hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining and metals and on today's video we're going to be
smelting down some 14 karat gold jewelry we're going to try and refine it down to just precious
metals so let's get started and i'll show you the process so here's our jewelry i've got a little
ring band here with no stones in it and then a little uh i don't know like a bracelet i guess
uh they're both stamped as 14 karat gold and when i purchased them they were supposed to be
5.5 grams so the first thing let's make sure i actually bought 5.5 grams worth of gold
so 5 5.5 okay so we got the right amount of gold now let's take a look at how much i spent on it
i paid 205 63 after tax we'll take a look at our chicken scratch here we got 5.5 grams that's what
i paid for it so for 14 karat gold 205 83 divided by 5.5 that's what i paid per gram
for this material 37 and roughly 50 cents right now spot price for 24 karat gold is 59.79
per gram so to figure out how much i paid per gram of gold 14 karat gold spot price of
pure gold times 58.5 percent is how much gold is in 14 karat gold is 34.98 per gram
of gold spot price if that makes sense now interestingly enough i paid 37 so i paid a little
like 250 more than the spot price but if you take out the tax if you notice on my receipt i paid
189 for 5.5 grams i actually paid a little bit less than spot price for the amount of gold
that i bought so i'm don't get me wrong i'm not even making a whole bunch of money on this one
but i was surprised that going to this pawn shop and buying scrap gold i bought it roughly for the
scrap price of the gold so i was surprised there i thought they'd mark it up a little bit more
all right our first step is going to be taking our jewelry putting it in this enormous crucible here
and i'm going to melt it down into a button and this is actually uh i don't need to do this step
but what i want to do is i want to get it melted down into a button both pieces and then take it to
the scrap yard and have them zap it with the xrf gun so we can know exactly what metals are in here
and uh how much we get at the end so we can figure out how much more pure we have it
after our whole process a little bit of borax in there take it and put it in our furnace
like so now let's light it
when you're smelting and you're going to pour your charge into the cone mold it's important
to have your cone mold dry so i'm here in this shot i'm preheating my cone mold i'm driving off
all the water because if you pour a bunch of 2000 degree liquid glass and metal into a cold cone
mold with moisture in there it spits and pops and shoots that molten stuff everywhere so it's really
important to get your cone mold dried out and preheated a little bit before you do your pores
okay well moment of truth here the borax is all shattered it's cooled down
quite a bit let's see if we can get it to pop out of there
there we go it's probably still hot
but there is our gold button
here's a little closer look at the slag it's uh it's pretty clear you can see through it
kind of got a little green tinge to it maybe just a little bit of iron in there
iron usually makes that green color ah
so i wanted to talk a little bit about the furnace itself it's made out of kale wool and i've been
getting a lot of emails uh from you guys both saying that uh you want to start smelting and
try it out but also a lot of people are telling me uh with comments and emails about how dangerous
that stuff is that ko wall especially after you fire it those long fibers are needle-like and
if you start breathing them in they get in your lungs and it's just like asbestos so they've been
telling me you know be careful a lot of people are saying that i should coat my furnace and i have in
the past i've done that a couple different times but it seems like the stuff that i'm smelting all
those sulfides some of that metal i don't know if it's something in the sulfides that it eats that
that coating away really quick and so the coating just doesn't last very long
but another word of caution is the koala fibers are dangerous i'm not trying to downplay that
but there's stuff coming off those sulfide cons that are equally as nasty if not worse you got
heavy metals such as lead zinc uh copper arsenic uh stuff like that that might be coming off there
and and then the flux that you use i use a lot of basic or alkaline flux and so you got this
really alkaline rich smoke coming off that if you breathe that in it starts eating away your
your stuff so um i always wear a respirator when i'm when i'm running when i'm smelting regardless
of if i'm just melting a little bit of gold like today or if i'm smelting lead or whatever
so just be safe you know don't don't take that stuff for granted
all right let's see if we have our 5.5 grams here still
5.41 so we lost like a tenth of a gram some of that could have been from the
melting process oxidizing uh some of the base metals in there as it melted and got up in
temperature the other thing could have been there could have been a little bit of dirt or
some other junk in there that that went off into the slag but now i'm going to take this
and see if i can get it zapped with the xrf gun i'll figure out exactly what metals are in here
all right now we're going to go into our next stage which is the actual refining stage we got
this figured out this is actually uh 14 karat gold as we thought there's a lot of copper and
