How to Build Yourself a Henderson Pump - A STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL

It is done! For Christmas, my dad, bless him, gave me a voucher for custom-making me a Henderson gold pump. Awesome gift! Since he is a very skilled handyman, I knew it would turn out great (it did - works like a charm). And since it did turn out so great, I made a tutorial for you. Step by step, with photos to lead you through. Hope it helps.

HENDERSON PUMP-TUTORIAL

Unfortunately, my panning realms are currently covered in snow and ice. As soon as that has melted a bit, I will put it to the field test, as the water levels are still low, which will enable me to access areas I won't get to in the summer.

My equipment - What I use...

From left to right: classifier, rubber mat to sit on, two pans for collecting material, Keene pan for panning, little transparent boxes and a glass vial to collect gold, magnifying glass, tweezers, funnel, brush to get little flakes out of the pan, hiking maps, scraping tools for crevices, rubber gloves if the water is cold, tupperware box to take concentrate home, small shovel and large shovel. All stored in a large backpack.

I also have waterproof fishing pants with wellies attached, but haven't used them yet and I own an extra pair of wellies, which I usually just wear when I go out to pan - along with a jacket and outdoor pants. In addition to all that, I always to bring my wallet, my mobile phone, a knife, a rain-jacket or -poncho, water, snacks, toilet paper, dry socks and a small first aid kit. You never know...

Looking up-close now - my microscope!

I haven't posted in a long time, sorry for that. There's indeed lots to tell you - so I best start at the very beginning, as first thing's first: I finally have a microscope! It's a Traveller USB microscope, which you can plug directly into the computer to take screenshots. It magnifies either 10x, 60x or 200x and you can change the light settings (light from above, below or both). Best thing is: It was only 30 Euros - and it really works like a charm! Here are some pictures of older finds that I could finally look at closely. Click on the picture to see it in a much better, bigger quality:

I am really happy with the results. Sure, it has some flaws, e.g. when you blow it up to 200x, the vision does get blurrier and the contrast is much less, but overall, I think, it's a great microscope for a fantastic price - and it serves my needs perfectly.

Precious stones... but where's the gold?

In the meantime, my other two gold pans for fine-washing arrived. They were delivered together with a tiny sniffer-bottle (which doesn't quite work) a handy pair of tweezers, a magnifying glass and a little jar. The weather cleared up quite a bit again and yesterday, I went down to the river to try my luck again. It turned out that the little specks I found last time were probably no gold, but just some flitters from iron pyrites, which we have a lot of in the area. So what did I find this time? Alas, no gold but some pretty garnets (in the picture above). If you click on the picture, you can see that on the left, there's also some tiny light green stones. Finding all these shows that my method of panning is at least not totally wrong: in the end, only the heavy black and red sand remained - mixed with these heavy semi-precious stones and a small piece of a rusty nail. This weekend, I plan to finally try the most promising river in the area.

The first attempt

Today, I finally received my first gold-pan in the mail. am still waiting for some black pans (for finer gold) and some accessories... but even with only one pan, I could finally try prospecting for some gold at the river (I did try it before, but lids and flowerpot-saucers just don't work). It was freezing outside - tonight the first snow fell on the hills and mountains. But the landscape looked beautiful:

I have to take a sief next time, because it was a drag picking out the bigger stones. I don't expect big nuggets anyway, so a sief will really help getting rid of useless gravel. I also did not bring a shovel, which made scraping together material really hard. However, I did end up with some tiny little flitters in the end. I have no idea, if they are real gold or not. I did do research about rivers with gold in the area - and the river where I washed today does have gold, but not really where I tried it, so yeah... But they shimmer in a pretty way and make me wanna try some more promising rivers soon. I just hope, the weather gets a bit warmer still!