Blue? Huh ....blue. Really? BLUE????!!!

[Boarteats]

I have a love/hate relationship with my gold source material. I'm struggling to find a good flux mixture. Lots of experimentation. I'm making progress, which is good news.

Anyway, thought that I'd share one of the oddest smelting results that I've had. I decided to try a variant of the flux that I've used for smelting iron from magnetite, a neutral ph flux in a low O2 env.

Results are in attached pic. Top left and lower right are silver/gold and no iron. The pieces on the diagonal were originally one button that I broke apart. These are mostly iron with what appears to be copper or copper/gold on outside margin and something BLUE in the center. I think that the blue might be a copper oxide or something. Not sure, but it looks really cool!

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

DR.ÖTEK Metal Detector, Waterproof Gold Detector, Pinpoint & Terrain Modes, Professional Metal Detector - Grab it through Amazon!

[Clay Diggins]

Iron when it's alloyed with Silver and Cyanide (ferrocyanide) creates a blue tone to the alloy.

Heavy Pans

 

[Boarteats]

Iron when it's alloyed with Silver and Cyanide (ferrocyanide) creates a blue tone to the alloy.

Heavy Pans

In what mineral form would cyanide exist? I know that there are a number of plant based sources, but didn’t realize that there were naturally occurring mineral compounds with cyanide.

 

[Clay Diggins]

Cyanide is either organic or inorganic. It's composed of a trivalent bond between an atom each of the elements Carbon and Nitrogen. If the source is organic it's known as a nitrile. Most cyanide used commercially (mining, swimming pools, plastics etc) is inorganic and is made from methane and ammonia. The inorganic compounds are usually much more dangerous than the organic compounds.

If you have copper, silver, gold and iron associated in the same deposit the odds are very high that the deposit has been formed with the help of the supergene enrichment process. In all cases that enrichment is due to surface waters percolating down through the deposit. Surface waters often have measurable cyanide content due to either pollen and seeds degrading to cyanide compounds or low temperature/oxygen surface fires creating cyanide compound from the grasses, brush and trees. Combine that with the hydrogen sulfide portion of the supergene enrichment process and you end up with a partial conversion to Hydrogen Cyanide. It's the Hydrogen Cyanide that dissolves metals, freaks out greenies and kills spies.

If you think about it between the burning and decomposing organic matter over millions of years and the huge quantities used in modern manufacturing - Cyanide is everywhere. In the ground, in your food, in your buildings and in the manufacturing of everything from plastics to tires. Combine those persistent traces of relatively stable Cyanide with the reactive metals, hydrogen and sulfur compounds in a good paying deposit and you will normally see quite a variety of toning in the metallic portions.

Look at your smelt color and compare it to Prussian Blue (ferrocyanide) and I think you will see the relationship between the two.

Heavy Pans

 

[Boarteats]

@claydiggins: thanks for info!