Once you have gathered your gold bearing material from the field, classified it down to a similar size, and processed it through your processing plant (i.e. high banker, trommel, spiral wheel, etc.), you will need to complete a gold “cleanup”. Cleaning up is when you take the concentrated gold bearing material that is a result of running it through your preferred processing method and continue to remove the remaining unwanted materials and extract only the gold.
Cleanups are done several different ways by different gold prospectors. Which one you use depends highly on the amount of concentrated gold bearing material you have collected. If you have collected a bucket or so of concentrates, you can choose to use a high-volume method like a spiral wheel. If you only have a few cups of gold baring material, you can simply use a small gold finishing pan and a magnet.
One annoyance you will most certainly encounter when finishing the gold extraction process is black sands. Black sand, or iron sand, is a magnetic sand that is very heavy. The best way to remove this sand is by using some sort of magnetic device. We offer several different types of black sand magnets with a “plunger” action that allows you to quickly remove the sand and easily release it into another vessel thus separating the black sand from the gold.
Once you clean up your concentrates and have accumulated what is mostly pure gold, you will need to then collect it somehow so you can put it into a vial. For this you will need a snuffer or “snifter” vial. We offer several different types of gold snuffer bottles in a variety of sizes. Once you have your gold safely contained in one of the plastic snuffer vials, you can then transfer it into a gold vial, which come in plastic or glass, by using one of our small funnels. Shop our selection of cleanup tools for gold panning and prospecting down below.