Raw gold nuggats/dust test

Mass Spectrometer?

Girlfriend?

Trust me. It's uncanny.

Taking up hobby gold prospecting eh?

You can easily check the bulk density of your nugget by its displacement in a known volumetric cylinder right at the stream. And with gold dust just keep it in a bag and check it at home on a scale or according to its settling rate in water. Gold dust can be a bit tricky especially if your stream bed or ore body has a lot of pyrite or dark micas in it, but it will fall out of solution quicker than the pyrite and considerably quicker than the mica.

Naveel,

The standard method of checking the purity of gold s referred to as a fire assay.

The fire assay of gold ore consists of two stages:

In the first stage, a sample of the gold (of precisely known weight) is made to combine or alloy with metallic lead (forming a metallic bead or "button"), with the the other constituents of the ore being separated from the lead as slag;

In the second stage, the lead button containing the gold is cupelled (to oxidize and remove the lead constituents), and the resulting gold button is weighed. Comparing this weight to the weight of the original assay sample yields the gold content or "purity".

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Just my $0.02...