Hey guys, my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today we're
gonna take this little bead of gold from one of our previous smelting experiments
and we're gonna try and remove the base metals by cupelling it using lead and
Portland cement. Okay now the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna make our
cupel out of this Portland cement, and I'm gonna put it in this stainless
steel mixing bowl here so it can hold its shape. And the cupel absorbs the lead
oxide that is formed on the lead button as we heat it. And as the lead oxide
forms and becomes liquid, it rolls off the lead bead and gets absorbed into the
Portland cement here and taking with it other base metals. And the gold and the
silver will stay in the gold button once all the lead is gone and
absorbed into the cupel here. Okay now we're gonna take our little gold bead
here, we're gonna weigh it on our scale, it being four point eight one grams. All
right here's a little thin ingot I made, I melted down some roofers lead which is
nice pure led it's very soft, I mean see I can bend this ingot pretty easy. So I'm
going to just clip off some lead here off the corner. Again we're shooting for,
I don't know, probably between 100 to 150 grams.
So there's 63, so maybe twice that much. So we're gonna have a pretty big lead
button here. There's 63 and there's 64, so we have about 127 grams a lead here and
we'll use that absorb our gold bead. I'm gonna cut these pieces of lead a little
bit smaller. Now we're gonna take our gold bead and place it in the center of
our cupel cover it up with our our lead. There we go, and now I'll go get a
torch and we'll melt that down. So here's our cupel, the lead is just start to
melt and that's a propane burner from our furnace videos for our smelting
experiments. And as this thing gets up to temperature, I wrap the kaolwool around it
just heat in, but that lets going to start melting down black scum will form
on top which is lead oxide and as it gets up to temperature that lead oxide will
start to slough off in the cupel.
Now the temperature's coming up, the lead has starting to open up and there's, it looks
like it's now it's molten on the surface, and that's going to allow the lead to
oxidize.
Now the lead is completely opened up, and you can see there's a little black ring
of lead oxide that sucked into the cupel right around that liquid pool of
lead. And as the reaction continues the lead pool will get smaller and smaller.
So now our lead has reduced in size quite a bit, the lead oxide ring around
it is grown and as this works down the puddle is going to get smaller and
smaller until it turns into a little gold button. All right so we just turned off
the burner there, and our little gold bead is sitting at the bottom. And it
kind of went I think the term is kind of like a rainbow of colors on the surface
there and that it blinked over to gold colors. So I'm gonna pull it out of
there and then we'll cool it down and get it weighed, take a look at it. So there it
is, it's quite a bit shinier than it was. Well I think we pulled out quite a bit
of base metals there. And it's just real shiny shiny gold now, so that's pretty
cool. There's our little gold bead, ends up at 4.3 grams so we lost about half a
gram of base metals. Now we're going to cupel this other gold bead, this is from
a video I did a couple years ago where we took some ore and ran through the
turnkey system. And I've got some comments in the video about the button
doesn't look very pure, it looks like it has a bunch of copper in it. So we're
gonna cupel this one, right now it weighs 15.9 1 grams, and we'll put it in
our little setup here and see if we can get that reduced and and looking shiny
and gold. So we've just put our lead bead in there and the molten lead as it gets
hotter is going to absorb that gold bead and then start driving the oxides off
the surface of the puddle. All right now the lead's completely absorbed that gold
bead, and it's really hard to focus but the lead oxide is floating from the left
to the right on top of the puddle and being absorbed into our cupel.
And here our bead is getting pretty small and you can see the oxides forming
on the left-hand side of the button and they're actually making a little puddle
of oxides on the button on the right-hand side. But as this reaction
continues, the oxides will all be absorbed with cupel and we'll get a
nice gold button at the end. Now the button has blinked over to gold and all
the oxides have been driven off so now I'll cool it down and get it weighed. Got
that button cooled down, it's that nice gold color that we're looking for. Let's
see how much it weighs... 13.62, not bad. So we lost, what, at a
couple grams of base metals. And then here's that another one that we did
earlier. Ended up with just shy 18 grams of gold. It's not bad for a day of cupelling.
And I think you know we we pretty much removed all the base metals, refined
our gold a little bit and now I can send it off and get paid. So I hope you guys
enjoyed the video thanks for watching and we'll see how the next one.