hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today I wanted to
go over the soda iron nail smelting method and this uses iron to reduce the
materials and concentrate so you don't need to roast them and there's a lot of
benefits to that so in today's video we're gonna go over the execution why
I'm so excited about this method and trying to perfect it
and show you guys how to do it so let's get started okay so our first step here
is we're going to mix up our material we're gonna start with some sulphide
concentrates off our shaker table and I'm gonna measure out
130 grams there's the material we're gonna be
smelting I'm gonna put this in another container so we can mix it all up the
components we're going to be using are anhydrous borax, lye, and silica sand and
so we're going to go through those and I'm gonna talk about why we're gonna use
each one first we're gonna use our anhydrous borax so I'm gonna take this
I'm gonna weigh out 100 grams so there's our there's our borax we're gonna mix
that in with our sulfides we're gonna take some lye here this is
very very basic you want to make sure you're wearing gloves and goggles
protective glasses when you do it you're gonna add 120 grams of lye and this will
make our material basic which will help us absorb the iron sulfide that we're
going to create and then the last one is silica sand and for silica sand we're
going to do 40 grams and if your material already has a bunch of silica
in it you can kind of estimate and ratio the silica down we're just adding this
for the silica content a lid here's our jug of material we're gonna mix it all
up make this so it's all nice and uniform and then we're gonna add it into
our crucible here this is this is a number five crucible it comes up about
halfway you don't want to add so much that it comes up right to the brim
because this stuff, as it heats, it's going to expand and bubble and boil
a little bit so you want to make sure you have some room for it to expand and
then it'll contract way down once it's all molten so we'll take this and we'll
put it in our furnace and we'll get it heating up and turn molten we're gonna
add an iron bar to it to reduce any base metals that are in here and all the
sulfides are gonna end up being converted to iron sulfide FeS which
hopefully will most will be absorbed by our slag, that's why we added all of our
lye, but we got our first one here let's get this going in the furnace and see we
come out with. Oh and one more thing, I'm gonna add 50 grams of lead to this as
well as our collector metal so that'll be our collector metal at the bottom
Okay here's our crucible it's in our furnace here this is just a wrap of kaolwool
and I've got a video that i just made showing how to make this furnace so
you guys can check that out but it's powered by propane and it gets well over
2,200 degrees Fahrenheit so should be plenty hot enough for what we're doing
alright we're on our second smelt here and I wanted to show you guys this
crucible actually failed right as I was taken out of the furnace so I got all my
slag in there and all my metal but you can see the cracks and it came out
right down the bottom and so that tells me that this is too basic and it's
eating away our crucible and what I've heard is most of the times when your
crucible gets eaten up you don't have enough silica in your mix because it'll
rob silica from the crucible and eat it up pretty fast and that's one
of the things you don't want. I wanted to take just a second here and walk through
the five different smelt samples I'm gonna be doing and I'm trying to find
this universal recipe for smelting. The the first one here is pretty much pure
sulfides, there's some iron pyrite there's some chalcopyrite and there's a
little bit of oxides in there, so that's our first one. Our second one is pretty
much 100% pure iron pyrite, Fool's Gold, so we'll we'll give that a shot. Our
third one is mostly oxides actually and so it's black sand this would be
kind of considered like a sluice concentrate or a placer concentrate.
There's not many sulfides in there it's mostly oxidized. This is pretty much pure
quartz tailings, this has been run through the system this is the number
four off our shaker table so that should be mostly quartz with very little
sulfides or oxides in it. And then this is just some head ore so it's got silica in
it, some sulfides, not many oxides and so
we're gonna run all five of these in that order that I went through and see
if we can get a good recovery. Not all of these our goal is first is is no map
second is high percentage of gold recovery third is going to be you know
keeping the crucible in good shape and and forth is gonna be a nice quiet smelt
that's not boiling it's not expanding it's not filling up and flooding the
furnace with a bunch of junk and screwing up our furnace linings so those
are kind of our goals and the five samples we're going to be running today.
I wanted to take a second here and show you guys I've kind of improved my
cupelling method here, and this is a little electric furnace and it's got the
coils in there and this is where I'm starting to do my cupels so when I get
the lead button I put it in this cupel which absorbs the lead oxide as we
heat it up and in the past I've done this in my gas furnace but it's really
really hard to control the temperature and get a nice even heat, where as with
this one when I turn it on I can control the temperature right down to the degree
and for the oxygen I can just crack the door a little bit and let the air blow
through it oxidizes the lead I can control the temperature really nice and
we get a really nice precious metal bead in the bottom of that cupel when it's
all said and done. So, I'll show you the process but wanted to walk you through
my new improved method here. Here's our first cupel in our little electric
furnace and I moved it over so if I need to I can put another one and
actually I can probably run four or five in here at the same time. But this is a
pretty nice little furnace, you click it on you can set your temperature,
it remembers my temperature from last time, so 1775 is what we're gonna do. I'm gonna
close the door and latch it and let it heat all the way up and then I will
start I will crack the door and let some oxygen once it heats up. sSo we'll check
back on this in a couple minutes to see how it's going. Alright we're a little
over 1500 degrees and it's been about six or eight minutes it hasn't been very
long so let's see if I can unclamp this thing with one hand... So our lead's molten
and the black stuff on top is either a little bit of that slag or it's lead
oxide and that's the temperature inside the furnace is 1,500 that crucible or
that cupel probably isn't up to temperature yet, so we'll check back on
it in a couple more minutes and see if we can see that lead starting to oxidize
and drying in the cupel
here's all our cupels for the day and we'll start over here this is in order
of what we smelt it so this is the bead from the sulfides and oxides, this is the
bead of pure sulfides, this is the bead of mostly oxides, this one which is still
hot is some quartz tailings, this one is some head ore, that one is some pure iron
pyrite again, and this one is some matte from a previous smelt. And you can see
that all the beads are different sizes which is to be expected because they're
not all the same grade and this one is clearly the best that's actually a
pretty good sized bead from 120 grams of material. But you can
see the the cupelling process here and what it does for you it ends up all the
oxides the base metal oxides are absorbed into the cupel and you're left
with only the precious metal so you have gold, silver, and any PGM platinum group
metals are going to be left in your bead because all the other metals, the base
metals, copper, lead, zinc, iron, all oxidize in the furnace and get absorbed into our
cupels. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video today, one more thing before I
sign off here is you know we're dealing with a lot of pretty nasty stuff you got
lye which is really caustic, you'll start dissolving your skin, if you get in
your eyes will blind ya. We're dealing with lead, lead fumes, lead
oxide, the sulfur dioxide coming off the furnace when you breathe that in it
gets in your lungs and mixes with the water and turns into sulfuric acid so
just if you're gonna do any of these experiments just make sure you do you
know follow the safety guidelines one respirator I use a P 100 which is
recommended for dust and lead in particular, glasses, gloves, all the stuff
to keep you safe so I just wanted to put that out there for you I know you
youtubers are concerned for your safety and mine as well so that's my
safety talk for the day. But again I hope you guys enjoyed the video hopefully you
learned something. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments, all
of that information is in the description below so... Thanks for watching
and we'll see on the next one!