![]() Specimens are highly prized raw once you’ve got all the dirt out. That can be a good bit of profit, depending on what you have.īut often the price of gold-bearing quartz is more than the value of the gold. The idea of playing with a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric just doesn’t appeal to me most days, and the chemical precautions alone will take some time to learn.ĭepending on the refiner you may see 70-90% of the gold’s spot price returned to you. It’s not wise to refine gold at home unless you really know what you’re doing. Impurities can include silver and copper, but lead is another common one. The gold in your piece is most likely in the 20K range or around 83.3%, but some places like Australia regularly have higher purities in their hard rock ore. Keep in mind that a lot of specimens that seem to have a lot of gold may only have a few scant grams while being visually impressive. You can check a price index, I use APMEX to get a good idea if you know how much gold is in the specimen. You can easily destroy the value of your piece by getting over-eager to figure out what it is. I’d think hard before going into that test. Gold doesn’t dissolve in anything reasonable, if it’s still there in the morning you have gold. It’ll take several hours, but quartz dissolves in acidic solutions, as do pyrite, chalcopyrite, and many other gold mimics. Just fill a jar, drop the specimen in, and go to bed. Vinegar is the only thing I’ll recommend for someone with no chemical experience and PPE. If you don’t mind destroying the specimen you can also acid test it. If the above tests look good, then you most likely have gold on your hands. Actual gold should leave a golden-colored streak if rubbed against an unglazed ceramic tile as well, compared to the black pyrite leaves. If your specimen has an outcropping that’s convenient try scratching glass with the “gold” portion to find out. Scratch/Streak Test- Pyrite and chalcopyrite scrape glass, gold won’t.Without exact measurements, this test is more promising than conclusive, but gold will stick out like a sore thumb if you have another, similarly-sized piece of quartz for comparison. Quartz has a density of 2.65 g/cm³, while pyrite sits at 5 g/cm³. Density- Measure the volume and weight of a gold-bearing stone. ![]() Magnetic Testing- Touch a magnet to the specimen.You have three basic methods at your disposal: There are a few other minerals that can also look very similar to gold and occur in similar formations. It can make for visually interesting specimens, especially mixed with other minerals, but gold it is not. While attractive, “Fool’s Gold” isn’t expensive stuff. There’s a problem with finding gold in quartz: pyrite likes to occur in the same places. Regardless of the reason for its formation, gold-bearing quartz is an important economic resource so further study will undoubtedly bring the matter fully to light. Eventually, this fills in the quartz fracture. And a lot of people have studied it.Īfter all, a prospector will move hundreds of pounds of gravel just to get a few flakes and a small nugget of gold… now scale that up to mining companies with billion-dollar R&D budgets.Ī recent study in Brazil actually posits a new solution: nano-particles of gold held in suspension begin to collide with each other and form a mass inside the fracture. That’s was about as close as anyone’s ever been to explaining it. Its presence is usually explained as being due to gold-bearing hydrothermal fluids running into the cracks and depositing minuscule amounts of gold over a long, long time. Gold has long been found in the fractures and cracks of these stones and can occur in large veins during hard rock mining. It turns out that humble quartz (or silica) is one of the last minerals to cool down during hydrothermal action, creating a porous mass of quartz. It’s a common trope and the formation has a beauty of its own.Ī lot of beautiful nuggets have been destroyed for their gold content over the years. So, let’s get into figuring out the ins and outs of gold-bearing quartz specimens!Įven if prospecting isn’t your exact get-down, you probably know about gold in quartz. But first, you need to make sure you have the right thing! One of the most common signs of the mother lode, these nuggets have fascinated humans for millennia. One of the prized finds out there, for both collectors and prospectors, is the fabled specimen of gold and quartz.
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