Mark,

What I do is put the gold in a glass vial not plastic as static will cause it to stick in the vial when dry. If you are lucky enough to have gold bigger than flour you may get away without doing what I do.
Next step is to use a suction tweezer to remove almost all the water being careful not to suck up any gold. After that I twist a paper towel into a point and tip the vial on it's side and let the towel absorb most of the water. Don't try to get all the water out you may loose some gold if it attaches to the paper towel. Then I just let it air dry over night or a bit longer if you live a humid area.

I have also put the gold in a gold pan and let a paper towel absorb the excess water. Then let that air dry.
Hope this helps.

Scott L.

Most will use a fry pan on the stove to boil off the water.
On the bags of paydirt, I've had good success with laying it out on paper towels, and carefully transfer to a dry vial. That works ok for most flakey stuff except for really fine flour gold.

A frying pan works well as Arthur said but if any of the gold has mercury on it you might not want to cook with it again. Just buy a dedicated pan for gold and you are good to go.
Scott L.

Thanks guys. I wanted to get the experts to point me in the right direction. I didn't want to just 'figure something out' on my own.

Thanks
Mark

Hadn't thought about Scott's reply, but if you use heat, do it outside on a hotplate, just in case you do have some mercury on it.

What I do is carefully pick out the gold using fine tweezers to get it out of the pan, allow that to dry on the workbench, and the following day carefully place that into a collection dish that I pre-weighed and zeroed the scale. Not for the super fine stuff, but on the gold I get its ok...

Thought I'd weigh in here......YES PUN INTENDED :-)
I am a bit partial to dumping everything into a good finish pan (I use a Falcon blue pan) with water in the pan. Rare earth magnet under the pan to pull away any left over magnetics and with the iron sands under the water swirl across the pulled magnetics to get out any errant gold. I'll slide the magnet up the side and let the irons jump onto the magnet, with another rinse in the pan on the magnet. Then decant the water partially off, pan off the non magnetic waste. After that I'll decant it off further and let it naturally dry. From there I fold a sheet of parchment paper in half dump the gold onto that, plop a vial or a weighing boat on the scale tare it to zero and add the gold.

I like all these suggestions so much I'll copy and paste into a word doc and save it for me and try each of them and see what works for me..lol 😁

What i like to do is pour it into a gold pan and make a line of gold. Ill tilt back the pan slightly and remove as much water as I can with a paper towel. Get a heat gun or blow dryer with a low setting and I use it to dry out my gold.

A great youtube channel is Kletch. And he uses a heat gun.