Careful With Your Hot Rocks

[Rick Watkins]

Just a reminder to you nugget hunters dont throw your hot rock's away, these pesky red rocks were showing up where i was working in pocket veins. I was using a GB2. There were red, grey,black, rocks all in this same area,all had gold in them. Being new to this i almost pitched these rocks but then decided i would take them home and look later,glad i did I soaked them in acid and they all had gold. I had been finding good visible gold here and it never looked like these oddball rocks that kept getting in the way of my new find. I know someone (i wont mention names) that had found these pesky hot rocks also around a deep deep mineshaft and he was working around and finding visible gold and kept pitching the red ones down the shaft out of the way. After i showed him my red rocks cleaned of minerals he was very disappointed that he had been throwing all his gold away. I keep everything that im not sure of now,hope

this keeps a little more gold in your pocket. RICK.

[nugget65]

Nice finds ... Gonna start looking alittle closer from now on...

[Patrick in Havasu]

Good for you.  Your curiosity paid off.  What type of acid?

 

Patrick

[Rick Watkins]

Well at the time i wanted quick results so i was using HYDRAFLORIC to clean fast. Dont typically need something this extreme though. Other acids would work also just a bit slower.

[tvanwho]

I thought Hydrofluoric could kill a guy from the fumes? Would Muriatic Acid work or even Clorox? Thanks for the tip. Were the red rocks very heavy? I threw away a super heavy, fist size black rock years ago, that my MXT was screaming on in Prospect Mode, even tho it sure looked like a nugget of some sort. Been kicking myself ever since after I found there are such things as black gold nuggets. They are covered with iron and manganese oxides apparently.

Glad to see you were smart and did some investigating 1st before chucking them rocks....

-Tom

[beatup]

Congrats on some interesting finds.

[bado1]

That is amazing, Rick. My bet is that you are going back to look for more red "hot rocks"! Thanks for the tip. Do you think that this is the strata they were mining?

Dean

[Rick Watkins]

Yes the hydraflouric is very dangerous,its a last resort acid in my opinion.muriatic,oxalic,hydracloric etc.are all good in different ways. They all need to be respected just the same.

There is a couple extensive threads on this forum about acids and cleaning,pretty helpful. http://www.detectorprospector.com/forum/topic/404-best-way-to-clean-gold/

The red rocks were fairly heavy for their size yes. Too bad you cant get the heavy black rock back.

I found some very hot rocks 2 weeks ago in N.East Oregon that probobly arent anything but gonna check them anyway. Good luck.

[delnorter]

Wow, good job Rick. Nice gold/rocks

 

Mike

[Rick Watkins]

Yes bado,they had been working in this rock prior to closing down their operations.

yes i do look for red colors more often than i did,also white,black and grey, for this area anyway.