Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

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Desert Cruiser
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by Desert Cruiser »

Fascinating story: And with the prices of gold today, you've got a beautiful specimen that's worth a lot of money. Wonder if Mr. X ever worked it out? Thanks Jim B!

Don....
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by Jim Hatt »

There sure are a lot of Mr. X's in this business aren't there? :D
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by Oropan »

The look of gold is different from different areas. It depends on what other metals are in with the gold. Gold I've dug in Alaska seems to have a high percent of copper making it look duller and deep brass color. Gold i've dug in Georgia is very high in gold content and a bright yellow color. Gold I've dug from the AZ desert has varied but mostly is quite bright yellow and high in gold content. I'm talking about placer gold. Hardrock gold is seldom visable in the rock and requires a complex process to remove it from the rock. Many old claims were given up on due to this problem and only after more modern processes were developed was mining possible.
Also, I've taken leftover black 'sand' from panning and put it in a glass jar with bleach for a few days and repanned it with a pretty good of amount of gold recovered. Some of that black 'sand' was accually gold with a manganese coating. I have also seen gold with an red iron oxide coating. BTW, lots of gold left in the AZ desert if you are willing to eat lots of dust.
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by djui5 »

Oropan wrote:Also, I've taken leftover black 'sand' from panning and put it in a glass jar with bleach for a few days and repanned it with a pretty good of amount of gold recovered.
I've heard of guys using chemicals to remove the Gold, but bleach will expose it as well? Any sort of bleach or just Chlorine from the store? I've got quite a bit of black sand I need to process :)
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by Oropan »

Bleach works just fine. Regular store bought bleach. That is the same reason people add it to their toilet tank to remove stains in the toilet. Most of the gold you will recover using this method is flour gold but gold is gold and it all adds up.
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by condoraz »

Personally, I like to see the gold in manageable sized gold bars with a few "X"s maked into them! LOL... The trick is to find the Jesuit caches first, and later find their gold vein(s) and just kick the gold out of the quartz and sit around with a cold drink and sort it all out. Pretty stuff into the bag... white old quartz over my left shoulder. Of course, that is just my opinion.. LOL, but seek what ye shall seek! Me? I am looking for the Jesuit's booty!

Happy Trails --- trip, stumble and slides to all
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by cubfan64 »

djui5 wrote:
Oropan wrote:Also, I've taken leftover black 'sand' from panning and put it in a glass jar with bleach for a few days and repanned it with a pretty good of amount of gold recovered.
I've heard of guys using chemicals to remove the Gold, but bleach will expose it as well? Any sort of bleach or just Chlorine from the store? I've got quite a bit of black sand I need to process :)
I'm not really sure what's happening to expose gold from the black sand, but my best guess is that it's either one of two things:

1) Either some of the gold is "stained" by some natural agent like mold, etc... which the bleach removes to expose it

or

2) The bleach is actually not doing anything - you're just being much more careful in getting the last of the gold out in your second panning.

This will give you a quick bunch of info. on how bleach actually works to remove stains:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question189.htm

An interesting side note to this is that you NEVER want to use bleach to try to clean rust stains - all it will do is "set" the stains in deeper and make them even harder to get out. The only stains in the toilet that it works on are.... well.... I think you can guess :).

By the way, I ran across a really interesting article where bleach (along with dilute hydrochloric acid) is used to leach gold from after which the solids are filtered out and the gold containing liquid is treated with a reducing agent (sodium metabisulfate) which causes the gold to precipitate out as elemental gold. Pretty slick - albeit dangerous if you try to do it at home without a scrubbing apparatus as you WILL generate chlorine gas when you mix bleach with an acid (please don't ever do that!!!).

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14427380/The- ... h-Leaching
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by djui5 »

cubfan64 wrote: I'm not really sure what's happening to expose gold from the black sand, but my best guess is that it's either one of two things:

1) Either some of the gold is "stained" by some natural agent like mold, etc... which the bleach removes to expose it

This is what is happening. The Gold has been "stained" black by Iron (which is what black sand is) and apparently the beach removes the Iron from the Gold :)
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by cubfan64 »

djui5 wrote:
cubfan64 wrote: I'm not really sure what's happening to expose gold from the black sand, but my best guess is that it's either one of two things:

1) Either some of the gold is "stained" by some natural agent like mold, etc... which the bleach removes to expose it
This is what is happening. The Gold has been "stained" black by Iron (which is what black sand is) and apparently the beach removes the Iron from the Gold :)
I'm not sure what all the different constituents of "black sand" are, but I expect alot of it is different types of iron and other metalic oxides. Chemically, bleach just doesn't do anything to those materials - the only way bleach works to remove stains like on clothing and stuff is by chemically attacking natural stains like grass, blood, ink, etc... and just changing the way light is absorbed so you don't see the stain anymore.

I'm not saying the bleach isn't doing anything, cause sometimes things happen in practice that don't make sense scientifically - I'm just trying to figure out what's happening and I just can't figure out a reason why bleach would expose more gold in this case.

In the long run though - if it works, keep doing it I guess :P
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Re: Photos Of Gold When Discovered?

Post by djui5 »

Well I was wondering it myself :) This is the first time I've heard of Bleach being used for this purpose. I'll try it out and report back.
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