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boarteats

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 31, 2018
Messages
48
I stumbled across gold in my backyard stream. Was collecting magnetite to smelt iron. It never seriously occurred to me that there might be gold in the stream as well. Lol. So, I've now gone from amateur iron smelting to amateur gold prospecting. Here's a nube question for the pros.

Based on the description below, what would your initial gut reaction be if you were me: meh, mildly interested, excited, or OMG!? ...trying to figure out how much time/effort to put into this creek. I plan on working this as a side hobby at least.

I've pulled a few grams of gold from my first test hole. Dug out maybe a cubic foot of dirt in total. Gold has been in the form of a couple tiny nuggets, gold on quartz pebbles, and gold entrained with iron oxides and the such (have to crush up the material to see the gold). I tested the alleged gold with nitric acid as a quick sanity check. I have a few cups of black sands remaining with additional gold that I can see with a loop. I'm not including this gold in the count, since I really don't know how much is there.
 
None of the above...

Skeptical, is it really gold? Testing the material with nitric acid isn't a positive test for gold. I agree that it might not be copper metal, but that's about all. There are a lot of materials and minerals that might look as gold to the untrained eye.

My first "gold finds" were only some yellow mineral grains. When finally being shown real gold found in a pan I realized how wrong I was in the beginning, I never really accepted the thought that I didn't have gold until I was shown how it really looked.

Since you have grams of it, you can't mind doing some destructive testing on it.
- Take one of the nuggets and press it hard with some flat pliers. Gold is malleable, if it breaks it isn't gold.
- Dissolve some in aqua regia, make some stannous chloride and test the gold solution.

Or just post a clear picture of your gold and we could probably tell you if it's even worth testing.

Göran
 
Göran,

Funny thing is that I found the gold while crushing up magnetite with mortal and pestle. The bit of gold in the pic was mashed against the bottom of the mortar, originally covered in black material. Used nitric to clean it up and it is quite malleable. I've been dropping whatever chunky material I find into nitric acid, since it does a nice job dissolving iron oxides and sulfides (.e.g pyrite). HCL does pretry well with iron oxides as well.

Tried taking a pic of the gold on quartz, but didn.t come out very well. Hard getting good focus with my tablet even with macro lens. Quartz translucency and reflectivity messes with auto focus. No option for manual on my tablet.
 

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I hate to be a pessimist, but that shape reminds me of the base of a rifle or pistol cartridge. :| Thick around the base and where the primer is pressed in. How long are you leaving it in the nitric? What strength nitric? Are you heating it? Does the nitric take on any blue / green color?

As Göran suggested, you can dissolve it in aqua regia, then test with stannous chloride.

Dave
 
Dave, good to be skeptical. I’d like to make some AR but can’t find tin! Who knew it’d be so hard to find?

Any good online cem suppliers?

Having said that, I don’t know of any other brilliantly yellow malleable metal that isn’t dissolved by nitric.

The shape is mostly due to my mashing it about in mortar. Took me a while to notice it since it was originally covered in black material. Was in the shape of a pebble.

Not sure of nitric strength. Bummed it off a guy I know who owns a pawn shop. :). However, I did not heat the acid. It is quite caustic. It eats through iron like crazy.
 
boarteats said:
Dave, good to be skeptical. I’d like to make some AR but can’t find tin! Who knew it’d be so hard to find?
Just buy some solder from any hardware store to make your stannous. There are probably a thousand posts about it here.

You didn't say how long it was in the nitric or if the nitric took on any blue / green color.

Dave
 
The piece in the pic looks like it might be from a broken piece of jewelry - it DOES NOT look like a piece of natural gold

Take it to your pawn shop buddy & have him do a scratch/acid test (with the acid they use for testing karat gold)

he will be able to tell you if its gold (even in the "unlikely" event it is natural gold)

Kurt
 
FrugalRefiner said:
Just buy some solder from any hardware store to make your stannous.

Dave - you forgot to tell him the solder needs to be "tin" solder & NOT tin/lead alloy solder

To the OP - the stannous test solution is made by dissolving tin in HCl - the solder Dave is talking about is 95 - 97 % tin with 3 - 5 % antimony & works fine for making stannous testing solution --- the stannous testing solution is for testing gold that has already been dissolved in AR - not for testing solid gold

AR is a mix of HCL acid & nitric acid which is then used for dissolving gold

Kurt
 
James, yes, In fact gold has been found right near where I live. Mostly found in quartz.

