Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and on today's
video i'm going to try and figure out if i lost any gold in any of my smelting
experiments. I've saved all my slag and all my
crucibles and all my fire brick, and so what we're going to do today is
crush all this stuff up, run it through the turnkey system behind
me, and see if we can recover any more gold.
So here's some of the slag we're going to be running, and this is just
all the various slag i've used up over the the last several months.
I've got three buckets of slag. I'm gonna also crush all the fire brick,
some of it's you know been spilled on, and leaked all over, and so I want to
crush all that. So my plan is is I'm gonna run
all the slag and the fire brick together and then
separately we're going to run all my used crucibles. And so these are
crucibles that have leaked or broken or I've used up you know they only have a
certain shelf life. And I want to do them separate because
my guess is that we have lost any precious metals they're going
to be in these crucibles, and so i want to see that separate.
But we'll run the slag first and then we'll
run the crucible second and see what we get. The process starts
here with the jaw crusher module I'm going to dump the material in the orange
hopper, it's going to vibrate down through the
8x12 jaw crusher, come out this conveyor belt into the
fine or hopper. There's a small feeder underneath which
meters the feed of the material out onto the second conveyor belt.
The material comes up into the hammer mill here which is a 16 inch by 12 inch
one ton per hour hammer mill. It's going to grind the material to a
powder. We run it wet so it comes out in a nice
slurry onto our shaker table. All the dense material, the gold, the
precious metals or any lead or collector metal that's left there
will come across into the number one and number two. We'll have a bucket here for
the number three midlings and any number four is going to go out
and auger up the spiral classifier to be dewatered
and only about the 200 mesh minus is going to come out into the final
tailings pond where the water is recirculated over and
over again through the system
Here's the number one and the number two
from the slag, and then here's the number one and the
number two from the crucibles. And so what i'm gonna do is i'll start
with the slag and I'm just gonna combine these two and i'm gonna pan them down a
little bit and see what we get, and then we'll work
over on the crucible one as well. So this is our slide sample here and I'm
panning it down a little bit so you can see what we got. But running
on the table there was quite a bit of lead and a little bit of
copper. And again this is stuff that I've been
experimenting with, trying different stuff,
trying different collector metals, different flex recipes, so
I'm not surprised if there's going to be some some metal in here.
So I don't want you guys getting all worried about you know smelting is
is not a good way to collect your precious metals, but
it never hurts to save the slag and the crucibles
and process them you know when you get them saved up and got a bunch to
to process. Just as a check, I mean it doesn't hardly cost anything and
there might be enough gold and silver in there to make it worth your while. So
that's kind of what we're experimenting with here so let me get this panned down
and we'll take a look at what we got. so I've got our stuff panned down here
from the slag and these are all little lead bbs, there's some copper in
there, there may be a little speck of gold here
and there as well. But this is the number one and number
two from the slag. And so this is some of the stuff I've
got, I don't know, a couple hundred grams here.
So I'll get this stuff dried out and we're gonna smelt all this down again
and then we'll cupel it and see how much precious metal we have left.
Now we're working on the crucibles, the high grade from the crucibles,
and we've had several customers actually send us samples
of slag and matte from old mine sites and we've run it through the system as
samples and it's come back pretty good. So if you're if you're ever exploring
around old mine sites or old milling sites keep an eye out for the
glassy slag or the matte from where they smelted their
stuff down. That that may be full of precious metals
so it's a good idea to to figure out where
those locations are and if there's enough material take a
sample get it assayed and figure out what's in there. And here's
our panning cons from the crucibles. And there's actually surprisingly a lot
less metal in here, but you'll see over here we've got some
little beads of gold. And so we've got a little oops a little
bit of gold there quite a bit of copper and then the rest
of that dark gray stuff is lead. Here's our crucible cons dried out I
just dried them in a frying pan over the fire
and then i got this slag this is our standard
or flux I mean I got our standard flex recipe here, it's 100 grams anhydrous
borax, 100 grams of lye, and 50 grams of
silica sand. So we'll get that mixed up, put in a crucible,
and put it in our little furnace.
This is the crucible that we just poured from and
we were wondering where all the material went that went into the crucible and
here as it happens there's a crack in the side of the crucible and
most of it leaked out so we'll see what we get in the lead button.
So because I couldn't knock all the slag off of this and it's
got a lot of copper in it, I'm going to cover it with another cupel
and let it warm up and heat up so if that slag starts popping or
anything kind of goes weird inside there, it'll be contained and it doesn't splash
all over a furnace. And then once it's all molten enough to temperature
i'll take that top cupel off and then we'll let it
oxidize as normal.
