Gold Buttons – Dec 21st, 2023

Gold Assaying

This is just before Christmas and the weather is keeping us from prospecting.  That doesn’t mean we get stopped though. When the weather keeps us from getting out we have other projects to keep challenging us. One of these is both looking for gold ‘inside’ and for firing some fine gold in the furnace to get some gold buttons.

Pin Pointing is like gold detecting with the larger detectors, but using a much smaller unit that is very sensitive and picks up very fine gold, but basically has a sensitivity depth of perhaps 1/4 inch or so. This depth varies on the size of the target being detected.  Gold buttons will simply vary of the amount of gold you are firing. it can range from a half-pennyweight to several ounces.

Here’s a picture of one of the units and some gold buttons from previous times:

Pin pointer unit
Here’s a picture of some gold buttons from previous times

The small button weighs just over one pennyweight and the large button just over one ounce.

So for our story of today, we had some quartz rock to check and had some gold we wanted to convert from fine gold to a gold button. I call it a gold button because the furnace firing process ends with the gold in a cupel, and it’s the size of a button, and sometimes a very large button as you can see above! 

I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

Deb and Jim checking out a good target.
Deb is finding something good
Yep, there’s gold
Crushing some of the rock for panning
Panning some of that crushed rock. Surely there is gold here somewhere!
Jim preparing a flux to fire some gold he brought with him. The result will be a nice button of gold.
Deb preparing her flux for some fine gold she brought in
Me getting ready to put the crucible into the furnace. This crucible holds Jim’s flux and gold concentrates. Deb’s is already in there.
That furnace looks mighty hot! The temperature is 1980 degrees F.
Pouring the slag off from the crucible, and the gold and lead will follow into the pour-bar you see there
Here’s the cupels taken from the furnace. They are red hot at the moment. These contain the gold buttons
Jim weighing his gold button. It’s on top of the scale there.

This work ended our day. Score! 
Don

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