# maybe Fluorite?



## OMG (May 27, 2008)

While out panning I found a strange looking glistening rock that looked like it was chock full of pyrite.
I am currently experimenting on ways to dissolve pyrites so I thought this would be a great candidate.
I heated it up with a torch to see if I could burn off some of the sulfur from the pyrites. Not much happened other that making it more shiny.
So I put the still warm rock in a jar and poured some H202 and HCl on it and it started fizzing a lot. The strange thing is that it was giving off chlorine.
Now, would that mean that there is fluorite in it? Does anything else kick the chlorine out of HCl?
And the other question is, if the silvery stuff was pyrite, shouldn't it have turned back to iron (or copper, etc) with the intense heat from the torch?


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## usaman65 (Jun 2, 2008)

arsenopyrite?


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## calgoldrecyclers (Jun 11, 2008)

what color is the suspect flourite? green? slighty purple? i suspect the HCL didnt affect the gangue material at all, is this correct? did you note any odor when burning the material with a torch? sulfur gives a rotten egg smell, while arsenic (arsenopyrite) gives an odor of garlic. is there a way for you to chip off a sample of the suspect material? can you weigh it and check the SG? how about the streak? what color do you get? hardness? these simpler tests could give you better findings than trying to determine the affects of acid. acid wont dissolve most gangue material, as you will find.
good luck with the tests. let me know what you discover.


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## Irons (Jun 11, 2008)

Minerals containing Pyrolucite or other Manganese Dioxice containing minerals will react with HCl, releasing Chlorine.


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## OMG (Jun 11, 2008)

Well the rock was light grey to dark grey in layers. (the layers in it were in such a way that they looked like they were folded to about a 90* angle). The rock was very glittery.
When it burnt, no strong smell came off. Maybe a bit of so2 if I remember correctly.
I poured the h202 in first, so I don't know what the reaction with plain HCl would have been.
I'm thinking that it wasn't fluorite because there was no real color to it. So maybe some manganese mineral.
I was just confused at the reaction. I've been messing with black sands for a while and haven't seen chlorine come off like that.
Anyway, to update.. I let the reaction continue for a while before I started crushing the rock with a larger screwdriver. I broke it up and crushed it while it was still dissolving in the small jar I had it in, and was surprised how easy it was. The texture of it was like breaking up a charcoal briquette.
I ended up with a big pile of glittery flakes/powder. It looked mainly brown when it settled, but if I stirred it up it was pretty cool. The solution was yellow by now from the dissolved metals, so the little silvery flakes looked gold, and the little bit of liquid was full of them, so when I stirred it I could see all the minuscule currents in the water that continued after I quit stirring.
It looked nice. I stirred it quite a few times just to watch it. 
After a week or so. I think a small amount of the shiny stuff got dissolved but not much.


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## Anonymous (Dec 13, 2008)

wow, i think i'm trying to do the same thing.

please check the photo at my post and let me know if both of us are trying to process the same material. i'm actively searching for a solution on how to treat the material i came up with. please let me know if you have any progress and i'll try to be of help if i come up with some solution ''

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3867


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## Richard36 (Jul 27, 2009)

It sounds to me like you found some Mica Schist with A sulfide mineral of some sort within the matrix. Any mineral containing manganese will react with HCL to produce chlorine gas, If the mineral contained a chloride of some sort, the addition of sulfuric acid would have broken down the chemical bonds within the mineral, and therefore produced chlorine gas. The principle of the barrel method of processing oxide, and native element ores to extract the metals utilizes a similar reaction between sulfuric acid, and a cleansing powder containing chlorine to produce chlorine gas. The gas reacts with the metals converting them into water soluble chlorides that can be recovered individually from the solution. I got off subject a little, but the reactions are the same. You would need to try to dissolve your material in each acid individually to figure out whether it is manganese, or chlorides within the rock that produced the chlorine. A simple way to test for chlorides is to dissolve some silver in nitric acid, then add some fragments of the mineral in question. If a white precipitate of silver chloride is produced, the sample contains chloride minerals. To check for manganese, crush some fragments of the mineral in question, and place this powder in a test tube or other small container, and add some hydrogen peroxide to it. If it starts to produce bubbles of oxygen, then it contains manganese. If you have any further questions, I would be happy to help out, and answer them.


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