Links
Gold Prospectors Association of America
  Western Washington Chapter of  GPAA 
Easy Bucket Classifier
Taken from the Buckeye Chapter of the GPAA Website
Cheap Panning Tub
Here's an idea from ColoradoMike for a cheap Panning Tub  Taken from the GPAA Tennessee Chapter

Just a little ditty for those of you wanting to set up a panning tub without a great deal of expense.
Materials:
4 - 2'x4'x8' (about $1.78 each at Home Depot)
4 - sawhorse brackets (usually they come in pairs for about $7.50/pair)
plywood - 20"x38"
4 - 3" wood screws
40 - 2 1/2" wood screws (for the sawhorse brackets)
4 - 1" wood screws
1 - Rubbermaid 17 1/2"W x 38"L x 16"D storage bin.

Cut eight (8) 14" long legs, two (2) 20" long cross beams (A to B and C to D). Put them together as two sawhorses using the 2 1/2" wood screws and A to B and C to D as the tops of each sawhorse, i.e., A_________B and C__________D. Then cut two (2) 38" long cross braces, one to connect A to C and the other to connect B to D using the four 3" wood screws. Cut your plywood to a 20"x38" rectangle and square up on the ABCD rectangular brace and screw down with the four (4) 1" WOOD SCREWS. Set the tub on top of the table and voila! Cutting the legs to that short makes the tub an ideal 36" maximum height and just right when sitting on the porch in one of those round plastic chairs. The tub also comes with its own lid so that you can keep the leaves, bugs, and pesky 'skeeters' out.
Reading A Stream
This is from a book written by Matt Thornton. It is really informative and covers just about everything about reading a stream


Useful Information






 

Miller Table
Plans and instructions are attached.

"In it’s simplest form a modern Miller Table is just a flat piece of material set at a relatively shallow slope where you deposit heavily concentrated material washed by an extremely thin layer of low velocity water. In some ways it’s akin to running a completely bare sluice and in fact most sluices can be operated as a Miller Table if your entrainment mat can be removed to reveal the aluminum bottom.

In scientific terms I suppose one of these devices would be called a gravity separation unit since they operate on the principal of stratification and gravity settlement where the lighter materials are moved away from the heavier materials faster by the action of water flow. They are sometimes called ‘Gravity Tables’ or ‘Flowing Film Concentrators’. Despite their simplicity these tables are capable of separating extremely fine gold from black sands, gold so fine that it can’t be seen with the naked eye until it’s brushed into small piles. For a home built table I imagine that the finest material recoverable is in the 250 to 300-mesh range. The finest sieve I have is a 200-mesh screen and a tremendous amount of the material I collect with my small tables easily passes this classification so maybe I’m to conservative in my estimate but I’m not sure that I’d recognize 400-mesh material if I saw it. Maybe I need to buy some more sieves.

One of the remarkable things of using even a small table is that you can keep running the same sample of sands repeatedly over and over again and they keep revealing more and more gold each time and each run has a finer gradient of particles until you reach a point where you need magnification to observe the results. Just just using a longer table if you have the space for one can accelerate this process. The largest I’ve ever built was 5-feet long by 18-inches wide and it was remarkable to watch in operation as you could see the gold particles spread out along the entire length in a gradient of particle sizes and colors until towards the bottom the board was pitch black."