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Kustommolds

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Oct 23, 2018
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Hello I have old miners slag or what is to be stuff semi processed material. Assay given to me by the founders of this material shows that it contains 56 percent copper, 3 percent gold, .5 in silver, 36 percent iridium, and also other PGM'S the rest is lead and so on.. So here is the story to this material.

Update : For those willing to read the whole story: I do small scale foundary for locals ore concentrates,free mill gold,silver,and copper. A friend of the locals invited me to check out some material they have discovered. I did a 2 kilo smelt for them with just borax and got a 1.5 kilo bar. That being done, Now I did another fresh 2 kilo smelt with oxidizing fluxes and got a 1 kilo bar. They invited me to the area where they discovered this material. This material was stocked piled hidden within a wall of rocks out in the middle of nowhere up in the mountains. We had to take donkeys(14 hrs. round trip on a donkey) to get to this material. So when I was there I came across where the Spaniards did their foundary dating back roughly 4oo years ago. So this material found was not high grade ore but was believed to be an already semi processed material. I gathered 15 kilos. Getting back, I did a 15 kilo smelt using over 40 kilos of oxiding fluxes and got back a 7.5 kilo bar. Looks silver in color with a hue of yellow. I decided yesterday to redo the smelt again with oxiding fluxes(to see if it oxides more) and right when I pulled it out of the furnace after 2 hrs. of smelting, before I got a chance to pour into the mold, the crucible split opened and spilled all over the ground. So now I dont have the bar but a slab looking like earth on a flat earth scale. It stilled weighed the 7.5 kilos. I broke off a piece about a bit smaller than a silver dollar and it weigh 58 grams. I did a density test and it came out at 14.5 Did the magnet test and did not stick, also with a rare earth magnet and did not stick but got a bit of repealing force.

By the way the first smelt of the 2 kilos and got back the 1 kilo bar, It was sliced up in several parts and distributed with land owner and their friends involved. My friend had his examined and it showed up very little copper,nickel,lead and base metals with a very high percentage of silver,gold, and 4 out of the 6 pgm's If I recall it had palladium, iridium, platuimn, rhodium.

At this point I am not a refiner but know the basics of refinng with acids. So I did a sample with chemicals. Ill explain what I did. I took 1 kilo of this material and put it in a 2 gallon bucket.
I added water and nitric acid. It produced red fumes and I put a lid over it and let it sit. I then ordered online a stannous testing kit. It arrived like 5 days later. So the material was in nitric acid and water for a bit over 5 days. The solution was a greenish blue when I opened the lid. I took 1 drop of the solution and added to a white plastic spoon. Then I added one drop of the stannous solution. The test revealed a dark green color. Did it 3 times and got the same dark green result with the stannous test. The bottom of the solution still looked to have a bit less than half a kilo of the kilo of the material I had started with. I didnt want to pour off and filter so I took a plastic coke bottle and drilled several holes leaving a couple inches from the bottom undrilled. I took a copper pipe and placed it in the bottle then placed it into the solution. I had left it there for a day. The next day I removed the bottle from the solution and the copper pipe had precipated whiteish looking powders so that could be my silver, and alot of greyish looking powders which could be the palladium. I retested the solution and it came back light brown.
I then just poured all powders from the coke bottle that precipated from the copper back into the whole solution and threw in 2 large copper pipes. Left it there like 2 weeks and went to retest the solution with stannous. The copper pipes were almost dissolved and the solution was darker of course. The solution now tested negative. It went clear with stannous now. No further testing was done. As it was just a test.

I was asked by the land owner and their friends if I could process the material and sell it or try to sell the material as is. I told them I do not want to go again on a donkey for 14 hrs. So they said they will do that part and can provide 100 kilos(200 lbs +)a week. So here I am looking for buyers.

I have an ebay sellers account and pay pal account with 100 percent postive feedback with other products that I sell from time to time. So I am willing to deal for the best of all of us.

I would like,for now lets say 600 dollars for 1 lb. of the material that I just smelted, along with that 1 lb. I will also inculde a few ounces of the raw material that it came from. If you come across that the value in that 1 lb. is in the thousands of dollars, All I can say is enjoy and lets deal with prices from there on with next purchases. If for some reason the value is less then the 600 dollars and you confirm that with me, I will give you a few choices. You can send me back the 1 lb. and keep the ounces of raw material and I will refund you 100 percent. Or we can agree on price. All in the favor of the buyer. This offer is available to whoever's interested.
If you are a refiner Great!!!!
 
You will get better responses if you post a picture of the assay , you can blank out your name if you need to but show the assayer as this will inspire some confidence that what you claim to have is there.
 
