This popular and versatile tool is a must have item for every gold prospector. They first found popularity as a small nugget recovery device while metal detecting for gold nuggets. Now people use them for every imaginable scooping task like feeding concentrated material into a gold wheel or other recovery device, cleaning out large sluices, excavating loosened material from a crevice – you name it, and digging scoop can get the job done. These are a tough high wear plastic, stronger and longer lasting than you might think. There is a hole in the handle for a tether to keep the scoop secure. However, people do lose them often it seems – so buy two! The scoops we stock are normally green but sometimes we will have black or other colors available.

Good use of a plastic scoop is critical for recovering small gold nuggets while metal detecting since these tiny nuggets can be very hard to find. It is also a fact that many very sensitive metal detectors will signal on the salt content of your hand if you wave a hand full of dirt over the coil! Use the “divide and conquer” method. Scoop up the material that has the nugget in it. Give the scoop a good shake to get the nugget into the bottom of the scoop. If you have a couple inches of dirt in the scoop and the nugget is on top, you may not be able to detect it when you run the scoop over the coil. Some prefer to do this with the bottom of the coil turned upright so they can get the scoop right over that hot spot in the middle of the coil. Other detector coils are edge sensitive and you can work the scoop over the top of the coil. It is important you find out where the hot spot is on your coil. If you confirm the nugget is in the scoop, dump half of the scoop contents in your hand and check the scoop again. If it is still in the scoop, place the material from your hand on the ground where you can check it again later if need be. Mistakes happen or sometimes there are multiple nuggets in the material! If the scoop no longer beeps, the nugget is in your hand, in which case discard the material in the scoop into the safe discard pile. Now place half of what is in your hand into the scoop and check the scoop again. If the scoop beeps it is in the scoop, otherwise it is still in your hand. Keep splitting and checking until you are down to a small amount of material, which in the case of some little mud covered nuggets sometimes is just a few little pieces of dirt which have to be checked one at a time to find which one has gold in it.

Once you get good at this it goes real fast, but care must be taken to not get a nugget in the scoop only to discard it. That is why you put all the discarded dirt in a pile where you can check it again with the detector when you are done. Sometimes you really can get more than one nugget in the scoop at once. 🙂