What's The Nugget Market Like Now?

[Gold Hound]

Thats the show Tucson, he was telling me that its huge, mineral collectors from allover the world meet there to bid on or purchase high grade specimens. This guy's shop is called 'Crystal Fraction' I believe.

He wanted to take a whole bunch of other nuggets I had on consignment but for the little extra he was willing to pay it was not worth it.

A lot of prospectors are slow to adopt new technology. I think its due to the average age of prospectors being over retirement age(young people are lazy now lol), and that the zed was the first digital platform minelab gold detector. I had to teach a couple of old fellas I know as they really struggled with the transition. And minelab made it hard by changing the name of settings that were essentially the same function on the 5k which added to the confusion allong with no printed manual for purchasers who don't own or wish to own computers.

[jasong]

The few people I had interested in buying a couple ounces disappeared after the economy went bad. Now that gold seems to be decoupling from the equities market again and acting more normal, has any US demand for gold returned outside of the ultra premium collector type stuff? There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of buyer demand right now on the forums. Ebay seems to have quite a lot of bidders on average type gold lots now though, but mostly just on the 1 gram or under lot sizes, which takes foreveeeeer to sell an ounce of gold. There has to be a better way. It's hard to sell bigger pieces or bigger lots on Ebay.

I'll sell gold down to 7% under spot depending on size if people are buying in 1+ oz lots here in the US. Or trade for an older XRF (InnovX DS2000 for example) with geochem, mining or soil timings.

[Norvic]

On 4/25/2020 at 10:57 AM, mn90403 said:

Then on the other hand if it was an attractive specimen I'd want double or triple or XXX the gold price.

Hey MN if you become a buyer, give me a cooee, those xx, xxx prices are exciting me big time.

[Jin]

On 4/27/2020 at 1:56 AM, jasong said:

Or trade for an older XRF (InnovX DS2000 for example) with geochem, mining or soil timings.

I think i may have asked this question before but interested in others opinion so will ask again. Would XRF machines be accurate enough to sample soil for traces of gold? Amagine how good it would be to use one as a tool for loaming, instead of collecting soil and panning it. They arnt cheap though, up around $30k in Australia im told.

[mn90403]

There you go Jin, another machine that is going to get us twice the gold at half the depth of a heavier detector!  haha

[Gold Hound]

XRF, is very useful in prospecting both by milling and pelletizing rock samples and soil samples  for gold content and for using more mobile path finder elements to trace gold bearing mineralization. I have used the nitton gold 3 plus series made by thermo scientific for this purpose. There are other brands that are also up to the task but do your due diligence in researching weather they are upto the task. And make sure that you get the program that is specific to mineral exploration. As most second hand units will be programmed for material's testing, which will render it useless for prospecting.

[PeterInSa]

Interesting Product Overview Video:

https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/XL3TGOLDDPLUS#/XL3TGOLDDPLUS

[jasong]

6 hours ago, Jin said:

I think i may have asked this question before but interested in others opinion so will ask again. Would XRF machines be accurate enough to sample soil for traces of gold? Amagine how good it would be to use one as a tool for loaming, instead of collecting soil and panning it. They arnt cheap though, up around $30k in Australia im told.

What Goldhound said. For gold prospecting most of the usefulness to me personally is in tracer elements. Arsenic for instance is a very common one. My main interest is in locating hidden/buried hard rock deposits, and tracer elements are a great way to do this. Once assays show what is consistently running with gold, then you can use the XRF not to look for gold itself, but to look for whatever element is associated with it.

An XRF isn't a substitute for an assay. But assays are expensive, take a very long time, and all the samples are cumbersome. It's much easier to use an XRF in the field to do a quick, qualitative analysis in order to determine if samples merit collecting and sending in and paying for the assay to get a quantitative measurement. Soil assays are definitely the way to go over an XRF, a gold pan is still more useful to me if it's gold itself I'm tracing.

Gold is bad element to chase with a XRF, for a number of technical reasons the threshold of detection for gold is fairly high and kinda useless for most prospecting endeavors if only looking for the element gold itself. This can also apply to certain PGM's or silver, since the elements are often used in the electrode and thus interfere with measurement and require higher thresholds.

XRF's are also way useful outside of the gold prospecting realm. For instance, you can tell the difference between serpentine and nephrite with an XRF, even when the two are very similar in macro composition, it's quicker than thin sections.

Also, I am looking for a lot of other non-gold stuff that I can't really go into here on a public forum, which I've found an XRF to be an extremely useful tool for.

In summary, an XRF isn't really a great tool for a gold prospector looking for placer gold. It's an ok tool for gold hardrock exploration. But it is a great tool for a general prospector or exploration geologist who has a clear idea of what they need out of it and the limitations and power of the tool in specific applications.

 

[mn90403]

Here is a 'guide' to nugget value.  I mean it tells you which types of nuggets bring the best prices.

https://goldnuggetsforsale.com/index.php?main_page=how_are_gold_nuggets_priced&zenid=75b78b9f79f22916d031950fa700ff45