36% Iridium? Show me the evidence. I am guessing an XRF device that does not know Iridium from a hole in the ground.

Time for more coffee.
 
Better stop smelting immediately!

36% iridium could be arsenic. Many XRF systems not programmed for arsenic calls it iridium. Copper forms an alloy with metallic arsenic.
See False Iridium finds

Iridium is also not found by itself in ore without other PGM:s and especially not in that amount.

Göran
 
g_axelsson said:
Better stop smelting immediately!

36% iridium could be arsenic. Many XRF systems not programmed for arsenic calls it iridium. Copper forms an alloy with metallic arsenic.
See False Iridium finds

Another reason to obtain proper assays and not rely on xrf readings because as Goran quite rightly states unless your xrf is set up to read the element it will guess what it is and in some cases such as this it could be a deadly mistake to believe it.
 
Do not lick the rock. :mrgreen:

been a time since we seen iridium on XRF together isn't it Nick, Goran...
 
nickvc said:
You will get better responses if you post a picture of the assay , you can blank out your name if you need to but show the assayer as this will inspire some confidence that what you claim to have is there.
Will do, thanks
 
galenrog said:
36% Iridium? Show me the evidence. I am guessing an XRF device that does not know Iridium from a hole in the ground.

Time for more coffee.
Ill go ahead and post the lab reports, All reports was done both before and after a smelt.
Fire assay, chemical testing, and so forth.
 
g_axelsson said:
Better stop smelting immediately!

36% iridium could be arsenic. Many XRF systems not programmed for arsenic calls it iridium. Copper forms an alloy with metallic arsenic.
See False Iridium finds

Iridium is also not found by itself in ore without other PGM:s and especially not in that amount.

Göran
Correct, it also has the other pgms in smaller amounts
 
patnor1011 said:
Do not lick the rock. :mrgreen:

been a time since we seen iridium on XRF together isn't it Nick, Goran...


per the underlined --- :lol: :lol: :lol: yes we all got a good laugh when I said that after Goran shot his piece of arsenic ore with Jon's XRF :mrgreen:

Kurt
 
Kustommolds said:
Hello I have old miners slag or what is to be stuff semi processed. I smelt 2 lbs and get 1 lb bar. It contains 56 percent copper, 3 percent gold, .5 in silver, 36 percent iridium, the rest is lead and so on.. anyone interested in buying a few lbs .

If you are going to try to sell this you need to post a picture of the assay results along with a "general" location like South West Oregon - North west California (or other state NW - NE - SW - SE corner of the state) &/or the mining "district" (not the mine location - just the district) so that there would be validity to the claim you are making

Kurt
 
Kustommolds said:
Hello I have old miners slag or what is to be stuff semi processed material. Assay given to me by the founders of this material shows that it contains 56 percent copper, 3 percent gold, .5 in silver, 36 percent iridium, and also other PGM'S the rest is lead and so on.. So here is the story to this material.

Update : For those willing to read the whole story: I do small scale foundary for locals ore concentrates,free mill gold,silver,and copper. A friend of the locals invited me to check out some material they have discovered. I did a 2 kilo smelt for them with just borax and got a 1.5 kilo bar. That being done, Now I did another fresh 2 kilo smelt with oxidizing fluxes and got a 1 kilo bar. They invited me to the area where they discovered this material. This material was stocked piled hidden within a wall of rocks out in the middle of nowhere up in the mountains. We had to take donkeys(14 hrs. round trip on a donkey) to get to this material. So when I was there I came across where the Spaniards did their foundary dating back roughly 4oo years ago. So this material found was not high grade ore but was believed to be an already semi processed material. I gathered 15 kilos. Getting back, I did a 15 kilo smelt using over 40 kilos of oxiding fluxes and got back a 7.5 kilo bar. Looks silver in color with a hue of yellow. I decided yesterday to redo the smelt again with oxiding fluxes(to see if it oxides more) and right when I pulled it out of the furnace after 2 hrs. of smelting, before I got a chance to pour into the mold, the crucible split opened and spilled all over the ground. So now I dont have the bar but a slab looking like earth on a flat earth scale. It stilled weighed the 7.5 kilos. I broke off a piece about a bit smaller than a silver dollar and it weigh 58 grams. I did a density test and it came out at 14.5 Did the magnet test and did not stick, also with a rare earth magnet and did not stick but got a bit of repealing force.

By the way the first smelt of the 2 kilos and got back the 1 kilo bar, It was sliced up in several parts and distributed with land owner and their friends involved. My friend had his examined and it showed up very little copper,nickel,lead and base metals with a very high percentage of silver,gold, and 4 out of the 6 pgm's If I recall it had palladium, iridium, platuimn, rhodium.

