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Gold purity by just colour ?

Won't venture a guess on the purity, but will
say they are very nice specimens for sure.
Gold Nuggets :wiggle:
 
Back when the licenced gold byers were buying gold they had a color chart to determine the purity.
Back about 1950 I was buying gas at the Two-Stiffs in Lovelock and watched the gold buyer do
this... most of the placer was electum and was valued at $1.00 pennyweight. Gold was then $35/troy.

The local university bound kids could drywash enough gold to help pay for a semester. Most of the
local claim owners were happy to help the kids out by taking them to their claims. Lovelock was
then one tightly knit farming/mining community.

During the Great Depression years of the 1930's with gold at $35 the during ther winter off season
the ranchers were working their claims and the local university-bound kids were able to keep and
sell their gold. I know this is "off subject" but it was to bring attention to the licenced gold buyers color
charts... Just going down a memory trail...
 
By looking at the photo I would have guessed 850-900 fine, close to 22K. That's rather unusual for a natural nugget, especially around here. Most nuggets will have a colored cast, depending on what the alloy happens to be. Lots of ours have copper which gives a slight to heavy reddish color, if silver it will be slightly to sickly green. One note of trivia from my assay days: if gold is alloyed with silver it will be greener as more silver is added, UNTIL it reaches close to fifty percent silver. Below fifty percent gold content it just looks like heavy silver with no yellow at all. That was once a favorite method of smuggling gold out of Asian countries that had laws against taking gold from the country. Cast it into jewelry, mark it 925 and wear it through customs. Unless it is weighed no one will ever know. It'll even pass a silver nitric acid test.
 
In all honesty, I dont think you can gauge gold purity just by color except in a very gross way. Silver and copper together make a brass (gold like) color - they are both common impurities in natural gold. After all, both 14K (58% pure) and 10K (42% pure) jewelry have a good gold color. Stuff that is very light in color with a high silver content isnt going to be 98% pure, but on the other hand just because it has a good gold color doesn't meant its 95% pure.
 
The really old school way of deciding gold's purity was done by rubbing the metal on a touch stone and comparing the rub to that of a known good sample. That was the method that allowed trade using gold as the medium of exchange, since prior to that, the gold's purity could not be judged by sight or heft alone.

It can be argued that use of the touch stone is what helped create our modern system of commerce. It fixed the price of pure gold at a certain market level and lesser purities could be determined and priced accordingly. Gold thus became an international medium of monetary exchange that was both reliable and repeatable "on the street" as to its purity/value.

-Ed
 
Lets see by evidence--beautiful quartz matrix check---iron inclusions in left specimen-check-right one clear white so purer--checked your past post so know rough areas if found by you--left much darker and right more buttery-sooo. left about 19 kt due to iron---right more copper so about 20kt---wish I could lay hands on'm to do a streak test and compare to my patentened jewelers needles which absolutely prove what color is exactly what. Old timers had it down and we should heed as spectrographic analysis,colormetric and assays leave much to be desired,time consuming and expensive too-thats my guess. GO FIND MO'A THEM --tons a au 2 u 2-John :detecting:
 
Well, you certainly have this part right, John. For accuracy nothing beats a good ol' fashioned fire assay. It's the oldest and still the most accurate method known. Only probolem is it's a destructive method, not the the gold but to everything else associated with it.

Hoser John said:
Old timers had it down and we should heed as spectrographic analysis,colormetric and assays leave much to be desired,time consuming and expensive too-thats my guess. GO FIND MO'A THEM --tons a au 2 u 2-John :detecting:
Click to expand...
 
HAHAHA got sooo excited for the answer I forgot how to spell. Sorry I do not buy ever,except when my friends in dire need,then I sell'm back to them for same as bought to preserve their legacy when their good fortunes return. WHY?? Lousy banks pay me nuttn' no more on CDs,I bonds and such sooo,when a friends in need why the heck not?? Good deeds come back 10 fold--pass it on X 2 works also,sooner or later this worlds jus' gotta be a better place-John
 
:huh::unsure:
Hoser John said:
HAHAHA got sooo excited for the answer I forgot how to spell. Sorry I do not buy ever,except when my friends in dire need,then I sell'm back to them for same as bought to preserve their legacy when their good fortunes return. WHY?? Lousy banks pay me nuttn' no more on CDs,I bonds and such sooo,when a friends in need why the heck not?? Good deeds come back 10 fold--pass it on X 2 works also,sooner or later this worlds jus' gotta be a better place-John
Click to expand...

John ~ you Sir are very interesting , seeing your a good old boy like me I'm considering sending you something , would you like that John ?
:huh:
Bobby.
 
A new body, yet another young wife,dredging to be legal again in mexafornia, and oh yes this sites resurrection to work good again. Thats tops my bucket list. I truly need nuttn' but 1 thing--respect a vet today is always my #1 priority as without them there'd be no us. With my old knees I just could not goose step and don't appreciate chinese food-thanx much for kind offer but preceding MUCH more important and away I go---John
 
Bobbylikesgold said:
Care to guess the purity of the gold showing on these two specimens , the photo is close to true natural colours :)
Click to expand...

Gold does not grab it's hold on to a host rock in this way. As they are fake specimen's, it'd be more than likely they'd carry a fare share of a low grade mix.
 
Here are Fake Specimen's, all made in an amateurish way by the same guy. To his credit he sells them as fakes, so no bad there, but he claims to make them from the gold of nuggets he's found, instead of using the truth of melted jewellery, and I guess he merely likes the appeal of them.

I don't like the practise in any way shape or form myself, and can't stand the sight of them.
 
I had not looked at the original photo very closely, but taking a closer look Argyle, you are right, no question that they are fakes.
Just shows another point in the fact that you cannot tell gold purity color - melted 14K gold (at least as far as the color is concerned) looks pretty much like the color of natural nugget gold.
What looks fake about these is what Argyle pointed out - the gold clings to the outside of the rock in a way that gold does not naturally do. The other thing is the texture. Normally natural gold does not have a rounded texture like on the outside of these phony pieces unless its rolled around in a river for a while. Picked off a mine dump or from downslope from a vein the gold itself would look different too.
 
Classic misdirection. The original question was about the apparent purity of the gold. Did not occur to me to study the specimens themselves all that hard. A casual look at my computer screen and they do not look half bad. But look closer and they do look "painted".

Doug had a big chunk of quartz for a doorstop at Ganes Creek that had some seams carefully filled that had trained geologists going.

There are some pretty good fakes out there these days that really give a person pause. Especially the ones acquired by honest people and unknowingly resold as real. I was talking to a shop owner in Arizona recently and showed him my nugget pendant. He told me he does not buy nuggets anymore because he is afraid of getting burned.

Steve Herschbach
 
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