Help Identifying Mineral?

[tonofsteel]

Help Identifying If Gold Or Not In Crushed Ore?

Apologies for the poor pictures but I am using a cheap USB microscope and I need to upgrade at some point here.

I have been looking for ore as a hobby and will bring some samples home to crush from time to time. I am using a hardened steel rod in a steel pipe on a piece of 4" flat stock steel. I crush and classify through a 50 mesh screen and keep re-crushing the 50+ until it all passes through. I use a gold pan to pan down the crushed rock looking for heavies.


Panning in a stream I have found this piece of gold:



Panning the crushed rock I get pieces like this:




For test panning I wash aggressively just to see if anything is there and these pieces are really heavy. The heavies left after I crush always have this silver tinge to them on the surface.



The crushed rock "gold" always looks to be squished as well.

Is this transfer from the hardened steel shaft or am I getting fooled here? I cannot find anywhere this issue coming up for anyone else.

Edit: Also just thought that maybe the ore could have mercury or some other metal in it as well that through crushing gets mashed into the gold?

 

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[Mad Machinist]

Are there any cinnabar deposits in the area?

 

[tamrock]

Maybe native Tellurium
https://www.crystalclassics.co.uk/product/native-tellurium-8188118/

 

[605dano]

Here are some pics of sulfides I panned from some crushed quartz. I believe maybe arsenopyrite? Very silver like yours.

 

[arizau]

Can you tell if it is actually metal and not just a silvery colored rock? If it is metal then it may be a naturally occuring alloy of gold and silver called electrum. https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1...0i22i30j33i299j33i160j33i22i29i30.T3kZfnjn4Ew.

 

[tonofsteel]

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Are there any cinnabar deposits in the area?

There is not much documented for cinnabar or tellurium. It is mentioned in a couple of reports but noted as rare. There is quite a bit of lead here.

Maybe native Tellurium
https://www.crystalclassics.co.uk/product/native-tellurium-8188118/

I took pictures of the pieces that have silver/gold to them but there are others that are completely silver and have the same density, they are really heavy.

Here are some pics of sulfides I panned from some crushed quartz. I believe maybe arsenopyrite? Very silver like yours.

I have been running into this all year while crushing and up until now have dismissed as some form of pyrite. It does look similar yes but the weight of it is very puzzling me. I know the fine gold panning techniques but I am panning this as if there are nuggets in there and these pictures are the pieces that still stick there even after what feels to me like very aggressive washing trying to get them to move.

Can you tell if it is actually metal and not just a silvery colored rock? If it is metal then it may be a naturally occuring alloy of gold and silver called electrum. https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1...0i22i30j33i299j33i160j33i22i29i30.T3kZfnjn4Ew.

I try to poke the larger pieces with a pin and they do not shatter and feel like metal. Some pieces will deform and stick to the end of the needle while others feel more like a solid metal and will flick from under the pin head when trying to push on it.



Thanks guys, I was wondering if anyone else has run into this and it was a common thing (that I did not know about) for the hardened steel shaft to transfer/smear onto the gold but this does not sound like the case. Also does not sound very likely that there is some mercury or other mineral that is getting into the "gold" during crushing.

The other thing that is perplexing is that I will look at the ore through a loupe/microscope and see bits like in the first photo. After I crush it, ALL of the pieces look either like the 2nd and 3rd photo or they are completely silver. This is why I was thinking maybe there is something else in the ore that gets mashed up into the gold while crushing. Some of the silver pieces I can see vary in appearance. It seems the more they are flattened the more silver they are. In the pictures I posted the "gold" still has some texture and that is where the gold color shows up, where it has been flattened is where the silver shows up.

I don't have enough of this specimen crushed yet to send in for an assay but I think that is the only logical thing to do from here. I made the mistake in the past (not the type of specimen/ore/minerals I am looking at here though) of only getting a Gold/Platinum/Palladium assay but will go for a full metal assay the next round so if it is not gold I can understand more about what it could be.

This grab sample has the most heavies left over out of all the ones I have tried so should be a good candidate for sending in.

 

[tonofsteel]

The last photo also shows bits of a gray metallic substance that is closely associated with the "gold" Forgot to mention it earlier but that was another reason of thinking maybe there is another mineral getting incorporated with the gold during crushing. In addition to bits of the grey substance being near the gold there is some of it actually embedded into the gold itself. The last picture, upper left hand piece in the middle of this piece shows an example of it being part of the structure of the gold. Hard to see in the pictures but there is a nodule of it in one of the cavities in the "gold"

 

[CGC Miner]

Electrum.. maybe. If so the silvery part will tarnish to black soon.

Mercury from the solid rock with free milling gold highly unlikely.
Any pyrites would crush to angular smitherines not flatten.

We get some goofy pieces similar to this from various crushers. It is usually bits of steel from the crushing device. Check with a magnet.

 

[tonofsteel]

Electrum.. maybe. If so the silvery part will tarnish to black soon.

Mercury from the solid rock with free milling gold highly unlikely.
Any pyrites would crush to angular smitherines not flatten.

We get some goofy pieces similar to this from various crushers. It is usually bits of steel from the crushing device. Check with a magnet.

Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping to find someone that has seen similar in the past and I did wonder if it was flakes off the crusher. I was not of the mind at the time to think to check with a magnet and will do this the next time I encounter this.

For the time being I am going to assume it is crusher metal flakes and stick this on a shelf. There is so little of it that it would not be worth processing even if it was gold. If I find a sample that has much more of this then I will consider sending away for assay if it passes the magnet test.