Free · One PDF · 28 pages
The Jar on the Shelf
Somewhere in your house there is a vial, a film canister or a pill bottle with something in it that might be gold. It has been there for years, because you were never sure and you stopped wanting to ask.
Gold or Not Gold settles it tonight, on your kitchen bench, on material you already have. The one thing you may not have is an identified lump of pyrite, and the file says so on its own list — without one it tells you not to improvise, and prints what the specified porcelain plate cost, with the vendor and the day it was checked. It is 28 pages and it is free.
What is in it
- The ten-second calibration, and it comes first. Before you trust a tile, you calibrate it — against a quartz pebble, a piece of glass, and a lump of pyrite. Because a tile too soft to streak pyrite does not fail safe: it plows a groove of pale tile dust and fails toward a false positive. The weakness of the trick comes before the trick, on purpose.
- The streak itself. The color of the powder is not the color of the lump, and that is the whole trick.
- The knife point, the shade test, the angle test, and what it does in water. All free — the knife point out of published mineralogy, the two eyeball tests out of what prospectors actually report, printed with the disagreement between them left in.
- The magnet correction. A magnet tells you what is magnetite and nothing whatever about pyrite, because pyrite is essentially non-magnetic too. The most repeated test in this hobby answers a question nobody asked. If you checked with a magnet, you cleaned your sample. You did not test it.
- The arithmetic that kills the density test. A one-gram nugget displaces about 0.052 g of water — half of one division on a 0.1 g kitchen scale. The formula is printed so you can redo it and see for yourself where the threshold actually sits.
Where this file stops, stated as plainly as it teaches. A streak needs a particle you can hold between finger and thumb and drag, so this is a test for pickers and chunks and it does nothing for flour gold. A streak plate and an acid kit are not the same instrument: acid answers how pure, streak answers gold or not gold.
And it will not tell you where gold is, what your piece is worth, or how much of it your sluice is handing back to the river. It answers one question and then it stops.
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You will also get three emails over the next nine days about what the book does. If they are not for you, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom of every one and nothing else happens.
You will know whether that picker is gold. You will still have no idea how many of its brothers went out of the back of your sluice the last time you ran one, or whether the machine you bought to catch them would fix it. That is the book — The Second Pan, 382 pages, thirteen chapters, one PDF, with the Receipt Log bundled in the same file.