How much gold is in this 20 gram bag of gold leaf?

foreign [Music] Denver again her prospecting here welcome back to my channel and if you're new welcome I hope to earn your subscription today you ever see those little tiny glass vials full of gold flake you get at tourist traps well today we're gonna find out how much gold is in the Gold Leaf they put in those vials so wish us luck and I hope you enjoy thank you [Music] so today my dad Doug is going to be helping us out hello there and I can answer the question right now if you want how much gold is in those gold vials pretty much nothing that gold foil in those vials is so unbelievably thin it accounts for almost nothing we're gonna take it one step farther we have 20 grams of the gold foil they use to make up those vials and we're gonna test that gold foil and see what is actually in it for gold content oh on a heavy heavy gold that's that gold so one of my viewers saw on eBay someone selling 20 grams of gold foil used for making up those you know tourist trap souvenir gold vials and he sent it to me saying Dan please test this tell me how much gold is actually in there because it says it's 20 grams but he only paid a couple dollars for it and 20 grams of gold should could be worth hundreds of dollars so he's thinking that there's actually not any real gold in there but we have the ability to find out if he got a really good deal off eBay or if sure enough there's only a couple dollars worth of gold in that bag now how we plan to do this today is we're going to take this 20 grams and break it in half to 10 gram uh loads we're going to take one of the loads and just melt it down with Borax and see what comes out of it we're then going to take the other half and we're gonna smelt it we're gonna put the proper chemicals in it to smelt it down to remove any of the other metals that might be in that gold leaf and then see what happens with that 10 grams melted should come out to 10 grams 10 grams smelted well that's another story so here is the gold foil this stuff this gold leaf is absolutely nothing in thickness pretty stuff but does not account for anything there's some on the floor oh well it's not like we're losing much here so we're gonna take some of this about half of it we're going to shove it into this Crucible oh sure put that in there too as you can see we're losing lots and I am not too worried because as I said a second ago this does not account for pretty much anything for gold all we're gonna do in this Crucible is we're gonna add borax we're gonna put it into our compelling furnace heat it up red hot and melt it down then pour it into a mold and see what comes out we're gonna take a very scientific amount of half as you can tell I'm measuring very carefully here probably gonna be actually whatever we could fit into this Crucible and squish down remember this was like four dollars worth of uh material here if I lose a little bit I'm not losing lots of value yeah ah and we still have to leave room that we can put some Borax in here oh that's gonna be way too much ah let's do it [Laughter] that's gonna be about half right there there we go I am sure positive 100 that was exactly half of that bag squish it in there push and run over the sides push it oh you better push okay thank you borax now one of my theories about why this is 20 grams of gold leaf is possibly that there's maybe one gram of gold in there and you know 19 grams of the oils they use to you know separate the gold Leafs apart or something like that something on the surface that might be adding to the weight but not adding to the gold volume uh another theory is that this is not actually gold that it's another metal that they've made into something that is that drawn out into a leaf type material but gold is actually one of the best metals for drawing out into a leaf so I'm not sure if there's another metal that can actually get that thin and small if they've used aluminum or you know lead in with it or something we don't really know but one of my theories is that there's enough other stuff on the surface of that gold leaf to account for the extra weight that we obviously didn't pay for in Gold there's one Theory I don't know I don't know about it about the goal Leaf to know if there is another metal that can look the same that is no gold at all we might not come out with any what do you think I'm going with no without any I'm going with that too you got the compelling furnace ready to go yeah and the lid sure put it all on that one's on to go nicely let's warm up the big boy here fire up the next one and we're gonna smelt the rest with the proper smelting chemicals remember a melt is just changing the state from a solid to a liquid a smelt is a chemical reaction we're going to actually use chemicals to remove any impurities out of that now there's multiple different ways to light the uh Kiln depending on how many eyebrows you want left afterwards all right here's something or hairs on your hands there we go we're