My dad has a fair amount of small metal chunks / flakes that we’ve been unable to identify. They were in an old glass Skippy peanut butter jar in my grandfather’s basement. I don’t know where my grandfather got them or why he saved them, although he wasn’t particularly a pack rat.
They’re relatively soft (they don’t scratch a mirror). They’re not magnetic.
Here are a few pictures, including an AA battery for scale.
We don’t have a scale to accurately weigh the amount shown above, but to me it seems fairly heavy - heavier than both my dad and I expected.
I rubbed some of them between my fingers and I don’t smell any particular odor at all, so I don’t think they’re brass filings or pieces.
No, no real “access” to gold. My grandfather was a railroad engineer almost entirely in northern Washington state.
The pieces can be cut with a knife but are too small to really tell how soft they truly are.
Gold is what it looks like, but that seems unlikely, just that he would have kept them in a peanut butter jar in a dingy basement and not said anything. But then I don’t know why he’d keep something worthless, either.
Pyrite is hard but brittle. I wished the picture can be magnified some more because I see some smooth sided crystals that tell me it’s pyrite. Stumped by the “soft” part.
With the sharp edges it could be iron pyrite (fools gold), which is not reliably magnetic. It’s also much harder than gold, but you didn’t say how soft you meant. If you can get ahold of some hydrochloric acid, you can put some on a small piece of it. If it’s gold it won’t dissolve. Many other things, including fools gold, will.
If I hit a larger chunk (still quite small) with a hammer, would it flatten if it were (possibly) gold and shatter if it were iron pyrite? (We don’t have any HCl.)
Also, you can buy HCl by the gallon at any Home Depot or car repair or similar store, sold for cleaning sidewalks. (Might be labeled as “muriatic acid”.)
Green or brown or slightly black. Which is why some vendors in our country selling gold alloy jewelry like to display their jewelry on shallow dishes with water and lots of squeezed lemons on the sides. Looks funny?
But for field verification, we were taught to scratch or pierce the suspected particle with a pin or needle. Pure gold can be pierced by a needle.
My grandmother used to pan for gold in the Sierras as a hobby, and eventually accumulated a large pill bottle of gold particles. Kept it on a shelf. She’s been dead thirty years, don’t know what happened to it, but it looked just like your little pile.
