Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and on today's
video we're gonna do something different than I've ever done before. We're
actually gonna take some samples of gold ore, this quartz gold ore, and we're gonna
slab it off with this demo saw here. But some of you guys may be asking, you know,
"What's the point, why would you want to slab up gold or just crush it?"
There's a couple different reasons,, the first one as far as gold prospecting is
concerned is once you slab it up you get a nice fresh clean face that you can do
some mineral identification, you can look for free gold, you may be looking for
what the gold is associated with as far as other sulfides or minerals. So you can
learn a lot about your or by get a nice, fresh, flat, clean slab and I actually
have a little microscope that we're going to take a look through later and
do some mineral identification with. The other reason is the decorative stone
industry is huge and this rock is probably worth way more as a decorative
stone then the gold that's in it. And so you'll see once I get it all
slabbed up that it's got this really nice sulfides laced through it and people
will pay a really high premium for stuff like that. And I've seen them rock
samples and slab samples for sale and some of the local stores around mining
areas and they're going for a huge premium just so people can you know own
a rock from the old gold mine or I have a rock with a little piece of gold
showing in it. So that would be the other option where you can actually make
specimens out of some of your gold ore and sell it on eBay or online or in the
local shop. So that's kind of why we're doing it, but let's get the saw fired up
it runs with water so it'll keep the dust down so I'm not gonna breathe a
bunch of quartz but let's slap it off and try this out and see how it goes.
I clamped it down to the pallet here.
Alright guys so there's a slab off our rock and as you can see it's just full
of sulfides and cool minerals and so let's get it taken in and we'll take a
look at it get it cleaned up a little bit more and see if we can see any free gold
in it. Alright so here's our sample and a little bit of light hopefully and these
are just laced pyrrhotite stringers in here, which is an iron sulphide And up
here it looks like there might be a little bit of chalcopyrite we'll take a
look here in a minute. When I'm doing this I like to have a little squirt
bottle or spray bottle because a wet surface is a lot easier to look at and
identify than a dry surface, so you can just literally just a little squirt
bottle and just squirt it down a little bit,
wipe it off the excess water and then you can get a really nice look at some
of those fresh sulfides. And here's this little microscope we're gonna be using.
It has a bunch of different power lenses but we're going to use the the 10 power
and when we look down through this thing you'll see some dashes and each one of
those dashes is 50 microns, so that will give you kind of a scale. And this thing
is pretty cool it's got just a flat bottom you can set it right up on the
thing you're looking at, focus it and then you can get a really nice clear
view of your rocks and your samples. So we moved outside, the lighting's a little
bit better out here and we got our focused. Like I say each one of those dashes
is 50 microns. And there's a couple things I want to show you here, this big
gray mass in the middle, let's then get my pointer in here, so this big grey mass
right here is all pyrrhotite which is an iron sulphide. And then if you look right
over here a little piece of free gold right there.
Alright guys here's some of my rocks I got cut up. I don't know, it took maybe 20
minutes or so. And you can see some of them are pretty wild,
lots of sulfides in them, lots of mineralization. But I mean you can see
how this could be really valuable to a
collector or, you know, some of the locals you know about your local mine
or even on eBay. So you can you can find some pretty wild stuff when you cut
open your rocks. So look at that one, that one's pretty wild. And I bet you can do
some finish sanding wet sanding to get it polished up a little bit more and
then put some sort of sealer on it so you keep that night nice fresh wet look
but that's a that's a really nice piece. Alright and here's a really good
example of the pyrrhotite on the lower right hand corner that's the gray
massive blob there, and then above it that kind of brassy yellow is
chalcopyrite which is an iron copper sulphide. And a lot of times people
mistake that for gold because it is yellow, but it has a much much more
brassy color to it than gold and it's a very common mineral in ores
so it's one that's commonly mistaken for gold but there's a really good example
of both of them right next to each other so you compare the color and the shape
of them. Pyrite has a cubic structure and that's feS2. I haven't seen any pyrite
yet but if I see some I'll let you guys know. Alight guys well this is the
best I can do for focus and lighting but there in the upper right hand quadrant
is a nice little piece of free gold sitting out there in the middle of the
quartz. And I was looking all over the sulfide rich stuff and trying to look
around the chalcopyrite and looking for free gold, because usually in ore
that's where it hangs out is with the mineral rich sulfide rich stuff and here
I found a piece sitting out in the middle of the quartz all by itself. So
you never, you never quite know where it's gonna be but when you find it you
know what it is. So that's pretty cool, and each one of those small dashes is 50
microns and so you're looking at about a millimeter across for the the widest
cross-section of that piece of gold, so that gives you kind of a size range and
a reference on the size. So here's another shot and there's a little piece
of gold right up there and there's a piece of gold right
here and there's some gray minerals associated with it here, there's a little
bit of fine gold over here and a little piece up here. So the gold is really
speckled all throughout this piece. Again associated with those gray sulfide
minerals of some sort. They look kind of like pyrrhotite but they're a little bit
too shiny and silver to be pyrrhotite, and they're not massive, inthis ore the
pyrrhotite is pretty much, you know, massive and lots of grains whereas this
is just kind of little specks of the silver mineral. But let's increase the
power and see if we can get a better look at some of this gold we have here.