going to try the internal light okay no hand hairs left whoa I smell burnt hair I have to clean out the crystal before we do this because there's a little bit of silver left in the bottom of the crucible that we don't want up our results [Music] it's almost leveling there oh I was here last week melting down a bunch of scrap silver you may have seen the video and I just had a little bit of a few beads left in the bottom of the crucible that we're going to be using so we're just going to heat up The Crucible red hot pour that out so that when we put the Gold Leaf in there we're not getting a mixture of silver and gold because that would make it look a lot bigger than it's actually going to look and we will be using a flux we'll be using Legends high letharged flux it's going to actually combine the gold or whatever's in that leaf with lead and in the end we're gonna get what's called a Prill that's a lead gold mixture that we compel afterwards which is a process of removing the lead leaving just the precious metals behind if there is anything like copper or lead or tin or anything like that in with that gold it will also oxidize those into the compel we'll get rid of those it should just leave gold and silver behind a minute Platinum okay there's a whole bunch more things too but they're precious metals the metals that will not oxidize Legends high letharge flux and we're going to uh use a very scientific measurement here of that much in with this smelt this is pre-mixed flux it has everything we want in in it including the lead oxide which you know reduces the lead and some flour in with it to help reduce its lead and it's what's going to actually create lead in the smelt to combine with the gold then we're going to add the Gold Leaf in there and mix it all up and by the time we're done mixing all up clear our silver is melted and we're ready to go we're also heating up one of our cupels here my cupels are stored outside so they absorb a lot of moisture and I had a problem last time of the cupel is actually melting they're not melting sorry the coopell's cracking I know what I'm saying yeah so I'm trying to drive off any water before we use the cappell right now um Dad this is looking really hot over here how we doing good question let's Let It Go if this is a metal that has not gold that's not um you know you know a low melting temperature it's a high melting temperature we might not even get to liquid in that that's great we will in this neat thing about a smelt is you don't have to get hot enough to melt the metals that are in there because the chemicals will actually dissolve the metals in the smelt situation what I'm going to do what are you gonna do I'm Gonna Break These Lumps up so they mix up with the smell of it put that in here and shake it all up to get the call good call that's why we pay him the big bucks it's supposed to get paid not enough flux we're not dealing with sulfides or gold ore here most of the metal in there is just going to be a straight up metal of some sort we don't need a lot of flux and if we put too much flux we're going to end up with too big of a Prill so we're hoping for a you know an adequate size Grill but not a huge Pearl the gold man oh Dad hold right we poured the silver out it's down in there now it's time to load our turn let's actually turn the flame off here yeah get rid of the uh get rid of these yeah and carefully load the charge look at it some of it ignite like steel wool [Laughter] something's good more is better look how it turned to Ash yep it's like it's almost paper yep I wonder if that's what it is I wonder if it's paper that has had you know electroplated gold on the surface or something like that that would make sense yep and if that's the case 20 grams is going to go down to nothing let's turn that back on the mirror is right there you want to see it burn away you'll see what uh four dollars worth of gold uh goes down into if you can tell by all the Laughing going on we're not taking this seriously at all right now it's very serious very serious no that's seriously silly hey look at all the gold my workbenz is going to look like it's just covered in Gold by the time we're done I'm pretty sure we do that was dad trying to lose his beard I'm being very careful with my beard did it collapsed into the bottom and it's flexing at the bottom now so whatever's in there is either burnt or melted or anything is sitting on the bottom letting the flux do its thing flux is boiling flux is boiling this one I just looked inside it and we seem to have some hard lump in the bottom I even took my carbon Rod here to poke around at it and it's just a little hard lump and Deluxe is doing its thing it's fluxing down there if that can't get hot enough to melt that lump that's inside there once we get this out and have the compelling going we'll move that over to the hotter furnace because this thing can get a whole lot hotter than that cap and maybe it'll take that solid lump and do something with it or