Some Handy Gear for the Prospector

Hardrock miner
Photo by Norbert Schnitzler

There are several items that over the years we have found to be handy added to our exploration kit.  Probably one of the handiest and incidentally the heaviest is a steel anvil 3 inches in diameter by 1 inch thick.  This is used for a simple test for gold.  Gold is malleable and can be flattened with repeated blows with a hammer.  So-called fools gold is brittle breaking up into several fragments, and if reduced to powder turns black.  Gold will retain its true color everything else turns black or in the case of mica turns white.

A hat to shield your punkin head from the hot sun is one of the most valuable things you can have during a prospecting expedition.  A hat also keeps the rain off your head if it starts raining. A simple bill cap will help, but a broad brimmed hat like the cowboy’s wear is even better.  The best one is a hard hat to protect your head from falling objects.

Gloves are another thing you shouldn’t be without because after a day of shoveling or hammering you are likely to find that one of the things you’ve got is a good set of blisters among other things.  The best work gloves for the prospector are leather work gloves.

If you are hunting for gold anywhere there are snakes, and there are always plenty of snakes wherever there is gold you need a pair of snake proof boots.  A rattlesnake can strike so hard that even with snake boots you can still be bruised through your boots.  A snake bite can ruin your day.  If you are messing around in streams one of the most handiest things you can have is a pair of rubber boots, preferably hip boots.

One of the handiest things you can have on a prospecting expedition is a good jeweler’s 10X loup.  Why a 10X because it has a depth of field that is deep enough to bring things into focus.  Loupes larger then a magnification of 10x have a much shorter depth od field to render them virtually useless.  In the same vein a pad and pencil also comes in handy for making notes.  A surveyor’s pad works best because they have water-proof paper.  You could also include a ball point pen.

The really most handy things to have is a good handheld GPS unit.  You can set it at your base station so you will always be able to return.  It is also handy for finding other places where you have been.  Another use for one of these is using it for laying out claims.

Nancy Twinkie goes Shopping for Prospector’s Supplies

It finally came to pass that Nancy Twinkie became so hooked on gold prospecting she decided that she should own her own prospecting gear.  So on one Saturday morning when it was raining off we went to a rock shop that carried the kind of gear she wanted.  It was quite a drive to the rock shop since the nearest one to where we lived in Connecticut was about forty-five miles away on the other side of the Connecticut River in East Hampton.  Although Connecticut isn’t exactly rock hounding country there are enough to support a few rock shops; this one is the largest in the state. 

While I was talking to the owner Nancy was poking around in the store for what she wanted, and they had enough of fixings to satisfy her wants.  The first thing she bought was a gold panning kit that included two pans one was 14 inches in diameter and the other was 10 inches.  The kit also had a 14 inch classifier along with a pair of tweezers, a small magnifying glass, and a snuffer bottle for snuffing up small flakes of gold from a goldpan.  There were even a couple of plastic vials to hold the gold.

Then she bought a folding shovel like the kind you use in the army to dig a foxhole.  Although many people would call this a folding shovel I learned the hard way that it is also known in certain quarters as a “hip spoon.”

Nancy went whole hog that day, and bought some other gear for rock hounding.  This collection included a 22 ounce Estwing rock pick, a four pound Estwing cracking hammer, a 1 inch chisel about a foot long, and a bull point of the same length. 

After collecting this gear we stopped at one of those Big Box stores and bought a pair of work boots and a zipper overnight case to carry all this gear in.  The goldpans didn’t fit, so she also bought a backpack.  That finished her collection, so with that we spent the rest of the day rock hounding. 

This is the part of Connecticut where there are several large pegmatite mines many of which have some really rare minerals, so we went to the Strickland Quarry for collecting.  (At the time Strickland was open for collecting, but has since morphed into a golf course, and is closed to collectors.)

After parking the truck we noticed there was a large boulder composed mostly of cleavelandite just on the edge of the parking area.  From the looks of that boulder it probably weighed more then two tons.  By examining the boulder I could see the blades of cleavelandite sticking out in all directions.  Knowing this was one of the signs that there might be pockets inside the boulder we decided to see what was inside and went to work on the boulder with my 8 pound sledge.   

It didn’t take long to find out that the sledge hammer wasn’t going to work so I went back to the truck for a single jack stone drill and a striking hammer.  This was some mining equipment I had inherited from my great grandfather along with some ¾ inch feather wedges. 

A single jack drill it pretty easy to use, and you can drill a hole with one in a hurry by hitting its upper end with a four pound hammer. Each time you strike the drill you have to rotate the drilling steel a quarter turn so that every time the cutting edge of the drill is cutting into a new part of the stone.  We had to make four holes into the rock that were about six inches deep to hold the feather wedges.  It probably took agout 15 minutes to drill the holes and set the feather wedges.  After the wedges were set and tapped into place the boulder was split in half in less then a half hour from when we started drilling. 

Feather wedges can still be bought at mason supply stores, but old fashioned stone drills are no longer sold.  However you can make your own from a star drill by grinding off two of the flutes, or by grinding a radius on the cutting edge of a cold chisel.

Once we were inside the boulder there were many interesting specimens as the pegmatite was an LCT type.  In some of the cavities we found nice specimens of columbite,  but the best specimen was a nice crystal of blue beryl.  Most of the specimen was badly flawed, but there were some areas that were faceting grade that would probably have made gems weighing more then 10 carets.  That stone is still in Nancy’s private collection!