NICE Gold Find (NSW) this week - 4.262 Kilo Specimen melt + PICS.

This all came from the one, single specimen which I weighed about 8 hours ago...

A friend of mine was kind enough to allow me some time to take some photographs of a specimen this afternoon that he had just found the other day. He had crushed it and melted it into two very evenly sized ingots. He's also a member of this forum but wishes to remain anonymous because he likes his privacy... but he did allow me to post these images here and the information below. There was even a piece of the specimen left over that contained a measly 2 ounces of gold ...which he's keeping as a memento. He showed me several other smaller specimens from the area that had not been dollied up and were quite lovely, holding an additional few ounces of gold between them. This is just a smaller portion of what he's previously found in the last few years in NSW.

* The total weight was 4.2 kilograms + 2 ounces. (137 ounces / 4.262 kilograms)
* Location was just outside of the Sydney region (NSW).
* Detector used was a GPX-5000 (I forgot to ask which coil).
* The depth of the quartz specimen was approximately 10 inches.
* Size of the quartz specimen prior to dollying was approximately 16 inches long.
* No gold was visible on the outside of the specimen - except when viewed close with a magnifying loupe.

When he dropped it into my hand, there was simply no way to hold it in front of you for any length of time, such was the incredible weight in such a small volume. Wonderful! The black material visible on one of the ingots is the graphite residue from the crucible adhering to some quartz. The white material is some of the remaining quartz that was still mixed in with the gold. He melts quite a bit of his gold so this is considered a rough melt prior to assaying but the gold I've found in the same general area is about 97% pure (sometimes higher) so I think he'll be happy regardless.

Sorry about the lack of studio lighting for these pics. We had to make do with white paper for a background and white neon for the main light source.













The larger images (same as above) can be found here:
They're too large to post here... but they have some lovely detail in them.
www.pbase.com/image/143559071/original.jpg
www.pbase.com/image/143559069/original.jpg
www.pbase.com/image/143559093/original.jpg
www.pbase.com/image/143559092/original.jpg
www.pbase.com/image/143559091/original.jpg
www.pbase.com/image/143559070/original.jpg

Absolutely amazing!!! What a find. Congrats!

Looks beautiful Glad to hear someone is on the gold and thanks for sharing, great pics again nero

Woooww what a terrific find I bet you couldn't wipe the smile from his face. Congrats to him for his finds and thanks for sharing with us all.

Cheers.

Mike.

Pretty incredible find,are there any before shots of the quartz.A find of this magnitude is so rare.I think I would have soaked it in hydrofluoric acid to reveal the extent of the gold even if it took a while.

That is a great find, congrats and well done to your mate

Ren...

Absolutely beautiful! Amazing find. Thanks for sharing great pics. Woo hoo!

So what did it weigh after the melt down ?

Harb wrote:So what did it weigh after the melt down ?

That's was the meltdown weight for the two ingots above plus the left over specimen
The original specimen (before it was broken up and dollied) was about 16 inches long and would have weighed considerably more in total. He took pictures of it before it was crushed but I don't have those.

The residual quartz in the mix is pretty minor. My notes say 4.3kg after crushing and melting.

Wow....thats crazy, and good luck to him!!
It's kind of nice to know it was out there and only 10" down, so it could have been found with any well operated detector....good stuff

A BIG thumbs up to Nero for the story and the pics and a BIGGER thumbs up to the mate who detected such a lump of *gold*.

Well done fellas.

Nero - Many Thanks for posting a once in a lifetime find.
A great presentation
Gotta admire the ingots
Imagine the heart rate
What sort of a sound would have the 5000 made at that moment
Congratulations to the owner

Excellent post Nero, thank you, congrats to your friend.
Cheers
Goldquest

Ya what!!! What a brilliant find congratulations to the lucky finder,and thanks Nero for the great pics and story....ahh we can still keep our dreams alive...for it does and can happen for any of us.

Cheers
Eureka Dreams

Good morning all and Nero in particular.
Damn. I know I was meant to find that. But a question.
I was under the impression that generally one was likely to yield a better return by selling the original nuggets rather than looking for just the gold value on market prices. So why the decision to melt the stuff down?

Yours tropically, Harry

Maybe the gold was to fragmented......

Thankyou for restoring my faith in "there is gold out there" .... AWSOME

WOW im speachless, Congratulations to the finder and nero for showing us this magnificent find.
I just wonder what the origonal specimen whould have looked like if sliced up to show gold inside.
The mind boggles

I'm guesing it would have looked like a little slice of heaven!!!
Regards
Wayne.

Drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool, drool.

What a magnificent find! Completely AWESOME. Good luck to him....

Year of the big speci,the bars been set high this time its gonna take some work to better that.

harryopal wrote:Good morning all and Nero in particular.
Damn. I know I was meant to find that. But a question.
I was under the impression that generally one was likely to yield a better return by selling the original nuggets rather than looking for just the gold value on market prices. So why the decision to melt the stuff down?

Yours tropically, Harry

Hi Harry,
It sure is a wonderful find. This one had no gold visible to the naked eye on the outside of the specimen... and, when he broke it open, he found that the quartz was riddled inside with the gold. It would have been too random and loose for him to bother creating specimens so he simply smashed it up to liberate the gold. Stuff like this, he'll almost always melt down to speed up the refining process and to make transport and assaying simpler. A single specimen can vary in the way gold and other metals are distributed in it - so by melting the gold into a single (or several) ingot, it's easier to drill a sample from the middle and have it assayed to determine the likely purity.

I asked him what the target sounded like and he said it sounded the same as when you come across fence wire because of the randomness of the gold inside the specimen.

One a side note, I met a slightly older gentleman who has started up his own small-operation open-cut gold mine outside of the Bathurst district last week. He showed me large photographs of his production and some of the bars they'd cast were in 8 kilo range. He'd just bought a GPX to speed up the recovery process (hasn't used it yet) with their excavator and some of the largest nuggets were definitely in the half kilo to one kilo range. They were all water-worn very nicely too. I couldn't really take pictures of his pictures but he showed me some color photographs that were printed to scale and the largest nuggets (assuming the images were to scale) were half as big as your fist. All of them coming from a deposit of blue-grey clay near the surface.

Nero,
Thank you for the explanation. It certainly looks quite wonderful in it's present form.

Harry

What a super find, and no sight of any gold to begin with... thanks for sharing Marco and the photos are great as usual (lighting looks good to me but then again gold that size is just going to stand out in a photo ).

Excellent find. Gives me hope too. Good story Nero.

wow

Thats amazing... keep on beepin!

You beauty... Perfect to hang off a neck chain....

Beautiful. I love the rough cast and the contrast in the dore. And the colour of the Gold, wow, It looks really pure. Awesome find.

nice.............very nice