yes i live in the uk.
i have just bought a gold nugget. my first Californian one. the others are Australian. and it is less golden looking and a little more silver looking. can gold look different from different parts of the world?
yes i live in the uk.
i have just bought a gold nugget. my first Californian one. the others are Australian. and it is less golden looking and a little more silver looking. can gold look different from different parts of the world?
First thought: Iron Pyrite? AKA Fool's Gold...
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Sure, this stuff isn't 24 K pure gold. Who knows what is in it. Of course, as another has said, it might not have any gold in it. Have you weighed it?
Jon
yes i have weighed it and it is what it says it is. and seems consistant with size.
Sure, depends on what it's alloyed with, and if it's a real nugget or something someone melted in the shop into a bucket of water.
Different structure entirely and VERY different density.
Yes. Gold that is found in nature is rarely pure. It is commonly found alloyed with silver, and slightly less commonly found alloyed with copper. It is also found alloyed with other elements, such as tellurium, or members of the platinum group. One might expect combinations of several elements. Each of them have a profound effect on the color of the nugget. Not only will the appearance vary by location, but gold content is likely to as well. In my years of refining, I processed gold that ran as low as 30%, and as high as 96% as found in nature.
While it may make little sense to you, the addition of silver to gold yields green gold, quite unlike anything you might imagine. The addition of copper yields red gold. A balance of silver and copper alloyed with gold will yield a subdued golden color we have come to expect from gold used in jewelry. The addition of nickel or palladium yields white gold.
Pure gold has a look like nothing else. At the risk of offending, I'm going to email you a picture of a bowl of gold shot, pure, so you'll understand the color. The shot in the picture is gold that I refined, and is how it was dispensed to the customer, normally manufacturing jewelers. The shot form allowed for the small amounts to be weighed precisely for alloying, which is customary for the average benchman.
Harold
Just yesterday I was looking through old "nugget shooting" posts in Google (just got a new metal detector early for Christmas) and saw a post describing how the gold found near the silver mining districts would look pale due to the high silver content. Fairly common out here I understand.
dennis in nca
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