Best Gold Panning Kit for Beginners
There are several gold panning kits for sale, but which ones are good and will catch more gold for you? Read this complete guide for the to find the best gold panning kit for beginners and kids!
Feel free to also have a look at my previous guides if you want to find the best sluice box or the best sluice mat for fine gold recovery.
Let’s now have a look at the best gold panning kit!
Best gold panning kit for beginners with a 12” dual rifle pan (5 pieces)
This gold panning kit is perfect for beginners and contains all the basic tools for gold panning! The gold pan supplied with this kit measures 12’’ in diameter and has deep rifles on one side with small rifles on the other side. This dual rifle pattern is perfect to separate gold not only from small rocks and dirt, but also from fine sediments. No wonder why everyone likes it! This gold pan has an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 with more than 800 reviews on Amazon.
Click here to see this gold panning kit for beginners on Amazon (12’’ pan – 5 pieces kit)
This gold panning kit contains 5 pieces in total. In addition to the gold pan, you also get a snuffer bottle that is very useful to retrieve small gold flakes. The kit also contains a pipet to retrieve fine gold, as well as a small vial for storing your precious metal. The last item of this kit is a magnifier to make sure that you won’t miss any gold.
In summary, this is one of the best gold panning kit for beginners. Furthermore, this gold panning kit is one of the cheapest you could find, which is great if you have just introduced yourself to gold panning and don’t want to spend too much for this new hobby.
Best gold panning kit including 3 gold pans, 2 sifting pans and more! (11 pieces)
This is a great gold panning kit for beginners! This big 11-piece kit contains most of the panning supplies you may need to get the best results. The tools are sturdy and the kit is highly rated on Amazon with a score of 4.6 out of 5 with more than 800 reviews.
Check this gold panning kit for beginners including 3 gold pans, 2 sifting pans and more!
This gold panning kit includes 3 different size of green gold pans; 8”, 10” and 12”. While the standard 12” dual rifle pan may be good for most of the work, the small pans can be also be useful to re-pan dirt for an additional cleanup step.
Another great feature of this kit are the 2 sifting pans. They will fit any 5-gallon bucket and are essential gold panning tools. These sifting pans are made of 304 stainless steel with 2 sizes of mesh (1/2” and 1/8”). Furthermore, these classifier screens are manufactured by SE, a well-known company also selling one of the best gold sluices for beginners.
Just like the previous gold panning kit, this one contains 2 vials for gold and a snuffer bottle. This kit also contains tweezers with a magnifier are very useful for picking up fine gold. In addition, this gold panning kit includes a magnetic tool to pull out black sand containing dense iron metal and a robust 12” scoop for loading classified dirt into the gold pan.
Overall, this is one of the best gold panning kit for beginners and one of the best deals you could find! You will definitely get professional results with this gold panning kit!
Best gold panning kit with mini sluice box from ASR Outdoor (14 pieces)
This is a neat and compact gold panning kit for beginners! It contains everything you need for gold panning including 14 pieces of high quality gold panning equipment. Furthermore, it is highly appreciated on Amazon with a rating of 4.3 out of 5 and over 200 reviews.
This gold panning kit includes 2 gold pans measuring respectively 12” and 10”. These dual rifle pans are perfect for catching gold no matter its size. In addition, the kit contains a 12” mini sluice box, which will save you time and efforts with an easy cleanup step. You can load it with concentrated material to further clean it. All you have to do in order to recover the gold from the sluice is to shake it in a bucket of clean water before panning the remaining dirt.
Check this gold panning kit with mini sluice box from ASR Outdoor!
Although this mini sluice is very efficient, please remember that it is not as powerful as a standard size sluice box. It is also preferable to keep relatively low water flow since gold has to settle in the riffles within 12” without being washed away. That being said, the sluice is made of 3 different riffle patterns that are very efficient for catching fine gold; Hungarian, V-shape and square rifles.
