Hi everyone, welcome back to Cody's Lab. So, I am in the middle of the road right now.
it is 1 maybe 2 o'clock at night and as you can see here the road has been
cut.
See these cuts have been made in here
they were doing this earlier today and I was watching them do it
see they were cutting so much things they're probably going to remove this
section or whatever so I wanted to get at this as soon as possible
also, I wanted to come out here when there wasn't any traffic on the road so
i could uh, work in peace
my theory is that this dust that they brought out well they were cutting it
contains mostly rock bits you know
Quartz, whatever was in the pavement, as this was cutting along
I'm sure occasionally a diamond would come out of the diamond blade
releasing the diamonds into this dust here
mining for diamonds in the street, haha! let's go ahead and dig this up because
it was wet and now it's dried into a hardpack mud so i gotta kind of break it
up and i'm going to go ahead and brush it into a pan
hopefully I don't brush too much of it down the crack there. Yes I got a little
pile here.
I'm going to brush it in this dust pan and put it in a baggie to take home and process
Ok, there it is
got me a nice little sample here
Now, I didn't manage to get all of it because it's pretty packed down and it's hard to get
up but I think I've got enough here that i could get a nice little sample and i will be
able to see if there's anything there at all
Ok, so next day and I think it's time that we go ahead and extract the
diamonds from this dirt here so i'm going to use a gold pan because diamonds
are significantly heavier than most rocks
so i should be able to pan them out I just had some soap to break down any oils
or grease that might float things away
now we just go ahead and pan this down as if i was panning for gold and I
should be able to accumulate the diamonds.
Okay, we're just about done panning here, you can see I got quite a bit of gravel
and sand from the road but hopefully I've got some diamonds too. Let's go ahead and
wash off the last of those there and I'm gonna take a quick peek at this
I'm going to wash it back a little bit see if we got anything at all. I can
already see that there's some sparklies in there, like little bits of metal and
stuff. I'll have to go get like a lens look through for the camera
yeah there's lots of metal in here by the looks of it if you can see the
trailing edge of that pile there at the shiny bits of metal and stuff. So it's
definitely the saw blades wearing out.
let's go ahead and process this a little bit more maybe even wash it in acid
then I'll get a microscope or something and look at it real close so you see it.
Let's add a bit of some strong acid to see if we can dissolve the way those bits of
iron anything else it will dissolve you can see in there
the red-orange color coming off as the iron dissolves
yeah that strong acid should make short work of that but it should also not
touch the diamonds at all
Muriatic acid is now washed out after sitting in there for a couple hours that
should have dissolved all of the bits of iron and possibly the magnetite and
hematite as well and certainly any carbonates that may be present and you
know what? I think I can definitely see that there is some diamonds in here
there's at least at least 2 small diamonds see the diamonds that I'm
looking for should be
a yellow in color because the industrial diamonds that are commonly used are
yellow and they should be rather small probably much less than a millimeter in
size
let's see if i can get this lens on one you can see it here
okay there you go I finally got it in view of the camera
see that little gem right there kind of in the center of the screen and there's
another one up there a little bit
yep I do believe those are diamonds. I managed to get the stones out of the pan
and underneath the microscope
I have them at 40-times magnification here and as you can see the crystal
structure pretty much gives it away that this is in fact a diamond. on the smaller
stone it's even more obvious
look how sharp those faces are. In fact the only thing that I could imagine that
would be this clean and precise
after going through a saw would be a diamond because diamonds just so hard
that it can resist abrasion even going through a saw I wouldn't imagine the
diamond to be very much
scuffed up it might have some chips also that probably actually fell out of the
steel rather than actually getting ground way
another test of its hardness I went ahead and moved the diamonds around on
the plate with a pair of tweezers and as you can see it scratches the glass
pretty good
looks like I was right for coming out in the middle of the night because they are
currently over there working on it and it looks like they're repaving the road
where they cut it
I think it was pretty cool i was able to get some diamonds out of there though
i'd like to mention that I wasn't doing this to make any kind of money i mean
those diamonds are probably worth less than a penny each
you know being able to actually find them i think it was great practice for
actually looking for diamonds out in nature but really it's just something I've
always wanted to try
hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did I'll see you next time