Here's our second bead, and it's quite a bit softer
now I can hit it and it deforms instead of breaks like our first one.
But it is still, it's still brittle you can see it's starting to
break there so there's quite a bit of copper in it.
So i'm going to add some lead to this and put it in a cupel and see if we can
get it driving that lead and copper out of
there.
And there's our precious metal lead alloy.
And those little black beads that are forming on top is the lead oxide
and they're rolling off down into the cupel.
And that process is going to continue until all the lead is gone and that
button will be just precious metals. This is our stuff
from the crucibles and here's our bead and there's just too
much base metal in there still to get it down to precious metals,
there's probably too much copper. So I'm going to pluck that bead out of
there put it in this fresh one and add another 30 or 40 grams of
lead and keep going see if we can get that down to precious
metals. All right here's our two beads this one's
from the crushed up crucibles and this one's from the slag.
And interestingly enough they weigh just about the same,
right around 0.95 grams. And I had to cupel them like three times to get
the base metals out of them, they kept coming up with a little oxidized film
and even this one here still is
is kind of pock marked and and doesn't look like all 100 of the base metals are
out of it. This one's a little bit better, it's,
the bead is is kind of pulled up into a bead form,
it has a lot bigger convex surface on the top,
and and a little bit better finish. But
I'm going to take our two beads now and put them together and do a final cupel
on them and see if I can get a real nice shiny silvery gold
colored bead. They're also both about the same same color
there there's definitely some yellow to them.
But I do believe there's some silver in there,
probably 60 percent gold 70 gold somewhere in there,
so we do have a quite a bit of silver. And here's our final bead.
So we'll get it plucked out of there and get it weighed and see how much
precious metals we lost in our slag and crucibles.
So there's our button under the windshield there it weighs just
shy of two grams. And so it's probably half and half maybe a little bit more
gold, so we're shooting probably right
around the grams worth of gold there out of our crucibles and slag. All right
so you can see that it's really actually a pretty
good idea to save all your slag and all your spent crucibles. We recovered a
little under two grams of precious metal, probably
again in that half to half ratio about 50% gold
50% silver. So i'm hoping to get about a gram of gold out of that stuff.
But to be honest with you i'm surprised that it wasn't more.
I've saved that stuff up for years and I've done lots of smelts that didn't
turn out very well. Some of the smelts the slag was way too thick and I lost a
bunch of metal, some of them the crucible broke some of
them, you know, the collector metal all went away there was some matte in that
stuff. So to be honest with you I thought it would
be higher. And also to put it in perspective I've smelted hundreds
of grams of gold in the last couple years in that stuff and
so our loss is probably less than one percent, even
with all the screw-ups that i did. So i don't want you guys thinking oh my
gosh all my gold and precious metals are going away my swag or in my spent
crucibles. They're they're probably not, it's,
you're probably getting some really really good recovery there.
But just it doesn't hurt to save them and run them through a system,
gravity recover what you can and then recover the the precious metals that you
did lose at a later time. As a little bit of a
side here, I wanted to show you guys another use for the cupel furnace
and cupelling. I've got all my little beads in here and
this is just from various stuff that I've smelted and
refined over over the years. And you know there's a there's a bunch of
little stuff they're all separate and if you mix a little bit of lead in there
and cupel them you can turn them all into one
large bead, which is a lot easier to handle and it's
harder to lose and stuff like that. So I wanted to show you
just real quick how you can take all your precious metal small beads and turn
them into one large one. So i'm going to add a little bit of lead
to our cupel now. And we're not refining anymore we're just kind of
conglomerating into one bead, so I don't need to add a whole lot
this is just a chunk I had, about seven and a half grams.
So I'll add that to our cupel and that'll conglomerate it all into one
bead once that lead oxidizes off.
All right we got our crucible in there it's warming up
I like to warm up and dry them out a little bit before I put the lead in,
just so if there's any moisture it dries out of there. And i'm going to put my
lead right on top of my precious metal beads
there, and we'll let that lead form an alloy
with all the precious metals and once that lead comes up to temperature
it'll oxidize away and conglomerate all those beads into
one large precious metal bead.
There you go cupelation in progress.
And there's a little bead. We got it pulled out of the furnace. It's mostly
silver now, so it's probably over half silver by weight,
but we'll get it pulled out of there and get it weighed. And there we go we got a
little over three grams. So I wanted to show you guys that's a
real good way to take a bunch of little beads and
stuff that you don't want to lose and conglomerate it into one nice big
precious metal button. So thanks for watching, let me know if you guys have
any questions or comments. You can find our contact information in
the description below, or please leave a comment in the comment section.
So thanks for watching and we'll see on the next video.