bswartzwelder
Well-known member
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2011
- Messages
- 660
Over the winter months, I purchased between 2 and 3 pounds of what was advertised on eBay as "Gold Ore Natural Gold Ore Nuggets Jinfeng Mine China". I finally got aorund to crushing them smaller than 20 mesh. Mixed up 500 ml of poormans AR and put several teaspoonfuls of the powdered ore in. The reaction was vigorous, but not violent, giving off a little heat and a fair amount of fumes. Then put it aside for 24 hours. Next, I mixed up some fresh stannous chloride solution using several pellets of pure tin and a small amount of stannous chloride anhydrous crystals. Added enough HCl to half fill the small dropper bottle and shook well. Placed a Q-tip in some gold chloride solution and added a drop of the stannous to it. Immediately, the Q-tip turned very dark almost black. I filtered all the powder out of the gold ore/AR beaker and put another Q-tip in it. A drop of stannous didn't change color at all. No sense wasting SMB on this stuff. If anyone can see where I made a mistake, I have more powder left over, but considering what I paid for the ore, I really wasn't expecting much. After it arrived, some of it did look a little like there might be some gold in it, but most of it looked like iron pyrite. Just a heads up.
