Im new please help.

Flyride95 · Jul 25, 2011

Hello everyone. I have dug around this site a bit and am lost at what to do next. I was doing some work on my grandmothers property in the mountains of colorado. I removed a tree that was growing from the side of the mountain. When i went to pic the roots out of what appeared to be granite or quarts I found some small peices of gold in it. I thought it was foolsgold but figured meh ill collect it just in case. It was in a vein style formation in the rocks. Ill include pictures of the gold I found.
I took it to a jeweler to see if it was real and sure enough it checked out to be gold and not fake. But my question now is how should I go about selling it? The nuggets arent beautiful I think to sell to a jeweler. Do I just find a refinery and have them work their magic or do I melt it down myself?
I called a couple that you guys have suggested here and they only deal with businesses or do not deal with natural or placer gold they say. Please help in some kind of direction.
The nuggets are like this
http://tinypic.com/r/no7mue/7

And there is alot of flake ect on stones like this
http://tinypic.com/r/mk9mjk/7

dtectr · Jul 25, 2011

Its NOT gold.
Good try, though ...

Flyride95 · Jul 25, 2011

I know it may be hard to say with a picture. But a jeweler did a acid and some scratch test. So unless they have no clue then I'd agree with you. However if it is real what route should I take is the question I asked. Thank you.

seawolf · Jul 25, 2011

Richard36 would be one of the best to answer this question. A sample could be sent to him for an assay and the amount of PM’s per ton would be known.
Does your grandmother have the mineral rights to the property or are they available, if not the results may be moot.
Good Luck, Mark

Harold_V · Jul 26, 2011

Flyride95 said:
I know it may be hard to say with a picture. But a jeweler did a acid and some scratch test. So unless they have no clue then I'd agree with you. However if it is real what route should I take is the question I asked. Thank you.

It's not hard at all to judge from the pictures you provided with the links. It's not gold. The route you should take is to take the sample (which is pyrite, not gold) to a person that knows what he's talking about. That a jeweler "knows gold" isn't always true. I refined for many that didn't have a clue.

You can make this determination yourself. Hit the dull yellow gray sample with a hammer, with the sample on something hard (sidewalk if you don't have an anvil). If it shatters like glass, you'll know it's not gold. Don't even bother to pick up the resulting pieces. It's most unlikely that they would contain even traces of values, although not impossible. Problem, then, is that it would be but a trace, and you'd need tonnage to effect a recovery worth the effort. Sulfur, when you are trying to extract values from ores, is not your friend.

Trust me---it will shatter. The color is so far off from being gold that I have no doubt. (Yes, I am familiar with gold ore, in particular, gold ore from Colorado)

Harold

Flyride95 · Jul 30, 2011

UPDATE: The results of the hammer test as suggested didnt go either way. It flaked and also flattened. So I took some samples to NTR Metals here in town and they came back with a mix of 67% iron 14% copper and yes 19% gold. No pyrite.

butcher · Jul 30, 2011

19% gold? either you have yourself a extreemly rich hardrock mine, or someone is kidding you, how did they test your ore to come up with that number?

Palladium · Jul 30, 2011

wow! 100% in only 3 elements.

sawmill · Jul 31, 2011

Flyride

I am not going to judge your ore with a Kodak assay
like some have. Photos of ore can be deceiving at best.
Miners at Cripple Creek were throwing the richest ore
away,and cursing it because it didn't look like common
textbook ore.

Your update about iron,copper,gold ,is typical with lots
of Colorado ore. Some of the richest ore from Colorado
was associated with lots of pyrite too.

I sell placer and hardrock gold to a refiner all the time.
They will work with private parties or business's ,but you
have to extract the gold or concentrates.They don't process
ore.

The first thing you should do is get a real assay,or have
someone familiar with ore check your samples out. If it
does in fact contain gold,the next step is to determine
how to process the ore. If the gold is free milling extracting
it is pretty easy. I would like to see a real sample. I see
something of interest in the photo's.

Reno Chris · Jul 31, 2011

Can you clarify that the pictures you posted links to are pictures you took of your ore and not something you found on the internet that is similar to your ore?

Chris

Harold_V · Jul 31, 2011

Flyride95 said:
So I took some samples to NTR Metals here in town and they came back with a mix of 67% iron 14% copper and yes 19% gold. No pyrite.

I don't believe it. If the pictures you linked to the forum are of the same ore, it's perfectly obvious you're dealing with a sulfide ore. That's not to say there can't be gold included.

I know from the ore I processed that the gold content (of free gold) is relatively low---but I attributed the low percentage to tellurium. Don't know that I'm right.

Harold

solarsmith · Jul 31, 2011

I have a local assayer for you in golden colorado he can do a good assay for you call me at 303 503 4799 and gold and pyrite do come together in the central city area...thanks BRYAN

Williams55 · Sep 19, 2011

We are a full service precious metals firm providing a two-way buy/sell market in gold, silver, platinum and palladium products for your bullion and rare coin needs

Anonymous · Sep 19, 2011

Harold_V said:
I don't believe it.

I don't believe it either.
You started this thread on the afternoon of july 25th,at that point you were "lost at what to do next"(your own words).However,you took some to NTR and had a result by the morning of the 30th.We know it wasn't a fire assay,because they would not have given you a total on the iron,so I can only assume the used an XRF,or spectrophotometer.Had it been a spectro,they would not have scanned for iron,so most likely it was an XRF.That being said,I find it almost impossible that a bunch of other elements did not come up in the scan.And even if by some coincidence I have been wrong so far,you showed us a picture of a rock that was supposed to be almost 1/5 pure gold,and I just wasn't seeing that.
South African ore yields around 1/4 ounce of gold per ton.Welsh , Carmarthenshire can yield about 30 ounces per ton .Your ore would yield 380 POUNDS of gold per ton.But I have been wrong before.

epicnamefail · Sep 30, 2011

thats a lot of gold o.o but i dont think this is real gold either, i lived in the country by a creek and i found the rocks like this all the time, looked like little dull goldish crystals that my friend is pyrite......

not to mention if you didnt want to sell the quarts to the jeweler (which you would most likely get more money for in the long run) why in the world would you want to melt them down?

Im new please help.

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