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Sniping & crevice tools: where to buy

Sniping means hunting gold by hand on bare bedrock: in the cracks, under boulders and in the potholes of a creek, often lying in the water to see what you are doing. Gold is heavy and works its way down to bedrock, so cracks and crevices trap it, and a patient sniper can pull gold out of spots that others walked past. It takes very little equipment and works where engines are not allowed.

The tools are simple. Crevice tools are bent steel picks, scrapers and spoons for digging packed material out of cracks, and a pry bar opens the deeper ones. Suction tools pull out what you cannot reach: a squeeze bulb with a tube for small cracks, a snuffer bottle for picking flakes out of the pan, and hand-pumped suction guns, sometimes called hand dredges, for bigger holes behind boulders. Many of these are made by small shops from hardened steel or tough plastic, and a good crevice tool takes a lot of prying without bending.

The easiest time is low water in late summer, when more bedrock is exposed. Work slowly, put everything you scrape into a pan or bucket, and pan it out at the end.

1 shop across the US that sell sniping & crevice tools, 1 of them building their own. Each one links to its own website, so you can compare them one by one.

• Sedig's Place

  Builder · Online or by order · Tonopah, Arizona · Ships nationwide

  Makes: AR500 and 1095 steel crevice and sniping tools, sniping suction bulb

  Home-made AR500 steel crevice and sniping tools from Tonopah, Arizona

  Home-made crevice and sniping tools from Tonopah, Arizona, with blades of AR500 or 1095 spring steel, sold on eBay and Amazon Handmade. Free shipping in the USA.

  amazon.com ↗Eureka listing →

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