hey guys my name is Jason with non Baker Mining and metals and I've been getting asked a lot
lately is it worth smelting down your gold cons so on today's video we're going to do
a couple of smelts we're going to figure out how much gold I can recover how much cost me and how
much time was involved here's what we're going to be working with today and this is a little bit of
a special sample this came out of Ghana a friend from Ghana sent it up to me and they were having
some difficulty with the mat layer in this so the matte layer is the sulfides that form during the
smelt and if you don't get mix quite right you'll have this layer between the metal on the bottom a
matte layer and then the slag will be on top so the first thing we're going to do is we're going
to weigh out a sample I'm looking for about 100 G this stuff is wet and so I'm going to overshoot a
little bit we're going to go to about 110 or 115 G and that'll give us about 100 G of concentrates
so there's our initial concentrates I have no idea what's in here I don't know if it's pyite
ptite there's maybe some Aro pyate right in here there may be some zinc sulfides so it's really
a total mystery on what's in this so I'm going to try and just use my general normal flux that
I use I'm going to use some oxidizer and I've got a special ingredient I haven't used before
that I'm going to try on this melt I've been having real good luck lately mixing one part
concentrates one part anhydrous borax 102 103 so this is our anhydrous borax another part of
soda ash there we go then you add in somewhere between 20 and 40 G of silica sand it didn't
look like that stuff had a whole lot of silica in it so we're going to shoot for about 30 somewhere
in there now because we have a sulfide Rich con I'm going to add in some potassium nitrate and
what this does in the smelt is it releases oxygen which bonds to the sulfide molecules
as well as the sulfur that's driven off during the smelting and the idea is that it turns the
sulfides into oxides which are then absorbed into the slags 50 g might be a little strong
but we'll try it so we'll add that in there the problem is if you add too much you can get some
boil overs in your Crucible in your furnace which you don't want so I just got this stuff and I'm
pretty excited about it this is bisou oxide and in the past for my collector metal I've
used bismuth metal but with the oxide you get a couple advantages the first is it has oxygen
attached to it and what the oxygen does is when it comes in contact with a sulfide molecule it
reduces the Bismuth to metal and it oxidizes the sulfide so you get iron oxide or and that helps
reduce the amount of sulfides you have in your ore reducing the likelihood of getting a mat as well
as getting your collector metal really really fine really really disseminated throughout the
charge and it really helps collect all that super fine fine gold and silver we're trying
to collect at the bottom now I wasn't paying attention I was shooting for 50 and I added 100
there here we go now we got 49 G of bismuth oxide there's all our ingredients here's our 100 G of
concentrates here's our stuff all mixed up it's a little bit orangey orange in color
we'll put it in a brand new Crucible here there we go put our Crucible in our furnace
[Music] here
well that smell we just poured it ended up boiling over so what I'm going to do is I'm
going to repeat it I'm going to have all the ingredients including the concentrates we're
going to try it again I got to keep all that stuff in The Crucible cuz when boils over uh
I might lose a little bit of collector metal and gold with it but we're getting
some interesting stuff here so the first one that boiled over I tipped it over out of the
cone mold I did not see any collector metal in the bottom that tells me that the oxidizer has
oxidized all the sulfides away and there's nothing left to reduce the bisou oxide down
to metallic form so I just poured the 50 g sample and I think the same thing happened
no collector metal I haven't checked yet but I didn't see anything pour out
so what I'm going to try now is I'm going to do the same thing same recipe I'm going
to add some Nails after it's all molten all the oxidizers been oxidized away see
if I can reduce any bismi down to metallic form and have it collect in the bottom I'm
going to smelt the nails another 15 minutes after I put them in and then
we'll pour it into our cone mold see if we get any reduced bismuth out of [Music]
that
I want to try just the bism Oxide without any oxidizer and see if we can uh use the
Bismuth oxide to oxidize sulfides and doce the Bismuth into metallic forms then we can flect the
bottom
here is the exact same flux recipe with the oxidizer with the bisou oxide and Nails after
it's all molten but this is some concentrates from my new gold mine and I know these are
pretty much pure iron sulfides you can already see the difference in the slag but I wanted to
do one for [Music] comparison and so we can check the difference between this one and the the other
stuff from Ghana here's my sulfide slag and here's the stuff from Ghana so a lot more glassy I think
a lot of that stuff was oxides already instead of sulfides whereas this stuff it's it's kind
of glassy still but it's not as transparent this stuff you can almost see through in the corners
and stuff this stuff is it's almost waxy looking and I don't know how else to describe it thing
I'm really happy about is there's the metal pill and there are no there's no matte layer
at all that flux recipe works really really well for Pure sulfides as well as you know
more oxides if that's what we had from Ghana so that's I'm really really happy with that recipe
and that that mix for for flux it ends up being 89% bismuth by weight so if we put in 25 G of
