Hey Araluen...or apart from rhodium you can use josco high glow polish at 10000rpm i can get silver to shine the same...i actually live in a original gold miners cottage that was built in 1864 during the first gold rushes. Up to 1890 about 25000oz's of gold was taken from the creeks and gullys around me...i cant be to specific about the location cause i live right where i prospect...i can throw a rock from my back door and it would land in the creek right where this piece was found...its not the only piece ive found its just a very big piece. It was found in a town once called Queenstown north east of melbourne...the other platinum i find seems to be consistent in size and the shape of almost a perfect round ball its always the heaviest item in my pan...i can get the gold to move about in my pan but the flat platinum wont budge...the balls of platinum roll very slowly...i used to never no what these metal balls were so just like the old timers i threw them back. I do have a very little piece that looks crystaline.The area was not so much volcanic but the majority of the gold here seeped up through cracks in the bedrock in its quartz...i no of a quartz vein that was found in a mine at one tree hill that was 3 inches wide and the gold in some sections was 3 inches wide so you could imagine how big some of the nuggets would be around here...that vein was never truly exhausted as they actually lost the vein...the ground movement had broke it off and the gold vein has never been found again...that mine is just up the road from here and still is in operation privately. I actually found this alleged platinum about a year ago and thought it was just junk and threw it away in my backyard...i walked past it again not long ago and was curious to find out what it was.... when i found it, it was very dull similar to lead...i polished it up last night first i cut polished it then i polished it with a high glow polish(meant for my alloy car wheels) at high speed on a buff. Another thing i did notice about it which i suppose makes sense if it is platinum is that i first stupidly used a wire wheel on my drill to get some of the dirt and dullness off it and the wire wheel was digging deep grooves into it...i thought shit! it will weigh less now but before and after polishing it, it weighed the same.i noticed that no material was coming off the nugget the wire wheel was just pushing the material around so that told me its malleable just like gold. Most of the bedrock behind my place has been all folded up most likely from when antartica originally collided into australia to form gondwana. This area was part of the ocean at some stage as trilobites fossils are found here. I dont no why it is but no one has ever bothered to really explore and analyse this area and several other areas around victoria that i no of. It wouldnt surprise me if the bedrock in this area would have more precious metal ores than what Australia are currently mining. Ive been even finding very big chunks of kimberlite around here and we all no what can be found in that!...ive found some diamond also in the kimberlite but of very poor quality...text books would never mention anything about kimberlite pipes being present on the fringes of melbourne but here it is...one of my own theories is platinum can be sent to earth via meteorites which can land anywhere...so it can be found anywhere in metal form just is very scarce...lava flow can melt it into odd shapes... I dont no anything about how crystalline platinum forms there is not a lot of information out there. I just thought i should of taken a photo of the underside its still raw and dull...im 90% sure its platinum...my partner works in the cbd ill get her to take it to the museum labs to test it. I can let you no the results if your interested...SWright said:
Tho I do know where you are, I'm not going to say it on here.Beherit said:
Looks like a casting of ETs finger that didn't make it home,Beherit said:
