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
