(intro music)
Alright everyone, Cody here.
So I'm at the local thrift store and I'm looking at glass things
And uh, I'm mainly looking for things that have a gold trim or gold plating on them
so I'm going to try and see if I can extract the gold from...
this sort of thing here.
Let's see what you guys got here.
We got some little cups with some gold trim on them, let's get those
I mean, I'm absolutely not going to get more gold out of it than this is going to cost me
but you guys get the idea
Okay, so, here's what we've picked up around the place. Let's go see if we can get the gold off.
So I've got the glass home and it's time to start extracting the gold from it.
I think i spent about thirty dollars total on all of these little uh.. gold-plated items.
I bought a couple of other things but here's the receipt ...
and there's no way I'm gonna make that much back on it, and I'll be quite happy if I get
three dollars back but the whole idea is to show you guys the process.
Which should be pretty simple, just gonna put them over here into this plastic bin then I'm
going to submerge them in a cyanide solution to dissolve the gold.
So the first thing I've done is added a light because this is probably gonna go into
the night my time-lapse camera and put on some gloves and right now I'm adding
some water to the reaction vessel the next thing to do is to add some
sodium hydroxide this will keep the solution basic and will dissolve any oils that
are covering the gold surfaces.
Now for the sodium cyanide just going to add in
a couple of chunks of that...
that's probably fine
now I'm going to add in some activated carbon to absorb the gold from solution
this is basically the carbon in pulp method now let's let this fill up with water and
i'm going to add in some hydrogen peroxide you see oxygen is needed for
the reaction to occur and dissolve the gold hydrogen peroxide adds a whole
bunch of oxygen to the solution you can see the peroxide is reacting with
various things and producing lots of little oxygen bubbles.
so it's been a couple of hours and let's have a look at this and see how it's coming along.
So it looks like this cup here, bring this over into the light, yeah, you can see that the
solution is definitely dissolving the gold that's good
I was kind of worried that it would be to dilute. Looks like we're good.
So I'm just going to kinda stir this around a little bit; turn over the cups so they
can get the other side. Give everything a good mix, and then I guess I'll just let
it go for this the night. I'll probably stop the time-lapse camera because...
there's not gonna be much really going on overnight probably
Hey, this cut... uh this little cup here is completely done. Excellent.
So it's the next day and it appears that most of the
gold has been dissolved as you can see so now I'm just removing these dishes
from the gold dissolving bath then putting it over here to rinse off the
cyanide. Now to destroy the cyanide I just use a little bit of household gene
destroyer here, little splash of this, and no more cyanide. Then I'm just putting
the rinse dishes over here in this box and I'll either reuse them or just take
them straight back to the thrift store haha
Yeah, that particular plate does have a little bit of gold on it, but I think it was actually mixed in with the
glaze and so it's really not worth my time to try to remove. Oh
Because I would have to like grind the plate up.
(Kanyon) How do you know it was gold?
(Cody) Well, in general if there's like a gold trim on the glass
it's probably gold because gold is actually the easiest material to put on
and they're not going to be putting on more than a few cents worth at a time
So what we're going to do the plates now?
Well, I don't know about the plates, but I'm gonna make some hot coco.
Okay
So now what I should have is a very dilute solution of gold cyanide or
rather I'm actually hoping that the gold cyanide is absorbed onto the carbon by now.
The reason i decided to do it in this method with it as diluted as it is
is so that i can determine if this process would actually work for
extracting small quantities of gold. You see the or in my mind is going to have
probably about the same amount of gold as those dishes did you know by volume even.
So if i can extract the gold from this, then I'll know that I'll be able to
extract it from the mine so I'm actually going to give this a stir every now and
then lose absorbed onto the carbon for a little bit longer. See? There's quite of
bit of carbon down at the bottom there
It's probably way more carbon than I needed, but I wanted to make sure I got all the gold.
Before burning the charcoal to ash i'm actually going to grind it
up into a fine powder so it'll burn quicker
ok so I'm just gonna put the crushed carbon into the furnace on top of a
plate just like that now let it get red-hot for several hours to burn away the
carbon we'll see what happens
so you guys might be wondering how I know that the activated carbon absorbed
all of the gold from the solution
well first of all activated carbon absorbs down into the microgram per
leter level so that's that's insane but also have a little test here which I'm
going to perform that should be very sensitive for detecting small quantities
of gold but before I can do this test I got to get rid of the cyanide so I have
a small sample of the cyanide solution here and now I'm actually going to
acidify it with a little bit of hydrochloric acid
now I know almost everywhere you read says that you should never let the
acidity of a cyanide solution go above uh, five or whatever because the cyanide
will react for using hydrogen cyanide gas which is true, but hydrogen cyanide
is incredibly soluble in water which means that basically by acidifying it
I've dot... I've not actually done much to it there is still cyanide solution much
the same way that you would have carbon dioxide dissolved into solution now heat
the solution to drive off the rest of the cyanide now the quantity that's
going to be here so small that if I just let go up into the air it's not gonna
hurt anything
There you go, those bubbles are probably actually the hydrogen cyanide gas
ok now I've boiled the water for a little while and it's becoming very hard for me
to hold I should have all the cyanide removed from solution so now i'm just
gonna drop in a little bit of stannous chloride if we see a color change to a
light purple then we'll know there's still gold. If not, I know I got most of the gold out
there you go, there goes the stannous
I did not see a noticeable color change so I know that there's hardly any gold in
solution (Kanyon) So I wasn't able to see the bottle you were... (Cody) Oh, this bottle?
(Kanyon) Yeah do you want to do that again?
This is stannous chloride right here notice it's basically just hydrochloric acid with
a little bit of stannous chloride dissolved in it along with a piece of
tin to keep it fresh. Ok looks like it's almost completely burned up that's very good It's the next day
I've let everything cool off I'm actually amazed at how well this plate has held up
its kind of stuck in there but otherwise the plate is ok and all the
carbon is now converted to ash and actually it's got a slightly reddish
color to it that tells me the right be some minerals it excellent
at some point I should probably show the process of how to extract the gold from the
activated carbon without burning it
unfortunately that process requires temperatures of a hundred and seventy
degrees celsius and concentrated cyanide solutions that process is of course way
more difficult than just burning the carbon so the process of getting gold
out of the ashes basically a miniature fire assay I've shown that process many
times I think this time I'll just show it quick time lapse and we'll just skip
to the part where I show the gold looks like there's a bit of gold been in there
let's pull it out and get a better look at it. There's my gold that's pretty you
know what that might actually be enough i could actually put on the scale and
weigh it exciting
so this proves that I can actually extract that low quantity of gold
ok let's grab this set it over here on the scale
there it is right about 30 milligrams
that's not bad about what I expected
that's cool so let's see at a price of forty dollars per thousand milligrams
that be four dollars per hundred milligrams and this is about
a third of a hundred that means I've got a little over a dollar worth of gold here
how about that? hope you all enjoyed I'll see you next time
*outro music playing*