bismuth oxide we should end up with 22.5 gram of bismuth now real quick I wanted to go over
these this was the Gana sample with the nails and the bismo oxide this was the Gana sample with no
Nails no oxidizer and just the bismo oxide we got less than one gram little button there and
that tells me there's hardly any sulfides in there cuz if there was a bunch of sulfides it would have
reduced a bigger button of bismuth this is just the Bismuth metal I didn't add any nails and so
we lost uh about 15 G of the bisou metal probably from the oxidizer that I put in there and then
this is Jason's new Gold Mine concentrates now we're going to get our precious metals out of
these buttons and to do that we're going to use a cupel this thing I'm going to heat up to about
18850 de fah I'm going to place our bismuth pill in there and it will melt the metal it'll oxidize
all the base Metals the Bismuth the copper iron any other base metals that are in there
and the cupel will absorb them like a sponge leaving just the precious metal button in the
cupel when it's all done all right we'll start with the nail sample got our cupel all warmed
up our first button there now that'll start melting pretty fast I believe there it goes
nice pure bismo button that's what we like to see it kind of turns gray on the surface
and then it'll start to open up there it goes those oxides are turning liquid and
they're becoming absorbed by the cupel that's a very nice little showing then you have the
dark raindrop looking things in the surface that's the oxides forming in our hot oxygen
rich environment and that cupel will start to turn kind of that dark gray color well
now I want to explore a little bit about is it worth smelting these concentrates and so
you know how much gold do you need to make it worth it and so we're going to take 300 G of
argana concentrates which I've weighed out at 330 again 10% for water weight I've got 300 G
an hydras borax I got 300 G soda ash I think I've got 100 gr of silica and I've got 120 g
of potassium nitrate I'm going to add 150 g of our bismuth oxide now we'll get it shook
up real nice p in our large number 12 Crucible here we should have enough room there for it to
expand
for
[Music] for
we've got all our beads celled they're all spread out here for everyone to see I promise
they're there a couple interesting things here's the bead from the 14 G button with the nail and
unfortunately these are all so small I can't weigh them on my thousandth of a gr scale so
we just got to go kind of by the size but I got 14 G of collector metal this one here is bigger than
this one but not by a whole bunch and this was the one that had less than one gram and so it's really
interesting that the ratio of the size of the collector metal button doesn't necessarily mean
the ratio of the amount of gold you recover this one is the one I added the bisou metal directly to
and I cannot see any gold bead in there at all with my naked eye once I'm editing the video I
might be able to find one when I zoom in but I I didn't recover anything with the Bismuth metal
which was interesting because I've used that in the past and recovered gold but maybe the bisou
metal isn't as efficient as the Bismuth oxide is is and then I did an experiment I've got my
Jason's new Gold Mine concentrates 22 G button out of that one and here's my bead right there as well
which it's hard to kind of qualitatively size them but they're all roughly the same size right and I
know that these should be about 150 g per ton so we're probably looking at somewhere in the 100
G 15 50 g a ton range for all of our concentrates now I did do a larger sample I smelted down a 300
G sample but I got an 89 G button and then over here I just poured this one this is Jason's new
gold M concentrates number two as well and I did a 500 G sample of this and so I'm going to be really
interested to see if we can scale up essentially 10 times the size of the bead and hopefully we can
get a weight on it and then we can kind of answer our question is it worth smelting 500 G at a time
this is also interesting I put a piece of flat bar in with my number two concentrates and you
can see how much of the steel got eaten up there it took a lot of Steel off of this flat bar you
can see how thick it was I think it's quarter inch and it just took it down kind of to a real
thin little flat paddle there interesting that it aided up around the top here too well i' beat
on this thing for a while and it does look like there might be a thin little coating of bismo on
there especially down at the bottom there and that would be where it was sitting in the puddle right
at the very bottom of The Crucible up here where it wasn't in the flux at all there's really no
other than the discoloration of the steel it doesn't look shiny or like a different metal
but right there on the surface of the bar where it was in the flux it looks like there might be
some bismuth attached there and that might explain where some of our collector metal is going if it's
fusing itself to the nails or to the iron bar in there we're going to expect a little bit of loss
that also is going to have a little bit of loss of precious metals cuz you essentially make a bismuth
alloy with precious metals and as some of it gets bonded or welded to the steel you're going to
lose some of those precious metals unfortunately we're going to have to wait on the results from
my larger smelts so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back with part two hopefully next
week we're going to check out how much gold I recovered from my large beads and my 300 500
G smelt and then we're going to do some smelts on some stuff that I know is worth smelting so
stay tuned for part two thanks everybody for watching and we'll see you on the next video