Gold Nuggets And Gold Dust: Valuable Or Not?
When you get into buying and selling gold, you may run into situations where gold dust and gold nuggets are presented to you for sale. Should you buy them, and are they valuable enough? It is a tough call, but if you know enough about gold, you might consider the following before you buy gold products.
Gold-Dipped Rocks vs. Actual Gold
Veins of gold, from where gold nuggets are harvested, are extremely soft and very breakable. A gold nugget, believe it or not, is not going to be as hard as you think. If you get a gold nugget that cannot be scratched or bent under the pressure of your fingers, you might not have something that is solid gold. Be sure to use a testing kit, and ask the seller if you can cut the nugget to see if it is solid gold all the way through. You definitely do not want to buy a gold-dipped rock or a string of molten lead covered in gold.
Filler Dust vs. All Gold
A similar problem happens with buying gold dust. People make the mistake of weighing what they think is an entire little bag of gold dust, only to find that it either is not gold at all, or there is "filler dust" in the bag to make it weigh more. There are two tests to make sure you have no filler dust. The first is a magnetic test, which requires that you pour the dust out onto an aluminum plate and use a magnet to draw out filler dust. Most fillers used to cheat the gold scale are going to be heavier and magnetic. Gold is not magnetic, so anything that a good magnet pulls from the gold dust is filler.
The second test is a liquid suspension test. A beaker of water is all you need. Pour the bag of gold dust into the water. Whatever is heavier than the gold will sink, while the gold will remain close to the top of the water. If it is all gold, nothing will sink all the way to the bottom. This test is a little messier and more time-consuming, however, because then you have to sift the gold dust out of the water and let it dry before you can weigh it and pay for it.
Worth Your Time and Dollar
Ultimately, gold dust and nuggets are "raw" gold. They have not been processed, and they might contain some slight impurities. Resale value for you is risky, at best. You could buy them and stockpile them anyway, but the real money is in gold that has already been processed and purified.
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