Dave, turned brownish yellow, guessing due to the iron. Only kept it in nitric for maybe 5 mins. No heat. Putting nitric on it after cleaning (after removing iron oxides) didn’t cause acid to change color.

Kurt, odd shape is due to my grinding it and mashing it about with a bunch of other rocks. Originally, looked like a black pebble.

All, thx for info about AR and tin! Need to buy nitric. Only have a small amount. I’ll look through posts for suggested sources, but would appreciate suggestions.
 
for a buck shipping you could ask and send it to a member and have them test it for you. All a pretty good bunch of guys here, willing to help out.
 
silversaddle1 said:
for a buck shipping you could ask and send it to a member and have them test it for you. All a pretty good bunch of guys here, willing to help out.
Wow. That'd be great! I feel the need to do some more work on this before asking anyone else to spend their valuable time. At a minimum, I'd want to do stannous chloride test. Have been reading up on the topic. Toughest thing will be getting the ingredients.

Having someone who could validate my testing would be invaluable!
 
Ok. I smelted/melted all the concentrates from my first test holes. This included the iron+gold from my first attempt at smelting. This time, I threw in 23 grams of silver in the hopes that any valuable metals would preferentially collect together with the silver over the iron. Worked pretty well. Not perfect. I ran out of gas, so didn't keep the heat on as much as I'd have liked. Also, didn't get as hot as I planned. Biggest problem is that I have a chunk of material still stuck on the bottom of my crucible. Couldn't reheat it since I ran out of fuel.

Even with all the aforementioned difficulties, the silver plus whatever mixed with it was about 3.5 grams more than the silver I started with. Still have some gold mixed with iron since I didn't get my furnace hot enough to melt the iron. The iron+gold is not part of that weight. See picture below. The iron+gold pieces are the bits not circled. The rest is silver, some gold, and other metals that mixed in with the original silver.

Am I correct that gold, silver, and PGMs will preferntially alloy/mix with silver? Should I expect that other metals like copper will do the same? Is it time to invest in a back-hoe and Champaign? :wink:
 

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Well, still guessing? You should have just sent some samples :eek: to someone who could have tested it and you'd know by now.
............................................................Where the hell did that ^ come from?.............................................................................
 
I know. I think that I needed to convince myself that the first piece of gold I found wasn't a fluke. Need to go back to my test site and get more material, sometime this week. Once I do that, I'll be taking up the generous offer I received earlier from one of the forum members.
 
boarteats said:
James, yes, In fact gold has been found right near where I live. Mostly found in quartz.

Dave, turned brownish yellow, guessing due to the iron. Only kept it in nitric for maybe 5 mins. No heat. Putting nitric on it after cleaning (after removing iron oxides) didn’t cause acid to change color.

Kurt, odd shape is due to my grinding it and mashing it about with a bunch of other rocks. Originally, looked like a black pebble.

All, thx for info about AR and tin! Need to buy nitric. Only have a small amount. I’ll look through posts for suggested sources, but would appreciate suggestions.

Any chance an old ore smelter was running nearby? If yes, use Google Earth to locate it's past location. See if you can locate old slag piles from the smelter.

It maybe a very long shot. But, what you have been describing in your posts could be "prills" of PM and noble metals run through a smelter already. Maybe your creek is washing through old smelter slag.

:?: James :?:
 
silversaddle1 said:
Well, still guessing? You should have just sent some samples :eek: to someone who could have tested it and you'd know by now.
............................................................Where the hell did that ^ come from?.............................................................................

Don't forget much of that is silver that I put in the crucible to pull gold out of solution and to prevent it from mixing with iron. Only about 3.5 grams of that is gold, etc. that came from my initial 1 cu. ft test hole.
 
@James, not likely that there was a ore smelting up stream. The creek isn't connected to a larger body of water. I think that it was dug out about a hundred years ago or thereabouts for drainage reasons when the first houses were built here. Also, I pretty much only collected magnetite and hematite.

Of course, anything is possible. Every once in a while, I run across tiny bits of stuff that strongly resemble slag from iron smelting.
 
F34B536E-5646-46D6-94D8-AA1D971534C1.jpegGetting more interesting material the deeper I dig. About a foot deep, I found the rock on attached picture. Looked different than anything that encountered so far. I roasted it along with some other rocks the transformation was amazing. The picture doesn’t do it justice. Completely covered in what appears to be gold...soft, yellow, malleable.

I only just started roasting my material due to what I’ve read in this forum and elsewhere about sulfide ores. Thank you for the info!!67928271-D48E-4E62-B869-7FABB2978D26.jpeg
 
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