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snoman701

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 8, 2016
Messages
2,108
Location
SE MI
What type of assay was performed? How was the sample prepared and split? Has your friend performed proper gravimetric assay, or just that chunk being held in fingertips?


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engelman said:
I sent this metallic piece to friend who work in professional lab and he put it in nitric to separated all the metals and to get only the gold.
He sent me the picture with black powder (which he says it is gold). photo attached.
What i meant was that the metal piece that I melted was sent to a friend lab.
He use nitric to separate it from the copper and he got this black dust (gold).
Gold is not the only thing that won't dissolve in nitric acid.

Do you have any of this black powder? There are a couple of simple tests that can tell you if your black dust is gold or not.

Dave
 
There must be more to the story the chemistry does not quite add up, are some details left out?

If you asked me to become a partner in that gold mine, I would suspect the partner you have now or the friend in the lab who sent back gold, proving an ore or soil has gold is much easier than trusting a partner who wishes to sell me a gold mine. salting mines or having showing erroneous results of the value from poorly valued ore, or showing gold where there is none is a trick as old as history, and should be one thing to keep in mind.

I do not know your partner or friends they may or may not be up to no good. The chemistry is suspect also as a solution of calcium hypochlorite alone will not put gold in solution. and even if the ore or soil had gold even a proper leach of the solution may not put the gold into solution depending on the chemical and physical makeup of your ore or soil type.

I would not invest in the gold mine or the chemistry with further details or proof of the chemistry and the value of the soil.
 
Never heard about that procedure to extract gold. You boiled the sand in a kitchen pressure cooker? :shock:

There are a lot of strange procedures here but for pointing out just one, how do you know there was no gold with the copper used as a collector metal?

You talk about sand, is it a hard rock mine or a placer deposit?

For me there is only two real ways to test for gold in a mine, use a gold pan for a placer deposit. If you can't pan it you can't mine it. Only use your own tools as it's easy to hide a few golden specks in the bottom of a bucket or in some dried dirt on a shovel. It's been done many times.
And if it is a hard rock mine, use fire assay. A hard rock mine is a totally different kind of beast and very tricky to mine profitable in small scale. You need diamond drill cores to map the mine, a plan for mining and restoring the site, permits... and all has to be paid with by the gold in the ground.

How to take a representative sample is an art on it selves, and you can write a long article about it. Pro tip, use randomness as often as you can. Don't go looking for good looking stones to sample or nice places to dig out a sample.
If sampling a parcel of land, either draw a grid and take a sample in each location (gives you a map over where the gold is) or take a mixed random sample over the whole area.
A mixed random sample can be made by making a map over the area, throw some pebbles on the map and wherever there is a pebble, take a sample in that spot. For example a bucket of material. Then mix all the buckets together in a pile. Now split the pile up into two smaller piles by shoveling from the big pile into two smaller ones. Flip a coin and do it again with one of the piles. Continue until you have a small enough sample to pan by hand.

Don't let anyone you don't trust with your money close to the samples or piles, it can be salted with extra gold in just a second and then they got you.

Your black powder can be tested easily. Just dissolve it in aqua regia and test the liquid with stannous chloride. Then if it is positive the gold can be precipitated (after denoxing) as a dense brown powder by using SMB and weighed.
If you have pure gold it will not oxidize on the surface, so if it comes out black and not shiny yellow directly after melting it isn't pure gold.

Göran
 
What i don't understand is how come the assay didn't find anything while the other did found.
and if he wanted to salt it, he can done it as well with the sample for the assay.

A couple ideas would be:
1) Assay lab is correct, and there is no gold. Therefore, the black residue from the friends lab is not gold.
2) Assay lab is wrong. For either situation, the friends lab could easily digest the black residue with Nitric acid and HCl acid and test the solution with stannous chloride to determine, if the black residue is gold.

However, just because there is gold in the sample analyzed by the friends lab, does not guarantee there is any gold in the sands. So, for either 1) or 2) above, it may be in your best interest to resample the sands (making sure it represents the sands well by taking a composite sample) and submit to a different assay lab. If no gold, then no gold.
 