maybe not and it's snowing out here in the wilderness a beautiful Winter's day I think it is January 18th right now it's just hovering just above zero snowing a little bit dad's trying to make a snowball not working dad says we're up to temperature for around 2000 degrees just under 2 000 reps temperature we're supposed to leave a smelt in for 20 minutes at the 2000 degrees to get all the chemistry to do as things complete do its things do it stuff do it completely yeah we'll leave it we'll let it do whatever it can it also takes a bit of time for all that lethargis to you know reduce and get into lead and all that kind of stuff in there so in 20 minutes we will pour that and see what we get foreign well that's enough time let's get in there and see right too hot we are over 2000 degrees by a fair bit right now time to pour definitely solid come out of there I know it's supposed to go back the other way but nice looking flux on top I saw lead fall into it so we definitely have a lead Pearl in the bottom let's hope it's not too much lead and we had a bit of an issue with the furnace falling apart oops once again once again yeah this isn't the first time you're technically supposed to tighten these clamps on here periodically we don't which you know it falls apart yeah results in that there we go all fixed like there was no ever a problem yeah dad my personal mechanic is a mechanic just fixing that sure mention it oh my hand's nicely warmed up yeah put your feet up there they'll warm them up you're fine I'm thinking this is not doing it up here [Music] so I just checked on that and it's all molten inside there so just gonna give it a second because when I was checking out it cooled off give it a second to heat up again and then we'll pour it on the other side then we'll start the compelling process well the flux just popped in a big way as it cooled the stress built up in it and the the glass flux on top shattered it tends to do that of course we got debris and what we're about to pour into but we'll get that out of here we can tip that out okay let's tip that out first don't lose it oh there's our lead the lead didn't fall out in a perfect separation yep beautiful separation of the fluxes the lead still in the bottom there it is perfect get knelt the lead foreign out of it my poor old Crucible needs to be replaced though we burnt a hole in it oops we're in that hole so this is the lead Krill we made in our smelt it's got a little bit of flux on the outside there but that's okay the coupon deal with flux no problem it's a nice size it'll fit into the Capel nicely and all it does is it goes into the cupel in the compelling furnace here [Applause] it will melt down onto that little dish on top of your towel and then it'll slowly start to oxidize the oxidized metal gets absorbed by the Propel leaving the precious metals that don't oxidize behind well there is what we poured out of the little crucible that had just the borax and gold I use the term gold very Loosely we'll let that cool for a second we'll see what comes out I didn't see any metallic metals pouring out through the flux okay let's see what comes out oh look at me we got metal what is this it looks like copper oh that might have to be compelled as well copper will Copeland yes you guys get a much higher temperature this is interesting there's actually a lot of it in there we ended up with a big bead of metal which is looking very copperish at the moment okay let's knock off some more of that so this is interesting there is like 10 grams of material from that 10 grams we put in we don't actually have a scale here but we're just guessing it looks like it did all melt down into metal sure not looking gold but it melted down into a metal it'll be interesting to see what that cupel comes out at because any other metals should get absorbances at coupell we're gonna hit this with a hammer just to see uh how soft it is go forehead not very soft it doesn't work compelling in there I tried it once before yeah so it's not soft it's not brittle it's definitely metallic it's metal [Laughter] fire just got water any other metals other than the gold should get absorbed into that compel [Music] so we're just you know thinking here a little bit we're wondering if copper can actually be hammered out as thin as gold leaf if you can get copper leaf just as thin and then maybe electroplate some some gold on the surface electroplating gold takes nothing in the way a gold to do yet the surface still looks gold so maybe that's copper foil very thin with uh like a one or two molecule thick layer of gold on the surface but we melted whatever it was in that furnace so what's melting temperature of coffee what's the temperature of that furnace this is less than that yeah so it's under two thousand probably 17 18. it took a lot of temperature to melt that yeah oh yeah a long time see if we had cell service here we could look that one up there we go [Applause] melting in there and oxidizers now if there is that