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Lemon Thrower
1000+ Penny Miser Member
USA
1588 Posts |
 Posted - 07/30/2009 : 09:44:26
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Got back from Dahlonega, GA a few days ago. Toured the gold museum and did some panning at a roadside tourist attraction. After a lot of work, I did end up with a lot of tiny gold flakes. I asked a worker how much I had. She asked me how much I paid for the sand. I told her $30 worth. She said I had about $40 of gold.
Of course, I'm suspicious of that. I have a scale but its not accurate to fractions of a gram. $40 would be about 1 gram of gold I estimate.
has anyone ever had success with these tourist operations? I'm fairly certain they just plant a bunch of gold flakes in bags of sand.
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Buying:
Peace/Morgan G+ at $15.00
copper cents at 1.3X
wheat pennies at 3X
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redneck
1000+ Penny Miser Member
1273 Posts |
Posted - 07/30/2009 : 10:46:16
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Here's a little trick I did to make it profitable-fun when I was at one those tourist attractions.
They usually give you a little bag to pan at a water trough with other people.This is where it becomes profitable. When your done shifting your bag in the trough, reach down into the bottom of the trough and scoop up another pan full of sand and sift it.Do it again and again. The reason you do this is because most people don't have a clue as how to sift correctly and end up washing their gold out of their pans.
The tourist attractions know this, so they continually recycle their sand in their troughs.
Remember gold, is heavy and will always go to the deepest section at the bottom of the trough.
How much can you get...?
Well, when I walked up and gave the girl behind the counter my gold to be weighed, she told me she had never seen anybody ever, get that amount of gold there, ever...!
It made quite a little buzz between the employees.
Yes, they spike their bags with a little...
But ,you can spike your poke with a lot, if you know what to do....
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Kurr
1000+ Penny Miser Member
2906 Posts |
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Lemon Thrower
1000+ Penny Miser Member
USA
1588 Posts |
Posted - 07/31/2009 : 13:47:14
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redneck, that makes a lot of sense. I thought about doing that but my back was already killing me just working through the bag I bought. Also, the water in the trough is extremely cloudy, perhaps on purpose. so its a bit difficult to locate the good stuff. Also, I question how much the gold discarded by unskilled customers has a chance to settle.
for me to have $40 in gold is about 1 gram. commercial mining is economic at about 1 gram per ton. they must be seeding the sand. if they new the sand was that rich they'd be fools to let the public in. |
Buying:
Peace/Morgan G+ at $15.00
copper cents at 1.3X
wheat pennies at 3X
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Robarons
Penny Hoarding Member
USA
522 Posts |
Posted - 07/31/2009 : 16:02:22
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I did that one time as well. But the emphasis to find "gems" rather than gold. You would find your quartz or some other pretty stone and show it to a clerk and they would tell you its wonderful value. And they would push you to put it in a lovely 14k setting starting at $79.95!!!
Never liked those tourist type deals. |
Robber Baron= Robarons |
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redneck
1000+ Penny Miser Member
1273 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2009 : 14:33:22
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quote:
Also, the water in the trough is extremely cloudy, perhaps on purpose. so its a bit difficult to locate the good stuff. Also, I question how much the gold discarded by unskilled customers has a chance to settle.
You don't have to locate anything, it's on the bottom, period.
quote:
Remember, gold is heavy and will always go to the deepest section at the bottom of the trough.
quote:
they must be seeding the sand. if they new the sand was that rich they'd be fools to let the public in.
Of coarse they spike the sand so people get a little gold fever...
Most people pan 70-90% of the gold back into the trough.(inexperienced)
Plus ,it may be low grade.Hard to tell without a assay being done.
Simple math would work out something like this.
One ounce $954 = 31.1 grams @$30.67 pr. gram. Or approximately the amount you found. Now most people pan 70-90% of the gold back into the trough though.(inexperienced)
So, most people get less than $10 worth for their hard earned $30.
Not a very good ratio for the tourist, but a excellent rate of return for the operator of the attraction.
$954 divided by $10 = 95.4 customers at $30 per bag = $2862. $2862-954= $1908 profit per ounce of gold.
Not to bad...
Regardless,it's just plain fun...
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n/a
deleted
478 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2009 : 16:15:31
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| I tried it up in Alaska many years ago. It's very hard to do. I bought the kit in Fairbanks and used lead shotgun pellets in the bottom of the pan with the sand/gravel. If the pellets were gone, so was the gold. Needless to say, all I did was freeze in the cold stream for 10 hours polluting the steam with lead shotgun pellets. You need a special hand and lots of patience to pan for gold. It was fun though. |
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Roadside Gold Panning
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