We are back with our third and final installment of our smelting series
Today we are going to be smelting down the anodes slime's from our previous video
I will post links to the first and second videos if you haven't seen them before
Let's go take a look at the stuff that's now dried out
We will show you how to mix up some flux and smelt it down and hopefully get a little gold button out of it.
Here are the anode slime's that have now dried out
You can see it's just a bunch of black powder
I'm going to break that up
peal it off of the
paper towel here
and you want to make sure you save all the paper towels
and later i'm going to burn those down and get the ash
To smelt those as well
You don't want to put your paper towels in your crucible when you smelt.
because they are carbon and carbon is a reducing agent.
what we want to do with all this stuff is oxidize it
you drive off, oxidize all the base metals except the precious metals
and by adding the paper towel into the smelt it will counter act that
because carbon and oxygen really like to hang together and create CO2
and it will suck up all the oxygen from our oxidizer
I'm going to just peal off the black anode slime's
and we will save the filter paper for later
Weighing our anode slime's we have 309 grams
of dried anode slime's
Here is the flux we are going to using
I'm going to use about three times
amount of flux as anode slime's
should have a little more than 900 grams of flux
You can see the oxidizer is potassium nitrate
and I'm going to add a little more potassium nitrate
because I want to really make sure everything gets oxidized
I know there is a little bit
copper powder that came off the anodes and cathodes
This is a number 10 crucible
it comes up about to a quarter way to the top, so it's just about the perfect amount
put it in our electric kiln
heat it up and get it all molten and pour it into our conical mold
There is the top of our pour
you can see how nice and fluid it is, it's still
the hot currents of slag are still coming up
forming that texture on top
but the viscosity is really really low which is what we want
so that the metals can settle down into that molten slag and collect into a button
We just finished our pour of our anode slime smelt
here is all the nice black slag
and here is our
little button of precious metals
here is our little button we got, put it on the scale
22 grams
I'm going to polish a side of this thing
and take it down to my buddy with a XRF gun and see if he can zap it for me and tell me what's in it
When I ge that I will post a picture
I just got the results back from that XRF gun
I'm pretty disappointed I thought there would be more gold in there
turns out it's only 10% gold roughly
out of 22 grams that only about 2 grams or so
a little bit less than a 10th of an ounce
I was surprised how much copper there was in there
and as you saw from the results of the XRF there was some
tin and antimony, bizmuth and a little bit of lead
and that shows you what doesn't plate out with the copper and stainless solution
when we electrofly the copper
the lead, tin, antimony and the bizmuth all comes down the anode slimes
and I guess next time I will use a little bit more
oxidizer to get rid of the rest of this copper
i think the big take home here is the
that the process works, I mean we recovered the gold
we refine the copper out
it got all the stuff melted down out of the anode slime's
and recovered the gold, we just didn't have that much gold
Anyways thanks for watching the series and sorry that was
I was hoping to get a half an ounce or more
out of that stuff but it didn't turn out
I will post new smelting and refineing videos from time to time
hopefully we can get some more gold
I can show you how it's really supposed to work when I get some more gold
Thanks for watching and we will see you on future videos