hey guys my name is jason with non-baker mining metals and on today's video
we're going to be trying to recover the gold plating off these rings
all right so here's a little bit closer look at these things
the story here is that these were imported rings and they're gold-plated but apparently there is
too much lead in these to go for sale in the u.s and so supposedly they're uh they're gold-plated
i don't know if that's 24-karat or 14-karat or what but they're supposed to be about one
percent gold in these about 50 lead than about equal parts copper and nickel so um i'm gonna
do my best here to try and come up with solution for this guy to recover the gold off these rings
all right so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna try and uh do kind of a
faux assay on these things and so i'm gonna take a couple of them and i'm just going to
quell them in our furnace and try and oxidize all the base metals and see how much gold uh see how
much our gold button weighs so to get these things weighed i just want to weigh a couple of make sure
they're all about the same weight it doesn't look like they are this one's 5.8 grams or so
this one is 5.5 grams let's try another one
5.6 grams all right so they're all uh a little bit different weight which is um
concerning you'd think if they were just producing these rings mass they'd all be
the same weight um but let's take i don't know three how much do we have here
16.7 grams i'll try and cupel these three rings and recover the gold off them and then we can
do our uh our calculation so 16.7 grams we should end up with 0.167 grams of gold a
little gold bead from these three rings so this is called the cupel spelled c-u-p-e-l and this is
something that fire assays uh fire assayers use for recovering the gold when they assay
a gold ore and what we're gonna do is we're gonna use them uh to oxidize all the base metals and get
our precious metal beads so i'm gonna mix some bismuth in here with these the bismuth is gonna
melt it'll alloy with the rings and it'll form a liquid molten puddle in the bottom of this cupel
we're gonna get it up to about 1800 maybe 1900 degrees with the nickel and at that temperature
the bismuth oxidizes in the air in the furnace the oxides become molten and flow off the bead that we
create or the the button the molten button here and they're absorbed by this cupel and the molten
liquid metal stays uh impervious to the the capel is impervious to the metal so the the liquid metal
stays this thing absorbs the oxides and as the bismuth keeps shedding its oxides it takes with
it the copper the lead and the nickel hopefully and we will end up with a little tiny gold bead in
the bottom of this cupel when we're done so i'll get the the furnace over there set up and we can
see how that thing works all right here's our haggard little electric furnace here
and i'm going to place our cupel in there empty and you want to get it warmed up and dried out
as best you can before you put any metals in there so i'm going to get it up to temperature probably
about 1700 degrees and then i'll place our three rings in there along with some of the bismuth and
uh we'll show you that process and show you how it melts down and oxidizes the base metals away
so i haven't even added any any uh business yet and the rings are already decomposing
at about 1400 degrees
so they must have a lot of lead in them
or some low melting point metal to have them melt down at 1400 degrees
all right the next thing we're going to try is we're just going to melt some of these down
and uh get them all as a as a combined alloy and then i'm going to take them over to my
recycling yard and get them uh analyzed with their xrf and that'll tell us the
the true percentage of each metal in these rings so let's get some weight out i'll melt them down
in our little furnace in a crucible like this and we can get them poured in um a little mold and
then we take the mold over and get them analyzed all right we've got just over 67 grams in here
so we'll get it in the furnace and melt it down and see what we get
now here's a little furnace we're going to use this is just a a wrap of kale wool held together
by some baling wire uh and some kale wool on top i've got some fire bricks down there in the bottom
that uh hold our crucibles i've got a little uh injector here this black hose goes up to a propane
bottle that i keep in water when i'm running that helps keep the ice off and keeps the propane
moving and this blue hose goes up to a little shop vac i have set up as a blower to introduce more
oxygen in so you can get complete combustion and this thing gets uh up to about 20 to 2300 degrees
fahrenheit and it hopefully will easily melt the stuff or rings that alloy with the 50 lead over
here we got supposedly should uh should have a low enough melting point even with the nickel
that the alloy will melt below the temperature that we're going to reach in our furnace
so
i'm gonna add just a little bit of borax to absorb any oxides that have formed on the surface
so
all right guys well here's our metal from those rings
and a little borax cover looks like it's turned kind of red um but it was it was wild
to look down in the crucible you could see right through the borax cover it was completely clear
and the metal was there was bubbles forming on the top of the metal i don't know what that was
but that was pretty cool i've never seen that before so let's just turn this cone mold over
there's our little metal pyramid
look here and i'll uh i'll get that
borax slag chipped off of there and we'll see what we got here but i'll uh i'll get this kind of
cleaned up a little bit and get a fresh surface i'll sand or grind down a little bit on
one of the surfaces we'll take it in and get it zapped with the xrf gun and see what metals
are in there all right so i'm just taking this little hammer i'm just chipping off the
the cover the borax glass on top and it gives us a real nice pretty shiny finish
but i don't know if you can tell let's see if i can get the camera here because it's still
pretty hot the borax is like this kind of deep ruby ruby red and what happened was whatever
oxides were forming on the top of this uh metal puddle in the crucible were absorbed in the the
borax that i put in there and so whatever oxides make ruby red color with the borax that's what we
got and i don't know if that's copper or nickel are the two that are supposed to be in there lead
is also supposed to be in there but i think lead makes a kind of a green oxide when it mixes with
borax so and what do you guys think what what uh what metal oxide forms this ruby red color
with borax i'd be interested to know leave a comment below and uh let us know your thoughts
but i'll get the rest of this cleaned up and we'll get it zapped with the gun and see what we got
all right so we're up over our 1800 degrees fahrenheit i think our metal tunnel should
be all molten by now yeah there it is you can see the cupel is turning a darker color that's where
it's absorbing the oxides and as those oxides get absorbed that metal tunnel shrinks down
and it'll just leave the precious metals the gold and silver
when all the base metals are oxidized away okay we'll check on our bead here it should be all done
i don't know if you can see it in there
but it's super tiny let me pull it out and uh we'll take a look at it and get it weighed
so there's that little tiny bead in there is what we're after so we'll let that cool down a
little bit and then we'll get it pulled out and weighed here's our little bead
let's see if we can even get a weight point zero zero five so point zero zero five the other thing
is i don't know if you can tell let's get in here a little closer it's not very gold
colored so i don't know if there's silver in there as well we didn't get any silver show up on the
on the xrf but let's just assume that it's all gold and we'll do
some math and figure out how much gold's in there that point zero zero five grams
okay so check my math here i did uh 16.7 grams for our what we had in our original rings
and we have .005 grams of assuming pure gold which i don't think it is
and i did that math i ended up with point zero three percent gold by weight
so thanks guys for watching point zero three percent gold is not very much but if you had
enough of those rings it might be enough for you to go after and i might keep playing with
them and maybe in the future do a video on uh trying to de-plate the gold plating on
the surface so thanks again for watching hope you enjoyed it and we'll see on the next video