much copper in there we're gonna need a lot more heat to compel this than normal dad was saying we need one of those guns to see what kind of temperature is in there right now but uh it's all melted now it's now compelling it's doing its thing and let's hope it doesn't take too terribly long to oxidize that and absorb all that lead and maybe even copper starting to give off a smoke that we usually don't see in compelling so we're all we're standing way back we don't want to breathe I think we shouldn't be breathing and typically it doesn't vaporize any lead but something is actually burning or vaporizing right now so we'll let it do its thing but we're not going to breathe any of that you're not really supposed to tell at that part of the temperature but it goes quicker if you do foreign [Applause] looking at this coupel working yes I hold my breath when I go over there the surface of the bead of metal that's in there is looking very goldish at the moment it could be a copper that's that hot looking goldish but whatever when I um in there it definitely is not looking like lead anymore it looks like possibly I'm thinking right now that it's copper bead that is oxidizing and compelling right now uh you notice the difference in the cupel afterwards the lead coupel looks yellow lead oxide is yellow um a copper cupel looks red because the copper oxide goes into the Coppell looking red so it won't fail until it cools off but I'm thinking there's a lot of copper being coopelled in there right now we have a problem the metal in the cupel just solidified which probably means all the lead that was in it finally got absorbed by the cupel leaving just the copper in gold and we're not hot enough for the copper to melt and oxidize so I've put a lid on it for a second let's and turn the Torches to maximum we're gonna see if we can bring this temperature back up a bit enough to melt the copper and start it oxidizing as well if we can't get it hot enough unfortunately I can't go into the big Kiln to do it it just it doesn't oxidize in the Kiln not enough oxygen gets in gets hot enough but no oxygen if I can't get it working on that we won't get a result today but it should get hot enough because we melted the Street right we were able to melt that into but that's under borax under borax it actually doesn't reduce the melting temperature but it insulates it in there yeah so hmm it's Jiffy it's iffy it's liquid again we're gonna get it let it build up some heat so that uh when we take the top off and start oxidizing it stays liquid for a while well I'm not able to keep that copper gold mix hot enough to compel properly and I also don't quite know enough about the compelling process to know things like do I need to add more lead to make the copper do its thing or I just don't know so I think what I'm gonna do is I'm going to stop the compel process right now I'm gonna send this coopell and uh beat this material down to Jason from Mount Baker Mining and metals and see if he can put it into his hot or Kiln and uh Force off that copper I think it's copper in there and see how much gold is in it and I'll definitely get some results from Jason to show you what was in that gold foil and I we do have the piece that we melted to compare you know the 10 grams we just melted versus the 10 grams we smelted and Coop held and see how much gold was actually there but today this afternoon our compelling process is a bit of a failure for sure we just can't do it with the technology we have here hopefully my buddy Jason can bail us out it's not hot enough that it doesn't get any Oxygen when we put that lid on so Jason help help Jason I would like to send Jason the whole cupel in everything but it's freaking hot right now and that's hard to transport we gotta go so I need to preface this that I am not an expert on smelting in fact I'm a firm firm believer that you should never stop learning and I learned something new today I knew you could compel copper but I didn't know the specifics when I went back to the interweb and looked it up I found that the copper needs a significant amount of lead with it for both of them to be able to oxidize and get absorbed into Coppell without lead the copper oxidizes on the surface stays hard and it does what's called freezing and that's what it did to me so I am off to a big mining conference right now and when I get back I will go and add some lead to that recoupel it and show you the results I was lucky enough to be able to head down to Vancouver British Columbia to the AME Roundup that's a big Mining and exploration Conference held down there and as I was walking around the trade show I came across these two guys that were demonstrating xrf devices it's an x-ray device that actually will tell you the precise molecular makeup of an item and I asked them if they would scan my copper Pearl here and of course they were happy to When they scanned it it came out to be 100 copper now there was a little bit of traces of gold and other things in