Engelman, I've merged the two threads you created because they're about the same material and questions. I assume this is the same material from your first thread? It is best to keep all the information in a single thread.

Dave
 
engelman said:
I will say something more. and you all will think i am crazy or its a fraud etc.. the owner says that he got no less than 3% of gold por metric ton. means 30kg of gold for each ton. he say that there is way more but he can guarantee it, as well Rhodium, Platinum, Palladium.. and again, no money needs to be sent upfront, he say to me- ¨bring your people you trust, we will send them few tons of soil, they will separated the gold and they will pay me after¨ all he want is to be present when they extract it.
Yeah, you are crazy or it is a scam. 3% is an ounce per kilo, or 1300 dollar per kilo of dirt. Your small sample with the black powder looks like less than 1/10 of a gram, making your original sample at most 3-4 grams.
So either the external lab is right and there is no gold there, which would be consistent with the small return of insoluble parts in the copper.
If the owner would be right then the sample you took was just a teaspoon in size, or he is flat out lying or delusional about the gold content.

As a comparison, 3% is about the same gold content that 1/20 18k gold filled have.

No, I don't believe that number. You could literary fill up a small truck, drive it to action mining and get a million dollar per trip. You could even pack a bag and taking a flight from anywhere on the earth to action mining and still make a good earning.

This isn't too good to be true, it is in the fairy tale class by itself.

You know what, send me a box with 10 kilos of dirt at 3% gold content and I will give back 90% of the gold. I will even reimburse the shipping cost from my 10% fee.

Göran
 
Engleman as the guys say it's one of those things that looks too good to be true unless it's quantified. That's where the skepticism comes from because it's the same kind of story that pops up so often.

If you send me the 500g of sand you offered Goran, I'll send a sample over to a lab I work with in the UK regularly, and do the remaining part in my own place to compare the results.

If it comes back as you said then you'll know for sure you have a good proposition and then it can be moved forwards. Until you're at that point though it's all smoke and mirrors.

Regards

Jon
 
engelman,
We would like to help, you with this if we can.
Too many things do not add up, not counting the chemistry.

Gold is found in Load deposits (rock), Eluvial deposits (eroded from Load deposit but not washed with water) or Alluvial (placers deposits-washed by water).

If the soil was an Eluvial gold deposit, you should be able to pan the soil to recover enough gold to test the soil, how does the soil react to panning? does the gold float out of the pan before pellets of lead?

What is the history of the area this soil is found? How many historical gold mines per square mile in that area?
In the area I live, gold is found in every river and stream, many of the mountains are full of holes and mineshafts, and panning even from the surface sands, where gold is seldom found (gold goes down to bedrock) will turn up a few specks of gold from most any waterway, and many times from every pan-full.
Gold in this part of the country is found in all types of the deposits discussed above, the area has a rich mining history, the gold is mined as either placer or free-milling gold (either can be panned or refractory ore needing assaying, and more technical recovery procedures...
 
engelman said:
didnt thought you will say different.
Do you have a refinery ? do you know how to extract the gold? if so i can offer you 2 things.
1. come with me to there and we will see all.
2. I will send you 500g of sand. you will tell me your results.

Another question. did you saw the photo with the mercury? what is your opinion about it?
I don't have a refinery yet, there are plans for the future but I have been short in cash and time. I do all my refining outdoors so I can only refine during summer, but spring is here and I have just started up doing experiments so I can test your sand too.
I've been refining gold for over 10 years on a hobby basis and I have panned gold for the last 30 years. Gold around here is pretty well spread out and even. You can find a tiny speck almost anywhere but rarely anything more concentrated, so panning is more recreational and doesn't even cover gas.

I know how to extract gold from all kind of sources. Sand is weathered so there should be only minor amounts of sulfides so any gold should be free and not embedded in minerals. I can extract that. Panning would be my first way of testing.