there's a little bit of zinc that i'm going to try and pull out of this thing and the way
i'm going to refine this i'm not going to use any acids i'm going to use the cupelin method
this is a cupel we're going to put the gold in the cupel i'm going to add a bunch of
bismuth i use bismuth you can use lead as well there's not really any rule for how much bismuth
or lead to add but i can tell you that copper and nickel are two metals that are a little bit harder
to keep hell away than land or you know your other iron or stuff like that so i'm going to be adding
quite a bit of bismuth to this ratio wise i'm going to add for this five and a half grams i'm
going to add about 20 to 30 grams of bismuth and what happens is i put it in the electric furnace
it heats up to about 1800 degrees fahrenheit and i open the door i crack the door just a little bit
to allow oxygen to flow into the furnace or fresh air and as that puddle of bismuth gold alloy
is exposed to the oxygen the bismuth oxidizes and the bismuth oxides
are liquid at that point and so they roll off the bead of metal the alloy and they're absorbed
by the cupel the cupel is porous to oxides and it's impervious to metal so the metal alloy stays
stuck or sitting on top of the cupel and all those oxides run off into the copeland are absorbed
as the base metals get less and less in the alloy the oxides look like little tiny raindrops on top
of the surface of the metal alloy in the cupel and those things are it's really cool to watch
they just kind of dribble off the side and once that stops completely stops you have your precious
metals refined and there's no more base metals now the bismuth as it oxidizes carries with it
all those other impurities the copper the zinc the iron anything in there as long as you have
enough bismuth to kind of overwhelm and carry those other base metals away and what we're
going to be left with is only the precious metals so we're going to have the gold and the silver
they're going to be left as a molten bead in the cupel and once the whole process is done
there won't be any more base metals to be sucked out or oxidized away it'll freeze and then we can
get it retested but at that point you won't have any other base metals in there a lot of people ask
if the kepels can be reused they cannot once they get filled up with oxides they can't be reused
another common question is can you recover the bismuth or the lead out of the capels
yes you can i have a video on that i'll post a link here or a card
up in the corner so you can click on that if you want to watch that process i don't just because
the bismuth and the lead they're not worth enough to go through the whole process okay there it is
let's see how much it weighs there's about 63 gold and silver in that 5.5
grams so i think that comes out to just under 3.5 grams is what we should get
there we go so i bet y'all oh i bet you 98 99 of our base metals are out of there
now the other thing uh that i'll mention is you don't have to smelt this down in a crucible and
with the borax and stuff you could actually put that jewelry right in a cupel right into
the furnace with a little bit of bismuth and uh end up with the same thing i just did that
i wanted to get it coalesced into one button so we could get it analyzed with the xrf but you
could very easily just put the the scrap jewelry in a cupel and remove the base metals that way
let's go get it zapped and see how much gold we have
all right so we got rid of almost all the copper there's about half a percent of copper left
there's just a smidgen of bismuth left in there uh but some of you guys may have noticed there's
some selenium and i think it's niobium is in there uh and what happens oftentimes
when you get elements in there that are weird or weren't in there at the beginning is the gun gets
confused and so it's probably either gold or silver that is reading as niobium and selenium
i can't tell you which one though but we ended up was probably in the neighborhood of 90
gold and roughly 10 silver so that's in the 21 to 22 karat but we took
our uh rings and our bracelet turned it into precious metals pretty much so uh it worked well
it did exactly what we wanted it to do i had to add a little bit more bismuth two or three
more times to get the finish on the button that i wanted the other thing that i will mention is this
this button is not worth any more than it was as jewelry now that we've refined it down
you know 22 karat gold versus 14. and if we took it and we you know dissolved it in acids and
precipitated out the gold and ended up with three nines gold it still wouldn't be any more valuable
because if i send this off to refiner to get paid for it they're going to give me 90 of the gold
value regardless of if it's 14 karat gold 22 karat gold or 24 karat gold so it really doesn't matter
but i know a lot of you guys were really interested to see this video
it's kind of a unique way to purify the gold and the silver without using acids you can do this
at home you can do this with a little propane furnace or the electric furnace like i have
so i hope you guys enjoyed this video let me know what you think about the overall process and i
tried to answer as many of the compelling and smelting questions as i could that kind of come
up uh oftentimes on my channel so thanks again for watching and we'll see on the next video