Hey guys, my name is Jason from Mount Mining and Metals and on today's video
we're gonna be smelting down some real high-grade blocks and concentrates. Here's
a look at these concentrates, and these are off one of our shaker tables from a
customer and he says they're they're full of silver and a little bit of gold.
So he sent me up a sample to play with and I figured it'd be a good experiment
to run and show you guys hopefully getting some high-grade precious metals
from our smelting stuff. So I'm gonna run a little test, a hundred gram sample
of this. I'll use some lead collector and make sure I got the chemistry right and
then we'll do a little bit bigger smelt in a number ten crucible and see what we
can recover. And here's our sample all mixed up, we've got 100 grams of
concentrates, 100 grams of anhydrous borax, 100 grams of lye, and 50 grams of
silica sand which is kind of our standard flux. We're gonna run this as a
test, I'm going to add about 20 grams a lead to this as a collector metal. I'm
also going to add iron as a reducing agent and we'll see how it goes, and if we get
a little bit of matte, I will end up adding a little bit more lye because the
more basic your flux is the more iron sulphide it can hold.
Alright guys here's the crucible I've been using and this is a super
salamander graphite crucible, it's a number four. And as you can see this
thing is about done. I've got two holes in the side and I have put this thing
through the wringer man, I've done all kinds of crazy flux stuff in here. On one
of them I did pure sodium hydroxide, so I have not been very kind of this crucible.
But a lot of you guys are asking how much does it cost, you know what's the
cost of the smelting stuff and is it worth it? This crucible here cost $23 and
I've been keeping tabs on how many smelts I've done in it and I've done 20
smells in it. So it ends up being about a dollar a smelt, the flux material is way
less than a dollar for a smelt of this size and then the gas I get probably six
to eight maybe even ten smelts out of one tank of gas and it cost me ten bucks
to fill up the tank, so again you're looking at you're looking at maybe two
three four dollars a smelt. So that's that's kind of the cost range for you
and hopefully that helps some of you guys out there who are thinking about
getting into this or looking at doing some smelting on your own, it really
doesn't cost very much once you get up and into production. Alright guys you
just knocked our pyramid out of our cone mold.
Let's see what we got here for... so there's our little lead button, but as you can see we
had a whole bunch of matte in there still. So our recipe wasn't quite basic enough
so I'm gonna redo this one and end up adding more lye, I'm gonna end up adding
200 grams instead of just 100 grams and see if we can get rid of this matte. And
then here for comparison is a brand new one, so this is this is one of these
Salamander Super crucibles. And so I'm going to put this in the furnace, the
furnace is warm I'm gonna warm this thing up before I get it fired and add
some stuff to dry it out, get it heated up so it doesn't crack or fail because
of any moisture in the crucible.
Now here's our second smelt with 200 grams of lye. I tried to make it a little bit
more basic. And there's our lead button. And it's quite a bit smaller because I
just reused the 10 grams of lead that came out of the first one, I just dunked
it back in here so that's why we don't have as much lead. And here's a little
bit better angle you can see right where the lead button was and right underneath
it's all glassy slag, so making our charge more basic we got rid of our matte,
recovered our lead. Let's weigh it, I think I put in about 10 grams, and so now
we got the right recipe so now I'm gonna do a big smelt and see how much we can
recover. Okay so now we're going to upgrade, we're going to go up to a
number-10 crucible. And with this one I can add some more material so I'm going
to add 300 grams of sulphides, 600 grams of lye, 300 grams of borax, and 150 grams of
silica. All right there's our charge in there. I've added 20 grams a lead as a
collector again. And you can see the iron rod sticking out of there, there's
actually two in there and so we'll get it fired up get er smelting away and
hopefully we get a nice clean lead button and no matte and glassy slag.
Alright we got our stuff cooled down from our number ten crucible. Well
there's our lead button still in there, but you can see there's no matte so that
worked out really pretty nicely. Let me knock that lead out of there and we'll
get her weighed. Alright guys here's our LED button and
I've got it kind of hammered down, knocked the slag off and here's what I
did. So I took the ten grams that we have left over for first two smelts and I
added another 10 grams to it so I put 20 grams in, but look at how much we ended
up coming out with, 37 grams so we gained about 17 grams. So hopefully some of that
precious metals, I'm expecting there might be some of that as base metals
that we reduced out with our iron rod, but man, if we could get 15 grams of
precious metals out of that would be awesome. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going
to take our lead button I'm going to put it in this cupel and we're going to
heat it up in our electric furnace to about 1750 degrees. We're going to
oxidize the lead out of there, as the lead oxidizes it's gonna cool on top of the
liquid lead button, and it's going to shed off and get absorbed by this cupel
and the lead is going to refine the gold as it does that. So some base metals and
and other stuff is going to come up with the lead it'll all go into this cupel
by oxidizing and the gold and the silver won't oxidize even with those high
temperatures. And so what will be left over with is a pure precious metal
button with gold and silver.
Alright let's take a little look at our button here, see how our coming along. Oh
holy cow look at the size of that button!
Whoa, let me let me get it pulled out of there we'll take a look. Wow look at that
thing it's huge! It's still obviously quite hot, it looks like
there's some silver in there because it's it's not gold color but let me get
it cooled off and we'll take a look and get it weighed, man that is huge!
Alright guys here's our here's our bead and man I still can't get over how big
it is. Put it on the scale here... 14 almost 15 grams, wow that is amazing. Okay so like I
said I used the the lead from the first two so we did a hundred grams twice, so
that's 200 grams. And then in the number-10 crucible I did 300 grams. So
this is the precious metals from about 500 grams worth of those concentrates
and that's really amazing, that's almost 3% precious metals by weight. All
right guys now we're gonna do our kind of goofy but effective underwater weight
method. So I got my little jug of water here on the scale, I'm going to tare it
so now we're at zero. I'm going to take this little aluminum wire, submerge it in
the water tarr it again and then I'm going to take
our little precious metal bead. Now the scale is going to go negative because
I'm taking out the aluminum wire and some water, but when we put it back in we
end up with 1.03 grams. So that is the weight
of the water that our bead displaces. Alright so here's our quick math, we got
the weight of the bead and the weight of the water displaced. When you divide
those two you get the the density of the bead. But really what it tells you is how
much more dense your object is than water so our object is 14.42
times the density of water, but since water is just one gram per cubic
centimeter, that works out to be a density of 14.42 grams
per cubic centimeter. So Archimedes had it really figured out that's pretty cool.
All right so after doing our math we can check out a chart on line that tells us
the karat of gold by density...
and this turns out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 karat, which is
right around 2/3 gold by weight. And it might be hard to tell in the video but
the thing actually does have a little bit of yellow tint to it, so that was
going to be my guess, my guess is going to be somewhere between 60 and 70
percent gold. Now let's take our bead and see if I can go get it
zapped with our XRF and see if I can get a percent gold and silver by weight with
the XRF gun.
So I hope you guys enjoyed the video, that is by far the richest concentrates
that I've ever seen. So that just goes to show you that you probably don't want to
throw it your black sand concentrates until you get them tested or smelted or
assayed to make sure you're not throwing out gold because I actually did a little
test pan with that stuff right when I got it and I couldn't pan out any gold
or silver, but it turns out it was about 3% precious metals by weight. If you have
any questions or comments you can find our contact information in the
description below or leave a comment in the comment section. So thanks again for
watching and we'll see on the next one.