A friend of one of my kids gave me a baggie containing about a half-
teaspoon of what he panned somewhere out west, reportedly gold dust.
Obviously this is not a great deal of gold (if any) but I am
reluctant to toss any gold. Is there any worthwhile way to extract
whatever is in there? I work with so little gold that I don’t really
have anything else to send for refining.
On that subject-- how much gold do I need to have for it to be
profitable to send to be refined? I’ve only ever sent silver.
Rio Grande takes whatever you have. Give them a call and I’m sure
that you’ll get a proper answer from them.
Might be that other company’s deliver the same service but I don’t
know. Another good place whould be PMwest preciousmetalswest.com Give
them a call and check it out. Good luck, enjoy and have fun
High Tech Refining in Dallas, TX has no minimum, very fast and fair
return. http://hitechpmr.com/ will get you in touch with them. Very
friendly people, I’m sure they can help you figure out what you have
and how best to get the most out of it.
Standard disclaimer, no affiliation, happy customer.
I just weighed a half teaspoon of high purity gold dust and it
weighed right at 20 grams. At today’s gold price that figures out to
be about $914.
It would be worthwhile sending it to your refiner. There would be
assay and refining charges, but there would still be money left. That
is if it is in fact gold. It may be simply concentrates from the pan,
which would contain some gold but would also have a lot of other
material. Gold panners call it black sand. Much of the black sand is
removeable with a magnet. The rest can be carefully washed away from
the gold. What you want to do is get rid of everything which isn’t
yellow. If you do have gold there you may be able to melt it into a
ball which you can then often roll and draw into useable form I use
it often for bezels and accents.