Can a gold detector sense these samples?

[Zacksgold]

Good day,

I have a friend who lives in the pasific islands who is wondering whether he should get a gold detector but is unsure whether it will work in his situation. Currently the way they are finding gold is through very basic and simple artisinal means. and what they are finding is rocks that contain very fine gold. Currently they just grab any random rock that looks like might have potential (contains veins etc) and crush them to break them up into fine parts and poweder, then after a few steps its then panned then ground again into very fine poweder, then chemicals are used for the final steps to fully extract the gold. images and a video is provided below, Initially I thought the shiny bits on the rocks where gold but I was informed by my friend that its pyrite. They never find nuggets, its allways these rocks that they figured out contain (very fine) gold in them. the capsule sample shown is the resulting product after the described process and it contains close to 10g of gold after extraction and is quite dense when felt in the hands! The question is can a gold detector (He has his eyes on the Gold Monster 1000 due to budget friendly yet decent) be able to detect this very fine gold in these rocks? the aim is to be able to filter out useless rock from rocks that contain gold, currently theyre just grinding every rock on sight which is consuming unessecary time and. If the GM1K can actually filter the gold rocks from the useless rocks that would be a good investment for them.

Thanks

 

[Martijn]

Welcome to the forum, i believe metal detectors can not detect fine powder gold, or ore like in the capsule.
Are these rocks in a river or can you follow the float and locate the source vain?

 

[Yggdrasil]

Good day,

I have a friend who lives in the pasific islands who is wondering whether he should get a gold detector but is unsure whether it will work in his situation. Currently the way they are finding gold is through very basic and simple artisinal means. and what they are finding is rocks that contain very fine gold. Currently they just grab any random rock that looks like might have potential (contains veins etc) and crush them to break them up into fine parts and poweder, then after a few steps its then panned then ground again into very fine poweder, then chemicals are used for the final steps to fully extract the gold. images and a video is provided below, Initially I thought the shiny bits on the rocks where gold but I was informed by my friend that its pyrite. They never find nuggets, its allways these rocks that they figured out contain (very fine) gold in them. the capsule sample shown is the resulting product after the described process and it contains close to 10g of gold after extraction and is quite dense when felt in the hands! The question is can a gold detector (He has his eyes on the Gold Monster 1000 due to budget friendly yet decent) be able to detect this very fine gold in these rocks? the aim is to be able to filter out useless rock from rocks that contain gold, currently theyre just grinding every rock on sight which is consuming unessecary time and. If the GM1K can actually filter the gold rocks from the useless rocks that would be a good investment for them.

Thanks

Welcome.
As Martijn says.
It is not sure a metal detector can "see" the Gold.
I think it has to be over a certain treshold in volume or mass for the detector to detect it.
As Martijn say if the rocks are distinct enough it may be possible to follow it to the source.

 

[kaisernine]

A lot of detectors are looking for a larger profile targets(nugget hunting), there are settings on many that remove the ability to detect "hot rocks" which are just highly mineralized rocks and slags. If your detector has this setting and it is turned off you are likely to have it detecting everything in highly mineralized ground pretty much false alarm everywhere you put it.

Plenty of gold detectors for nugget hunting but fine gold I don't think there is one, generally gold specific metal detectors are great for discrimination with iron but in order to do that I'd imagine it would also discriminate fine gold powders as it wouldn't surpass the discrimination threshold.

That's not to say with practice and tuning your metal detector (if it has the options) you couldn't achieve some success rate but is it worth it? Might be cheaper and more efficient to just mill the material and get a shaker table or some form of sluice.

If you are finding values worth going after I would.