Old Festus - you have stumbled on to something very interesting. You can entertain us for months with this thread! Just some random thoughts - first, is
your mercury (Hg) shiny or dull and sluggish? If the little beads act "lumpy" as you swirl them around with your black sands (bs), they probably have amalgamated with gold. Second, as was stated above it needs to be researched where the Hg came from (forget the Hazmat authorities for the moment, if
it was devastating the environment, they would have been all over it by now. You can always let them know later on). Third, there are many utube videos
of miners extracting gold from liquid Hg in third world countries. There is little danger in squeezing Hg through a shammy IF you wear disposable gloves and/
or wash your hands thoroughly. Do not handle if you have open cuts on your hands. As far as storage of the recovered mercury goes, any leakproof container
will work. There are hundreds of pounds of Hg stored in old timers garages, basements, etc. in Calif. only because of the hassle/hysteria/regulations involved
with proper disposal. And finally, you may have found something of real value so, keep us posted but be cautious.
I'm glad to hear my little find is of interest to some of us. As far as your questions Fullpan...the mercury (Hg) is very shiny and rolls all over smooth areas, with little effort in the pan. I don't think the beads acted "lumpy" as I swirled them around with the black sands.... but again I didn't know what it would act like if it was carrying gold flour. I'll have to check it out as I started collecting it today. Also since the next 2 days are supposed to be rain...I'll start researching what the plant used to do in attempt to learn where all the Hg came from.
Anyway...as I do most everyday, I headed back down to the creek for a good 6 hours of panning with my brother. I now took special note of the mercury that I was finding and the abundance of those red colored crystaline rocks, which I now presume must be lots of cinnabar.
With nearly each pan, I was collecting the mercury as it rolled around my pan and placed it into a plastic gold collection tube. I figured I was doing the environment a favor..plus I could use the mercury if I decided to use it to collect flower gold.
Now one interesting aspect of this entire stretch of water (around where the old factory stands) is a huge abundance of very thin, single strand metal wires, which are all about 1/2" long and quite thin (thin like an insulin needle.... if you can relate to that gauge wire).
The water is littered with them..way more than one would expect to find in a creek. You get them often 2-3 pieces in each pan you sift. Some of the wires are clearly non precious metals, and very rusted and corroded....However,
many of them look to be made of gold and others are silver. Best I can tell, it may be very fine silver solder wire and gold solder wire ....which must have been used at one time, during some sort of (unknown) manufacturing process.
Odd though,.... because we normally associate such high tech soldering with modern day electronics, cell phones, computers etc. Not a factory plant that must be closed a good 30 years. Also in the water are little round metal wafers (less then 1/4" across and about 1/32" thick), that look like tiny round wafers, lots and lots of them buried way down with the heavies.
I think they are some sort of metal alloy prills, that may at one point have been melted in furnaces to do something with them,...who knows. I think maybe they are made of nickle.
All pretty odd huh?
I can't imagine them intentionally dumping buckets of this stuff (especially gold and silver wire pieces) into the creek some 30 years ago...but my prospecting is leading me to believe this is the case. (Not saying they are in fact real gold or silver at this point)
What I did was start collecting samples of that golden wire as well as the silver wire. I'd ideally like to test both, for alloy content, to determine what percentage each wire is of their respective precious metal. For example, I understand that silver solder will be whatever percentage of silver.... then mixed with something else.
Perhaps both types of wires are pure..who knows at this point. They both bend very easily. Both the gold (colored) wire is bright and shiny like my wedding ring and the gold I am panning....as is the silver wire pieces...very shiny...unlike all the dull lead pieces I'm also finding.
I will take some photos tomorrow and post them here. I have everything still out in the car, from today's finds.
Aside of that...my brother and I were finding quite a bit of gold, in this little stretch of creek..so this area is proving to be quite an interesting find indeed. But the mystery grows kind of deeper now.
If all that single strand wire is made if gold and of silver...that would be a beautiful thing indeed...so I'll keep my fingers crossed. I now need to learn how to test suspected gold and silver for authentication purposes.
