First post - need advice

[rocky99]

I live in Georgia, further south than the really good prospecting areas. I'm about 5 miles from one old placer mine and 10 from another in the opposite direction.I have 2 creeks on the property so I figured why not.
I started digging out pebbles and sand from one of the creeks and classified them. I have not started panning yet but picked out some interesting small pcs. They well could be just mica but the way they are in the quartz looks so much like pictures of ore I want to be sure.
I will shortly have a stainless mortar and pestle and acid test kit. If i grind the samples up and it all goes to dust i assume not gold. Will the acid tell me anything on the ground up or do i need to be able to make a mark for the test kit.

Any suggestion on determining whats in small samples appreciated.

 

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[Duckshot]

Gold has lots of tells, and guess not being affected by any one acid is one of them. But, there are easier tells to read. Density is one of them. Gold is likely to be the heaviest object in your pan. With practice one can tell gold by the way it moves in a gold pan. Dense objects do different things than less dense objects when you push on them.

Mica has tells too. A hamer will crush mica but only flatten gold.

 

[Goldfleks]

All I can say is that I had similar questions about what is gold and what isn't when I first put my pan in the water a year ago. There is so much shiny yellow flakes in a pan. Most if not ALL of what I thought was gold initially, was just mica. But I truly got excited about it when I thought I found it.

My advice is, once you actually SEE gold, you'll know exactly what is gold, and what isn't. Spend a few bucks, on some Pay Dirt off Amazon, and one of those Garrett Gold Pan starter kits. Pan out your concentrates and you'll get to see how ACTUAL gold sits in your pan, reacts to the swirl of the water compared to other gold colored materials. Once you KNOW what gold does, and what gold doesn't, it's really easy to tell if what's on your property is gold or something else.

 

[arizau]

If you do not find free milled gold after the samples are ground up (pan your fines to determine if it was gold you were seeing) then, for practicalities sake, you might want to stop at that point since it would not be worth your time eg. it is highly likely that it was a valueless sample. If the sample was taken from it's source, a vein, then it could be a different story, emphasis on could. A vein may warrant sampling and getting assays.

Good luck.

PS I would be spending more time on panning just to see if and where there is gold in the creek. If there is then maybe run a metal detector for possible random pieces of gold bearing quartz or nuggets.

 

[Jeff95531]

from my very first season. The most convincing fools gold I had ever seen. Way too light tho...

 

[triple d]

Some research of the area. And geology will help a lot.My lands matter has some good maps and may help also.

 

[goldenIrishman]

Well first and foremost.... Welcome to the asylum known as T-Net!

I lived in Georgia for about 7 years and was amazed at how rich some areas of the state are. The area I lived in was not great for prospecting (Warner Robins) but I didn't really have to go all that far to get my fix. What I really didn't care for was the lack of public lands like we have in the west. With almost everything being private there, it made for a lot of work just to get permission from the land owner to even test an area. Makes me glad that I moved back out west because now I live in a county that is larger than Rhode Island and about half of that area are public lands. (BLM) Makes for a very large playground.

 

[Laz7777]

if there's free-milling gold in the ore you crush, it might be very fine.
in panning this fine gold, you might want to add a surfacant like Jet-Dri or even dish soap so it doesn't float out of your pan.
any soap for that matter.
don't go spending a lot of money ...well yet.
like already suggested, just run material with a pan instead of crushing and using acid.
you can even use a bowl to pan in just to see...water and motion will cause most of the gold to drop to the bottom, then take it from there.
even as a hobby, prospecting doesn't have to be expensive, unless you want it to be.
too many gadgets, gizmos and thingamabobs being sold to greenhorns, mostly: WORTHLESS.

 

[Duckshot]

Rocky99, the short answer to your question is that your acid test kit is notgoing to tell you much if anything. The acid test kit you likely bought is for determining the rough percentage of gold alloyed into a sample which is pretty much destroyed by the test.

So, you might have already bought something you don't need- Welcome to gold prospecting!