At this point I am not a refiner but know the basics of refinng with acids. So I did a sample with chemicals. Ill explain what I did. I took 1 kilo of this material and put it in a 2 gallon bucket.
I added water and nitric acid. It produced red fumes and I put a lid over it and let it sit. I then ordered online a stannous testing kit. It arrived like 5 days later. So the material was in nitric acid and water for a bit over 5 days. The solution was a greenish blue when I opened the lid. I took 1 drop of the solution and added to a white plastic spoon. Then I added one drop of the stannous solution. The test revealed a dark green color. Did it 3 times and got the same dark green result with the stannous test. The bottom of the solution still looked to have a bit less than half a kilo of the kilo of the material I had started with. I didnt want to pour off and filter so I took a plastic coke bottle and drilled several holes leaving a couple inches from the bottom undrilled. I took a copper pipe and placed it in the bottle then placed it into the solution. I had left it there for a day. The next day I removed the bottle from the solution and the copper pipe had precipated whiteish looking powders so that could be my silver, and alot of greyish looking powders which could be the palladium. I retested the solution and it came back light brown.
I then just poured all powders from the coke bottle that precipated from the copper back into the whole solution and threw in 2 large copper pipes. Left it there like 2 weeks and went to retest the solution with stannous. The copper pipes were almost dissolved and the solution was darker of course. The solution now tested negative. It went clear with stannous now. No further testing was done. As it was just a test.

I was asked by the land owner and their friends if I could process the material and sell it or try to sell the material as is. I told them I do not want to go again on a donkey for 14 hrs. So they said they will do that part and can provide 100 kilos(200 lbs +)a week. So here I am looking for buyers.

I have an ebay sellers account and pay pal account with 100 percent postive feedback with other products that I sell from time to time. So I am willing to deal for the best of all of u
 
Why do people spend so much time collecting and trying to process material which "looks" good when all you need to do is to send sample of it to assayer and know outright what are you dealing with.
Try several assayers and you will know for sure what may be there and perhaps even how much.
That is the easiest part of the whole operation.
 
The "36% Iridium" makes me highly suspicious. Iridium in percent measure is truly rare. Id suggest that it's an anomaly of the test method.
1 a proper assay would be a good plan.
2 An approximate location would assist people trying to put a price on the transport
3 disposing of the arsenic that may be there may be an issue.
 
Why do people spend so much time collecting and trying to process material which "looks" good when all you need to do is to send sample of it to assayer and know outright what are you dealing with.
Try several assayers and you will know for sure what may be there and perhaps even how much.
That is the easiest part of the whole operation.
because anassayer doesnt hsave to give you anything they dont want to ... they rarely do just one set material they do a couple of assays together . and put it however you like . it takes a great deal of money to run a refinery . so they had better hope business is good and the gold concentrate is high.. because otherwise they are burning their dollars. they dont work for free. but i do . i workfor me . there fore i learned to assay. we break doown the material clean it and identify classify. because i know what gold specimens go for . i know the rareties in rocks. and most importantly and really the first reason ... to educate myself . to mine it. to know it/ to understand what im dealing with and the types of gold that im dealing with ...
 
because anassayer doesnt hsave to give you anything they dont want to ... they rarely do just one set material they do a couple of assays together . and put it however you like . it takes a great deal of money to run a refinery . so they had better hope business is good and the gold concentrate is high.. because otherwise they are burning their dollars. they dont work for free. but i do . i workfor me . there fore i learned to assay. we break doown the material clean it and identify classify. because i know what gold specimens go for . i know the rareties in rocks. and most importantly and really the first reason ... to educate myself . to mine it. to know it/ to understand what im dealing with and the types of gold that im dealing with ...
Assaying PGMs is quite complicated to be done right. This is not gold or silver, which is easy to learn, follow tables and known procedures, get a good measuring tool for measuring bead diameter, precision scale and say one or two years of experience and that´s (mostly) it.
Honestly, I never encountered assay lab that will produce skewed or falsified results. It is a bad advertisement for the business, who will do this ? Aside of some companies resident assay lab for obvious reasons.
You can have difficult matrix, that´s for sure, but work with AuAg compared to whole set of RuRhPdOsIrPt... That is completely another story. Not to mention when you combine AuAg with PGMs together and sprinkle some Cd or Hg on top, just to make it more fun :)
Even XRF is having a hard time to assay these combinations (which are more common then you think), not an assayer sitting in the chair whole working day with just few difficult matrix/combination assays.
 
○ur profile photo is the same... I can't see your test report?
It's not clear who you are addressing and what profile photo or report you are asking for.
Can you please be more specific?
 
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