Question About Hunting Tailings With Equinox 800

[maxxkatt]

I am going to a permissions on an old gold mine from mid 1800's.  There is a tailings pile about 4 feet high 20 x 30 feet that is a mixture of dirt and white quartz.
I am using an Equinox 800. I will be using gold 1 settings. 

my question if a quartz rock indicates gold do I break it up in the field or bring back home to do it carefully. I have to walk back about 2 miles to the tailings pile from where I park my car.

also can you distinquish between a hot rock and white quartz with gold in it?

thanks for any help.

last time I hunted gold in streams was using the fisher gold bug to find buckshot and black sand and then dig and pan the gravel. That was pretty easy. This seems a little more complex.

[Steve Herschbach]

Generally white quartz rocks are not hot rocks, since pure quartz in invisible to a metal detector. However, there can be things in the rock that sound off. Arsenopyrite gives a strong reading but is worthless. Could be copper ore minerals or copper itself - very common in some places. And it could be gold. There are other possibilities but these are two I run into a lot

If the rock has lots of visible gray sulphides or green staining the odds are one of the first couple options. If the quartz is relatively clean, or has iron staining, then gold becomes more likely.

The truth is there are way, way more worthless quartz rocks than ones with gold in them. For me with an Equinox it is therefore going to take a nice positive number reading. especially in the single digits, to get my interest. If rocks are too big to pack out, I usually just find a bigger rock and break them. I don't find enough rocks like that to make hauling a crack hammer around with me worth the extra effort. However, if I was hunting tailing piles with the express goal of going after potential quartz cobbles, a crack hammer would be part of the kit.

Lots of tales about hunting tailing piles at Steve's Mining Journal

 

[maxxkatt]

well I hunted the tailings pile and found shotgun shells, 22 shells and a spoon. Walked to the mine entrance and there were several large quarts rocks with the equinox using the 6" coils gave sold 1 and 2 in gold one. Well this rock was 30 lbs so could not  find much bigger rock. Decided to hike back to the car with my detector, back pack, lesche shovel, gold pick, Nox and this 30 lb  rock. It was a little over a mile. That was quite a chore for me.

at home put it on a plastic tub and it still is giving 1 and 2 reading. I don't think there is any foil in there.

any suggestions other than break it up with my big hammer and a chisel?

Just start breaking it in halves and keep going after the gold signals?

I am new at this so don't want to mess up by not knowing what to do.

 

here is a pic of the quartz rock. looks like lot of iron staining shows where I broke off a small piece.

 

 

 

[Steve Herschbach]

Well just speaking for me personally but yes, I would give it a good hard smack with a crack hammer.

[maxxkatt]

On 9/11/2018 at 12:58 PM, maxxkatt said:

well I hunted the tailings pile and found shotgun shells, 22 shells and a spoon. Walked to the mine entrance and there were several large quarts rocks with the equinox using the 6" coils gave sold 1 and 2 in gold one. Well this rock was 30 lbs so could not  find much bigger rock. Decided to hike back to the car with my detector, back pack, lesche shovel, gold pick, Nox and this 30 lb  rock. It was a little over a mile. That was quite a chore for me.

at home put it on a plastic tub and it still is giving 1 and 2 reading. I don't think there is any foil in there.

any suggestions other than break it up with my big hammer and a chisel?

Just start breaking it in halves and keep going after the gold signals?

I am new at this so don't want to mess up by not knowing what to do.

 

here is a pic of the quartz rock. looks like lot of iron staining shows where I broke off a small piece.

 

 

 

Ok, use the 800 in gold1 mode with six inch coil to pinpoint area of boulder where gold was located. Knocked off this portion of rock and expected to find gold signal in the main rock or  portion I knocked off. It was neither. smashed up some of the smaller pieces that came off and panned them. no trace of color. The 800 with the same settings did not show any gold in the main rock or pieces knocked off. 

so any ideas what was making the 800 indicate gold with 1 & 2 on the TID? Seems like it disappeared. 

 Was there not gold there in the first place? I think that is likely, but what was the 800 sounding off on?

 

 

[Steve Herschbach]

Here is a possibility from Advanced Nugget Hunting With the Fisher Gold Bug Metal Detector by Pieter Heydelaar & David Johnson, page 36:

"DIAMAGNETIC MINERALS

Most minerals which contain absolutely noi iron exhibit a very weak "negative" magnetism known as diamagnetism. The Gold Bug is probably the first metal detector sensitive enough to "see" diamagnetism.

QUARTZ. The only common mineral you are likely to encounter in gold mining regions which will exhibit noticeable diamagnetism is white or clear quartz.The compensation point of quartz is between 7.0 and 8.0 but its effect is opposite in polarity to that of magnetite. Since diamagnetism is a weak effect, it will usually be masked by the effects of iron-bearing minerals and will not ordinarily be noticed except perhaps when crossing a vein of "clean" quartz. In this circumstance you may notice a very weak "positive" signal which will be broad and impossible to pinpoint. You are not likely to confuse it with a signal from gold, which is usually more distinct."

 

I have encountered this myself exactly as described above. I was detecting on a dark rock and came across a nice white quartz vein in the bedrock. It signaled faintly. This can be diamagnetism but is more likely that the detector is ground balanced to, in this case, a different rock type. The quartz then stands out because the ground balance is way off for the quartz, which is tuned to the surrounding rock mass.

This would not normally occur just with a quartz cobble, but I thought i would mention it just in case.

[Steve Herschbach]

I tend to still think it was some tiny fleck of mineral making the signal, though I am not betting on gold. The only way to know for sure is crush it and pan it (dollying) but unless I could eyeball something that looks like gold under a hand lens I doubt its worth the effort. Still, it would answer the question when everything else is basically guessing.

Gold In Hotrocks! Bring Your Hammer

Crushing Quartz Samples