eBay

CALIFORNIA

GOLD QUARTZ

SPECIMEN

Gold from the

Mother Lode

There's hardly anything prettier than raw, native gold straight from the earth. Here's a sweet little micro-mount for your collection. Snow white 'Bull' quartz is attached to the Au. Rich morsel hails from the Sierra Nevada mountains, the famed MOTHER LODE of CALIFORNIA, so let no one devalue it.

For prospective mineral collectors, rest assured you've got the real Mccoy here. Please check my feedback for any disputes arising from non-authenticity issues. You won't find any. Prior to starting this business, I was a small-scale placer miner for 18 years. Wherever there was gold and running water available, I dredged, sluiced, panned, or used a rocker-box. In the arid, waterless desert, my primary tools were pick-axes, shovels, rock hammers, brooms, buckets, mortars and pestles, gold pans, rocker-boxes, drywashers, and metal detectors. Everybody asks me if I 'struck 'er rich'. Well, I found lots of nuggets, some over two ounces. During my biggest seasons, however, there was hardly ever a nugget found. What I recovered was practically all fine gold and amalgam. Hardly any ex-gold miners can truthfully say they struck it rich unless you count independent living as a measure of wealth. I do and I did.

Specimen weight: .17 Gram - 2.7 Grains

Size - 5 mm long

Ruler (if shown) is 1/4" wide (actual size). A U.S. 10 cent piece is often used to show size of the item for sale. FAST REFUND In case you're unhappy with this specimen, I offer a money back guarantee which includes your initial S&H. With regards to my gold quartz parcels, gold quartz specimens, slabs, and cabochon, I only deal in rocks containing VG (visible gold), not minerals or substances that appear to contain gold or that only assay gold. I think most of us interested in oro (Atomic symbol Au) would like to see authentic, native gold in their specimens; gold that was put there by natural elemental forces, not by some man's hand. It's an aesthetic we share and that's what I sell - authentic, natural, gold quartz (with VG visible gold).

Weight Conversions:

15.43 GRAINS = 1 GRAM 31.103 GRAMS = 1 TROY OUNCE 24 GRAINS = 1 PENNYWEIGHT (DWT) 20 DWT = 1 TROY OUNCE 480 GRAINS = 1 TROY OUNCE

S & H

Combined shipping offered. For multiple item purchases, please request an invoice (from the seller) when you buy more than one item.

U.S. BUYERS

S & H is $2.50 (shipped with USPS tracking to all U.S. destinations).

Combined shipping offered.

ATTN: INTERNATIONAL BIDDERS

INTNL. BUYERS S&H - $2.50 (via First Class Parcel)

PAYMENTS

For U.S. buyers: We accept paypal. For intnl. customers: We accept paypal. Pay securely with www.paypal.

Payment must be made within 7 days from close of auction. We ship as soon as funds clear. If you have questions, please ask them before bidding.

REFUNDS

We leave no stones un-turned insuring our customers get what they bargained for. If you're not satisfied with this item, contact me. Then, if the problem can't be resolved, return product within 30 days in 'as purchased' condition for a full refund (S & H included. For those who know the ups and downs of the precious metals market, this is a heck of a deal. Buy it and if the market drops dramatically in the next 30 days, you can return it for what you paid for it. That's a pretty cool insurance policy for precious metal buyers. I think most specimen buyers, however, are more interested in these rocks for their intrinsic beauty and collectability than they are for their gold content.

NATIVE MINERALS
Check any and all Gold of Eldorado feedback for disputes arising from non-authenticity of the specimens I sell. You won't find any. I deal in native minerals with visible gold, not replicas, not 'paint-ons'. I don't peddle 'simulated' specimens made with minute amounts of gold or no real gold at all. Nor will you find any salted pay-dirt here. That's not genuine. Real pay-dirt was created by nature, not by a man's hand dropping gold into a bucket or zip-lock bag of dirt. I was a professional placer miner priding myself on being able to locate pay-streaks both in the form of virgin pay-packs and redeposits. If I still had mining claims, any pay-dirt offered would be direct from the ground and the original deposit where it was found yet un-tampered with in any other way. I've personally bought stuff that had gold painted on it. I've bought so-called 'natural gold quartz' specimens with tiny chunks of placer gold glued into the vugs. All of my advertised specimens, slabs, cabochons, nuggets, gold ores (or 'paydirt', if offered) are authentic and contain naturally-occurring, native gold and/or are composed almost entirely of naturally-occurring gold (i.e. gold nuggets, gold flakes, wire gold specimens). The purity of this gold will vary, but if it's from California, you can count on the percentage being fairly high, say from 70% to 95% pure. For comparision, a 14K gold wedding band is 58% pure gold. The origin of this gemstone is a vein system in the Sierra Nevada Mtns. of California.

B.C. MINING ADVENTURE
Relative to modern-day prices, gold was low back in 1985, less than $400 per oz. That spring, a snowbird friend from B.C. had invited me up north to his Canadian province. Once I had arrived, he introduced me to one of his old mining cronies. Here was a guy who probably got a little lonesome working a remote mining lease in the Canadian wilderness and didn't mind an American prospector camped next door helping him out.
I was happy to assist in his operation and he was agreeable to my running a small high-banker upstream from his big wash plant. Unaided by mechanized digging equipment, it was impossible for me to access richer formations in the main creek bottom where the better gold was known to be. Despite limited choices of formations to work, I was able to find decent color in an old channel remnant suspended alongside a road cut. With trusty pick-axe, I commenced hacking pay-dirt from the high terrace. Wheel-barrelling it down to my portable, aluminum long-tom and running it through, results weren't spectacular, but after a couple of weeks, I managed to produce around an ounce of Canadian yellow; pretty small change compared with the kind of reserves we ultimately located upstream on this remote lease.
I enjoyed helping my Canuck friend sample as we searched for better ground to work. After five years prospecting a variety of mining districts, I felt pretty confident in my ability to locate gold-bearing formations; so, with rocker box, gold pan, and his D555 CAT with backhoe attachment, we began running tests further up towards the headwaters of the drainage. Ten to twelve feet of overburden isn't much of a problem for a good backhoe operator, so things got exciting once we reached virgin ground in a stretch of unexplored channel adjacent to some old diggings. With the prevailing gold prices, What I wouldn't give to have a claim like that here in the present day.

Gold of Eldorado 3-10-13