Here's a little bit higher power and you can see that piece of gold there's our
gray mineral again that it seems to be associated with. And this is kind of a
cool piece because the gold is flush with the surface on the left and then
you can kind of see it dive down into the quartz on the right hand side. So
that's pretty cool. Now at this power each one of those dashes is about 25
microns so this piece across is somewhere in the 250 the maybe 300
micron range. And so again just giving you a size range, but there you can see
another nice piece of gold in the quartz and you can see it's not associated with
any huge massive sulfide or pyrrhotite. Alright so let's see if I can do this
right. So if you get your cut quartz face, there's actually a lot of free gold
right along in here and if you get it oriented just right to the light it'll
flash at you, let's see if I can do this on camera here. As I turn it, there you can
see you can see the gold, there's some up here, there's a pretty good sized piece
there. And then the gray mineral that you can see associated with the gold but
there again when you when you cut it you can actually get a really quick and
dirty visual on this stuff by just flashing it into the light just right.
And it might be a little bit hard in the video but when you see it in
person it's really yellow, it is gold colored and it's really hard to mistake
for, you know, gray sulfides or anything like that chalcopyrite it's real brassy
this stuff is yellow yellow yellow there's even some more up along over
here you can see now that I'm looking. So that that's just a quick little trick
you can you can use to identify gold very very quickly in your cut samples
and this is the unpolished, you can still see all the saw marks here in the right
light so it doesn't have to be mirror finish polish this is right out of the
saw. Here's another piece I'll show you this that's pretty impressive, there's a
little piece of gold here and some associated across through here, and then
when you flash it into the light... and it's still a little too wet.
So I've dried it off a little bit, you want it damp but not wet because though
if you have a sheen of water on there it'll reflect in the light. But let's try
this again, there you go, you can see the see the gold and if you go too far you
lose it. You just need that little reflective spot where the lights
bouncing off those gold surfaces we cut and it shows up really really yellow.
Alright guys so I hope you enjoyed the video today, it's a little bit different,
a little bit unusual from what we normally do. But it was pretty cool
cutting open these quartz rocks, checking it out, seeing what minerals we had in
there and also seeing some free gold today. And because this saw is
gas-powered and uses very very little water I think there's a really good
chance that you can take this up to your mine site with a little water pump and
and cut open your rocks on-site and you can get some really good information
identifying the mineralization you have, where the gold may be if you can get
some free gold, is the gold along the wall rock is it in the middle of the
vein is it evenly dispersed stuff like that. And for all you rock hunters and
specimen guys out there, this is a really good way to quickly identify which rocks
may have some value for you as far as decorative stone or specimen. So what
do you guys think, is this going to be a useful tool for you when you go out and
prospect on some of your old claims and mine sites? Or is this really
just kind of a novel thing that probably isn't very much use to the actual
prospector or miner? So let me know if you guys find this stuff useful, leave me
a comment in the comment section below about what you think of today's video.
And thanks again for watching, and if you have any questions or comments you can
find our contact information in the description below or you can leave a
comment in the comment section. So thanks again and we'll see on the next one