Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining Metals and today we're
gonna do a video on melting down, smelting, and refining some gold. So here
are some vials that I've had for quite a few years now and they're, they're mostly
gold but there's some black sands mixed in with them, some have rusted and gotten
a little chunky, some are wet, some are dry. And so we're going to take all these
melt then down and make one nice gold button then we can then further refine
by cupelling. So our first step is going to take all those vials, I'm going to
take the plastic lids off, their glass vials and so I'm going to just put them
in the bottom of our crucible here. And since some of them are wet and some of the
olgd's all stuck in there, I'm just going to break the glass up and then we're
gonna warm it up and drive off the water and get it all dry and then we'll mix it
with some flux. Alright so now we have our gold down in there and I crushed it
all up, all the vials, and we got a hell of a mess going. We're gonna dry it all
out, and this is the same crucible I'm gonna be smelting it in so even if
there's some gold stuck in the bottom it should all be contained in in the button
at the end. All right here's our crucible, I've got a wrap of koawool around it for insulation
And we're just drying out the gold and glass in there, so I'll mix up a flux recipe here and get to smelting.
Alright, here's all our broken glass and gold. And I have 300 grams of
Chapman's flux I'm gonna put in there. I'm going to add about another 100 grams
of borax to help help with the glass that we put in there, that'll help keep
everything fluid and absorb some of that silica from the glass.
Okay we just got her in the furnace and just starting to heat up, so we'll check in with it in a bit.
Our charge is now coming up to temperature and starting to melt and
it's important to remember that when you load a crucible, only load it about
two-thirds to three-quarters full because all this gas you see coming off
our crucible now tends to make it boil, and if you have too much material that
material will actually boil over and get all over the inside of your furnace. Now
the material's come up to temperature it's all melted but you're still seeing
these big burps in the middle of the crucible. And I ran it about another five
minutes longer and those burps went away, so once the charge went nice and quiet
then it can be poured into our cone mold.
Here's a look at our steel cone mold and it's something I just fabbed up out of
steel plate, and the idea is is that when you pour the molten material in it all
the densest material the gold or the other collector metals that you have
we're going to go right down to the bottom of that cone mold. And it's really
important to remember, heat your cone mold up, get it warm and dry it out but
not really hot because if it gets too hot it's gonna fuse all the material you
pour in there and it'll be really hard to knock out. Okay we just got our cone
mold here. And there's the pattern that forms on the surface as it's cooling. So
we'll let this cool down and then we'll see what we got in the bottom of our
cone. Our slag is cooled down you see it's starting to break up there. It's
real nice and glassy, nice and uniform. And so I'll I'll dump this thing over
into this tub here, and hopefully we'll see a big gold gold button in the bottom.
And there you go. We'll get it knocked off of there and see what we got. So there's our
gold chunk on the bottom, and there's a little bit of slag on it, on
the surface so I can get it knocked out of there and chip some that slag off and
we'll get her weighed. All right there it is all cleaned up.
We'll get it on our scale here, 46.3 grams. Okay now the question
is for you guys, I have this gold bead it's probably mostly gold 75% 80% 90%
somewhere in there. I can cupel this and remove any additional base metals.
The silver will stay in there, but I can increase the purity a little bit, or I
could just send it right off to a refiner. And because we're experimenting
here I'm gonna cupel it and remove the base metals. But what do you guys think
should this be refined further or should I just send this off to a refiner, get
paid ninety to ninety five percent of the gold value and not even worry
about refining it anymore? So leave a comment below and let us know
what you think. I've just made a little cupel here and I'm gonna put our gold
button and some metallic lead in there. And I made it out of just Portland
cement, this is stuff I went to you know Lowe's or Home Depot and bought it was
like twelve bucks. And we're gonna put the gold bead in there. Lemme dig it
out of here. So here's our here's our gold bead, and I'm gonna put it right in
the center of our cupel like that I'm gonna cut up some lead, this is just
roofers lead, and I'm going to cut up I don't know I don't know how much base
metals is in there so it's going to be kind of hard to tell but I'll start with
about 50 grams of lead, it's about a 50 gram button, and we're going to melt it
down together. And as as the lead heats up it melts
it's going to oxidize and when we get it to a high enough temperature the lead
oxide is going to start to melt and then roll off the lead kind of pool we have
there and get absorbed by the Portland cement. And any base metals,
copper, lead, zinc, antimony, bismuth, will go with the lead and get absorbed into
the cupel and we'll be left with a pure gold and silver button. The first
thing you got to do is you got to dry out your cupel. I've actually made the
mistake of putting lead and gold in there in a wet cupel and
as you heat it up the moisture bubbles out from underneath and spits little
beads of gold and lead all over the place. So you want to make sure you get
your cupel pretty dry and warmed up before you put your lead and your gold
in there. Here are two buttons, the one on the top is the one we just smelted and
the one on the bottom is one that I've cupelled in the past. And you can see
there's there's a little bit of a color difference, it looks like the one we just
smelted might have a little more coppery color to it. So I'm gonna cupel
the bigger one and see if we're going to move some of those base metals.
Our lead is melted now and it's gonna start to dissolve that gold bead we put
in there, you can see on the right side it's just starting to form a black oxide
film on the surface.
This has been sped up four times to show the lead actually dissolving our gold
bead. The black oxide is now thick on the surface of the lead, our gold bead has
just been dissolved into the lead now, and the lead is starting to open up and
show clean bright lead on the surface, and all the oxides are starting to roll
off our puddle and be absorbed by the cupel.
Now the hot bright lead is really starting to drive and you can see the
oxides forming on the surface and rolling off very quickly into the cupel
And the cupel is starting to form a black ring around the lead button and
this is where the oxides have been absorbed into the cupel and once the
lead is completely oxidized we'll be left with a nice clean gold button.
As our bead gets smaller the texture on the surface actually changes and just
before it goes to gold, it kind of gets this iridescent rainbow color on the
surface and then the bead will actually freeze in place and that's when you know
that it's done cupelling and all the base metals have been removed. And so of
course my battery died just as I was finishing up, but here's what here's what
came out of the furnace. It's a nice shiny gold bead, and this this ring
around the bead is where the lead was absorbed into the the Portland cement
there. So let me see if I can see if I can pop this thing out of here...
Get out here in the light...
There you go there's that shiny yellow gold color we're looking for. So let me
let me get the scale and we'll see how much it weighs. Okay we're zeroed out
here's our gold button before it weighed 46.03,
and now we're 43.32, so we lost just shy of three grams
of base metals, but it turned it nice and gold color and shiny. So I'm going to
take this over and see if I can get my guy to shoot it with the XRF gun and see
exactly how pure our gold is here.
So there you go we took our vials of crappy, rusty, wet, dirty gold dust and
little pieces and melted them down turned him into a real nice shiny button with
with no base metals. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video, thanks for watching
and we'll see on the next one.