This gold panning kit also contains a sifting pan with 30 holes/inch. The sifting pan has a diameter of 6 inches and can easily be loaded using the sturdy scoop provided with this kit.
One of the best features of this kit is compact and portable. It weights only 2 pounds in total and is convenient to transport on the field with the multipurpose drawstring backpack included. At the end of the day, all you have to do is fold everything back to keep your gold panning tools well organized.
In addition, this gold panning kit contains pipets, small glass vials, a snifter bottle and magnifying tweezers. This panning kit also contains a strong 8 lbs pick-up magnet perfect for removing black sand.
In conclusion, this is one of the best gold panning kit for beginners and kids. It is also very complete and travel-friendly. Check the following video if you want to see the mini sluice box in action!
Best gold panning kit including a mini sluice box with miner’s moss from Sluice Fox (14 pieces)
This is a nice compact and portable gold panning kit from Sluice Fox! This 14-piece gold panning kit is a great starter kit and is slightly cheaper than the previous one from ASR described above. While these kits are very similar, the major difference is that this gold panning kit is provided with a different kind of sluice box.
Instead of rubber, the mini sluice from Sluice Fox is made of metal and is very robust. It is also supplied with 2 different matting surfaces that can be stacked on top of each other. You can use the classical V-shape riffle mat alone, or in combination with miner’s moss. I really like this dual matting surface, since it is the best sluice mat for fine gold recovery such as flour gold.
Click here to see this gold panning kit for beginners including a mini sluice box with miner’s moss!
In my opinion, this is probably the best gold panning kit for kids and beginners. It contains only high-quality items and includes all the gold panning tools that you need to get started. Furthermore, this product is very affordable and has very good reviews on Amazon.
Gold Rush Nugget Bucket – The Best Gold Panning Kit As Seen on Shark Tank! (15 pieces)
The Gold Rush Nugget Bucket is like no other panning kit. It has a very unique way of retrieving gold using a patented fluid bed concentrator. This is by far the easiest kit to use since all the concentration process is done in a single step. You just load it with dirt, pour water on top of it and let gravity do the work! The classifiers will separate the sediments from small rocks, while the gold will pass through the funnel and accumulate at the bottom in the fluid bed concentrator. You can then use the 10” gold pan provided with this kit for a final cleanup step of your concentrated paydirt.
Check this complete gold panning kit for beginners – As seen on the TV show Shark Tank!
This is a very complete kit and probably the best gold panning kit for beginners on the market. No wonder why they made a deal with Robert Herjavec on ABC’s Shark Tank! The Gold Prospectors Association of America (GPAA) also recommends this kit for all ages, and it is indeed one of the best gold panning kit for kids. It also provides detailed instructions, but you can’t really do anything wrong with this kit!
In addition, the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket is made of robust polypropylene and is well designed. It weights only 7 pounds and everything can be stored and easily transported as a single bucket.
In conclusion, the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket is a truly complete gold panning kit for kids and beginners. I really like how they simplified the whole gold concentration process. If you are not convinced yet, feel free to have a look at the following video to see how gold panning can be so easy!
And the best gold panning kit for kids and beginners is…
Honestly, I think that all of the gold panning kit presented above would be very good choices for different reasons.
I would recommend getting the 5-piece kit with the 12” gold pan if you are just looking for an introduction to gold panning. This small kit would make the perfect gift for kids. This is also a great way to see if there is a growing interest before investing more into this hobby.
For gold panning beginners and enthusiasts on a budget, I would probably recommend getting the kit from Sluice Fox since it provides high efficiency at a low price. Of course, if money is not so much of an issue, I would definitely go for the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket because it is the most complete kit and the easiest to use!
I hope that you enjoyed reading this review of the best gold panning kit for beginners and kids. Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments down below. Before you leave this page, you may also want to have a look at my previous posts to find the best rock hammers or the best rock tumblers for beginners.
Additional information
1- Gold Prospectors Association of America (GPAA)
2- Gold panning on Wikipedia
3- Placer mining on Wikipedia