I have the experience of running small batches to make a crude assay, as in this post where I extracted the gold from one circuit board (10 mg), http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=23737 or a single IC (50 mg), http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=7056.

1. Are you willing to pay for my travel and expenses? Depending on where the location is I might be available for hire. Payment up front for any travel.

2. I have sent you my address in a PM. You can send a package to Jon too, he has some fancy stuff and instruments that I don't have access to. But I suspect that we both will reach the same conclusion that there isn't any gold in the sample.

I think the mercury doesn't show anything else than there is something dirty in the soil sample. I don't use mercury, don't need it and I'm scared of the health risks associated with mercury. I really like to keep my brain and sanity as long as possible.
If you can pick up gold with mercury, you can pick it up with a pan.
Mercury alloyed with gold is still silvery, not yellow. Gold would be covered in mercury so there shouldn't be any yellow showing.

We are not trying to be mean, we are trying to help you see the truth that this in some way is a scam with 99.99% probability.

Göran
 
engelman said:
I am confused, can any body help me to get idea of what is going on here?


Thank you.
Your "friend", the land owner, is adding powdered gold dust to the carefully selected spot that he shows you he is "sampling". Therefore you get the 3% figure from that carefully selected "sample". When you take a larger sample, an send it to a lab, of course there is no gold.

Tell your "friend" that you want 5 tons of "sample". Then you take it home, and retrieve the "150 Kg of gold and other metals" that are there. Then you...

It is pretty simple really.
 
Don't you forget one thing?

So far no one have seen a sample with 3% gold in it. It's just the word of the owner and in your dreams that number exist yet. We don't know even if there has been any gold at all shown in this thread. Some black powder shown in a beaker is the closest this far, the powder could easily be tested if it is gold but hasn't been. Why?
The fire assay came back with zero gold.

So crazy numbers from someone that either is delusional or a scammer. That is the owner I'm talking about.

I think you got gold fever and is not seeing straight. Why do you believe in those numbers without proof? If the numbers are correct the sample you cooked in that crazy procedure would have contained easily 5-10 grams of gold. That copper button would have been twice the size just because of the gold and would not have been possible to dissolve in nitric since the gold content would have been too high.

The reason you don't have a huge gold button and that the fire assay came back negative is because there is no gold there, the owner isn't salting any sample since he is delusional, a seasoned scammer would have managed to salt the samples and would have used more believable numbers.

Why would the owner bring in you and your friend? You are obviously no mining experts based on your questions and procedures. If there were 3% he could have hired an expert and a whole team of workers along with equipment to mine the area with just the proceedings from the first ton of soil.

As you understand, we get these kind of stories all the time on the forum and so far no one have come back showing a lot of gold, telling us we don't know what we are doing.
We are skeptical to any outlandish story and want proof before we accept anything.

If the numbers don't add up, there is something wrong with the numbers, not that the plus sign is in a conspiracy.

Göran
 
Some forms of iron oxide are insoluble in aqua regia.

Your mention of the pyrites lead me to believe thats whats in the bottom of the beaker.

Goran and the guys are right.

Run, run fast and far.
 
I just came back to town after a 9 day work marathon in Stockholm.

I got a small sample before leaving town and took a quick look.The first thing I noticed was the golden sparkle from it even before I added water. Under a microscope it looked like mostly quartz and feldspar,pretty normal sand in my view. I also saw some golden mica.

Adding water to the sample in a shallow dish confirmed there is a lot of mica, it swirls around in the dish on top of the sand. Any gold would work it's way to the bottom and end up with the dark heavier minerals.

The mica is really golden, probably an iron stain.

Then I did a quick panning in the dish and went through the heavy mineral portion, no visible gold. Not even under a microscope.

So my analysis so far is that it's just barren sand with a lot of golden colored mica. I could not see any gold in the sample.

Göran
 
That is one gram per ton of hard to get gold. How do you repeat that process on a large scale profitable?

Göran
 
Well I still don't have the sample that was supposed to be sent to me Goran so I will have to defer to your results.
 
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