Cleaning gold nuggets

You’ve found some nuggets with your metal detector. You finally retrieve them from the ground. You can see they’re gold, but they don’t look very shiny! They’re covered in clay, mud, soil, perhaps with bits of quartz still sticking to them. Maybe it’s even covered in ironstone, the famed ‘black gold’! How do you go about cleaning gold nuggets to make them look as good and shiny as they can?

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Alluvial gold part 1: gold panning

Are you interested in looking for alluvial gold? Did you know that most Tasmanian gold rushes and all but one of Tasmania’s great gold mines were found by prospectors originally following leads of alluvial gold? In this post I will briefly describe alluvial gold, and go into places you might go, where to do research, and link to some good videos on how to pan, if you’re just starting out.

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