bottom, and air from a bellows or a blower lifts the light sand away while the gold stays behind the riffles. It is the machine for desert washes with no water.
Sniping & crevice tools
Small hand tools for getting gold out of cracks in bedrock: bent picks and scrapers, pry bars, suction bulbs, snuffer bottles and hand-pumped suction guns.
Rocker boxes
A rocker box, or cradle, is a box with a screen, an apron and riffles that you rock by hand while pouring water over the gravel. It washes gravel with very little water and still works where water is scarce.
Trommels
A trommel is a rotating drum fed with water. A screening trommel washes gravel, breaks up clay and sorts it through a perforated drum onto a sluice; a reverse-helix trommel works like an Archimedes screw, carrying the heavy material and the gold up to the front while the light material washes out the back.
Picks, shovels & hand tools
Hand tools for prospecting and rockhounding: shovels, picks, rock hammers, chisels, buckets, brushes and safety gear such as glasses and gloves.
Fine gold recovery
Tools for separating fine gold from the black sand in your concentrate: magnets for the magnetite, spiral wheel panners that carry the gold to a center cup, blue bowls that wash the sand out with a gentle vortex, cleanup sluices, snuffer bottles and vials.
Assay & refining supplies
Assays and tests that tell you how much gold or silver a rock, a concentrate or an ore sample really contains, by fire assay in a lab or with an XRF analyzer.
Paydirt
Bags of gold-bearing gravel or concentrate for panning at home, sold with a guaranteed amount of gold. Good for practice, for testing equipment, or as a gift.
Mineral specimens
Minerals, crystals, polished stones and gemstones to buy instead of digging, from rock shops with a storefront you can walk into, including some that sell material from their own mines and claims.
Rough & slabs
Uncut stone to cut and polish yourself: chunks, nodules and slabs of agate, jasper, turquoise, opal, petrified wood and many other materials.
Lapidary equipment
Equipment and supplies for cutting and polishing stone: rock tumblers, trim and slab saws, cabbing machines, flat laps, grits and polishes.
Fossils
Fossils to buy, legally collected on private land: shells, trilobites, ammonites, plants, shark teeth and more. Fossils from federal land can never be sold, so a good shop tells you where each piece comes from.
Meteorites
Pieces of real meteorites, iron, stone or stony-iron, each sold under the official name listed by the Meteoritical Society.
Petrified wood
Petrified wood, trees that have turned to stone, from small polished pieces to slabs and whole log rounds, dug on private land and the shops' own claims.
Classes & training
Lessons and guided outings: panning and metal detecting classes, lapidary courses and field trips with people who know the ground.
Your shop or workshop is missing? Write to us.