hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and metals and this is concentrates from a sample
that Dan heard just came down and ran through our dry Crusher Hammer Mill and Shaker table and we're
going to smelt these down and figure out how much gold Dan had in his sample this is a collaboration
or a continuation video from dance so I'll leave Dan's video on an end screen on this video so
you can check his out after you watch this one let's get started and get this stuff smelted down
we're going to jump right into it here's a close-up look at Dan's concentrates
and there's a little bit of quartz in there but there's quite a bit of sulfides because
this is what we panned out of the number one and number two concentrates we have about 500
grams this jug weighs about 40 grams or so now we'll mix up a flex recipe the goal is to eat
up all the junk in here leave just the precious metals and I'm going to add a collector metal
to help collect all the little bit of gold down at the bottom and I'll work on getting the gold
out of the collector metal here's our soda ash we're going to add about 500 grams of soda ash
and this is going to help dissolve any of those sulfides in there and I'm going to add some iron
a little bit later to help break down those sulfides into a form that we can absorb with
our flux now we'll do about 250 grams of anhydrous borax this is going to help absorb any oxides and
then I'll add about 200 grams of silica because I figure we have at least 50 grams in our material
so we'll end up with about 250 grams worth of silica now we put in our material our concentrates
put a lid on there Shake It Out mix it all up
now it's ready to put in the furnace I've got it transferred into a number 10 silica carbide
Crucible I really like these crucibles if you're going to do bigger production smelts the fire clay
just doesn't last these last a long long time I've added to this some iron Nails that's going
to help reduce the sulfides to base metals and any iron in there is going to soak up all the sulfur
that's left over and we're going to create our iron rich mat that is really bad at absorbing any
of the precious metals and then I've also added a collector metal in there I used about 35 grams of
bismuth at 32 actually I think and so that's going to filter down through the smelt as it melts down
collect all the little pieces of gold and silver and it'll collect them down at the bottom of this
crucible that we'll collect down at the bottom of our cone mold when we pour it here's our furnace
simple Design This is kale wool I have a propane tank over there a little shop vac as a blower
propane and air come down mix here in this little header and into the furnace and if
you guys are interested in any of the staff crucibles kale wool anything I've got links
in the description below so check those out if you want to get into smelting [Music]
foreign
I've got it cooling off in a bucket of water the Bismuth collector if there's any lead in there
yeah see we're at 200 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit if there's any lead in there that mixed with the
Bismuth it reduces the melting point of both Metals the alloy that it makes way way down
and so I got to make real sure that were we're cool enough to tip it over the other thing is the
bottom of that cone has a huge amount of surface area compared to the very center of the big Mass
so I'm hoping I'm hoping that we're cool enough that I can tip it over and
I won't have liquid metal running all over the place okay cross our fingers
ah good nice
glassy slag we'll see if we got our metal cone right there yeah I can see it right there we're
hoping for no matte layer in there and Matt is a sulfide layer when all the sulfides Melt together
but I don't see one [Music] nice nice clean button
slag all the way down so that is that is a perfect smell that's exactly what you want to see no matte
button separates easily from the slag good one all cleaned up it weighs 31 grams so we didn't
lose hardly any collector metal to the reactions going on in The Crucible so that works out good
now I'll take that and get it in cupel this is a cupel or pupil or however you pronounce it and
we're going to put our bismuth bead in there put it in the furnace an electric furnace and get it
up to about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit that will melt the Bismuth and it will melt the Bismuth oxide
that forms on the surface of our little molten puddle and the Bismuth oxide the molten bismuth
oxide is going to roll over and when it touches this cupel it absorbs into this like a sponge
the precious metals don't absorb into the cupel and so as that reaction continues the
oxides continuously roll off and are absorbed into our metal oxide sponge our cupel and the
bead gets smaller and smaller and smaller until there's no more base Metals left and you're only
left with the precious metals now I get a lot of questions about these things can you reuse them if
this cupel can hold about 60 grams of Base Metals I'm going to use about 30 in this one 32 whatever
it is so I wouldn't reuse this one this I just you know tossed this one the other question I
get a lot is can you recover the Bismuth from the cupels yes you can I've done this in another video
but it's just the Bismuth isn't worth enough to go and recover the keep out you'd have to crush
this up you'd have to get the grain size fairly small mix it with flux and carbon to reduce the
oxides back to Biz with metal and you'd have to re-smelt them down in the furnace so you can reuse
them if they're not fully saturated but I don't very often because they're so cheap and yes you
can get the Bismuth back out but it's not worth doing because it's so expensive and time consuming
got our cupel warmed up there goes our button when we open it up again we'll have a bead of
precious metal left let's check on our bead here oh that's a nice little bead
yeah that's pretty good size
let's see if I can do this while it's still hot here oh yeah
nice little gold bead get this thing weighed here
weighs oh about a quarter of a gram that's pretty good I think Dan said it was about 30
pounds he thought of ore it's not let's do some math figure out how much gold he has pretend
here's our bead weighs .246 grams and 30 pounds is .015 tons so when you divide those two you get
16.4 grams per ton but based on the color of that bead it's not real real yellow we'll estimate just
for fun that it's about 75 gold so 16.4 grams times 75 gold is 12.3 grams per ton so not too
bad Dan good work all right everyone well that's the results of our test I wanted to give a big
thanks to Dan Hurd for coming down and running a sample and letting me smelt down his concentrates
so I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you want to find more videos like this check out
our Channel and also be sure to check out Dan's video which is the start where I got the order and
you can see how it was processed so thanks again everybody for watching we'll see on the next video