there and there are some problems scanning a solid item like this you don't get to tell what's inside and there may have been a copper sort of coating on the outside but basically it tells you that this thing was 100 copper now I did go back and finish compelling it and the results back home were similar check them out well here I am back at the smelting furnace well the couponing furnace I found some scrap lead laying around we're gonna go and recoupel that Prill that didn't work the first time with extra lead to absorb that copper well it doesn't really absorb the copper it kind of dissolves the copper so the cupel can absorb the copper but let's get her done there's the remaining Krill we're gonna get that in Capel right away and here are some scrap lead I found I'm going to melt it down once and pour off just the pure lead to make sure any contaminants get cleaned up but uh put those two together so I am not sure how much lead I'll need that's a significant amount let's hope that's enough we will put that into the furnace start it melting in the Capel and then I'll put the meat on top of it this way now I'm pushing a bit faster than this whole super compelling you're not supposed to let it glow right like that but I just need to get this done and if I lose a tiny bit of the precious metals I'm okay with that now while we let that melt when I went home and looked this up on the Internet what I read is that copper oxide forms a solid at the temperatures that we compel at lead oxide forms a liquid and that's why it can get absorbed into the cupel but because copper oxide's a solid it can't get absorbed now fortunately lead oxide the liquid will dissolve copper oxide so it dissolves in like sugar would dissolve into water and because the two of those together are a liquid they will together get absorbed into the cupel and that brings me to a great geology lesson of the day metal oxides almost all metals will react with oxygen creating an oxide you know the common ones like rust of course and most metals will oxidize to a hard surface that protects the metal from from rusting any further but that hard surface will get eroded away or dissolved away leaving fresh metal which gets oxidized again which erodes away and gets oxidized over and over and over again until there's nothing left and that is why we can actually find gold in Native you know actual gold medal in the environment because it's one of the only metals that will not oxidize because gold doesn't oxidize it doesn't form something that can get eroded away or dissolved away and make it go away because it won't oxidize it stays in its natural form in the ground even silver which doesn't oxidize all that well it does still oxidize and eventually silver will go away and that's why we don't find much Native silver in the environment gold Platinum a couple other Noble Metals will stay in the environment because they don't oxidize there you go today's geology lesson of the day well there we go let's check it out now I did have to add lead twice more to continue the oxidation of that copper all the way down to the bead it took a lot of lead and there's the bead of gold I had to come home to find my scale to weigh this up but that tiny microscopic bead of gold comes out to .025 grams and that's just assuming that I actually was able to compel it all the way down to just gold so if you do the math the 10 grams of original material smelting down to .025 grams of gold means yes there is pretty much nothing in that original sample now that being said 0.025 grams of gold is still worth a buck 25. so I guess that's a little bit more than nothing and that kind of does correspond with the results we got from the fancy Dancy xrf machine well I hope you enjoyed watching us have fun out here and checking out what's in that gold foil hopefully Jason had some results that I left just before this clip hopefully they were interesting results I don't know that's the thing about taking these videos sometimes you do things out of order hope you enjoyed if you did please leave me that thumbs up if I haven't earned your subscription yet I hope by your subscription today and a big thanks to everyone for watching especially my patrons because of the sport of my patrons I get to make these weekly episodes of Dan heard prospecting hope you're all having a great day and until the next one bye bye [Music]

Channel: Dan Hurd

Views: 187,855

Keywords: gold panning, prospecting, panning for gold, mining, gold, rock hunting, rock hound, rock collecting, british columbia, bc, video, canada, finding gold, gemstones, gem stone, gems, treasure hunting, metal detecting, diamond mining, metal detector, gold detector, gold river, metal detecting gold, gemstone hunting, gold panning for beginners, finding gold with a metal detector, metal detecting for gold, sluice box, how to gold pan, gold mining process, gupta dham, gold leaf

Id: Y87dzo_W-kc

Length: 29min 38sec (1778 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023