Metal Refining & Recovery, Episode 22: 15,500$ in Gold?

[Music] [Music] hey everyone welcome back to Cody's lab so today I'm gonna be refining quite a bit of gold jewelry I guess I got tired of refining tiny little bits of gold basically over this last probably six months or so I've been kind of sniping eBay auctions for good deals on used scrap gold jewelry and I've been buying it up I think I've got at least $10,000 worth of gold jewelry here so yeah this is gonna be interesting I have a little card here which I've written down all the weights and everything for my stock that I currently have I looks like I've got about eleven point seven three ounce troy of gold currently on this table so that's pretty good so this is the 18 karat a little piece of 12 carat a whole bowl of 14 karat stuff a bunch of 10 karat gold rings and of course the little bits of gold that I've been refining throughout my youtube career I've got roughly two troy ounces here so this is the stuff I used in my bullet video that's what I hammered out in my silver play button video and these other things here this this came with some of the other stuff that I bought on eBay now these little tiny beads there's things that I've refined you know the little itty-bitty things and I got a couple of one gram gold bars at Aves at me so I guess I'll throw those into the mix I think I'm actually gonna refine these separately because as they are they'll dissolve in the acid right now right this stuff over here I will have to treat differently anything between 6 and 18 karat is insoluble in either nitric or aqua Riga so in order to remove the silver I'm gonna have to add more I put out a video explaining this earlier today I'll put a link in the description so you guys can go watch it and so do hit two birds with one stone I've got a bunch of a sterling silver here and use this for the importation this is about 90 percent silver the rest being copper it'll mix that with the gold and that'll make it much easier to dissolve my little card here I figured yeah I need 700 grams of silver more copper to in court the jewelry that I've got right there and I think I've got about a kilogram of silver stuff so I think I've got plenty to do it let's get one last good look at all the jewelry I'm about to destroy all right here goes Wow it's barely fit yeah it goes all right well that's melting let's go get this dissolving to dissolve this amount of gold I'm gonna need roughly a hundred milliliters of hydrochloric acid which I'll throw in now there should be little to no reaction now to this to get the gold dissolving enough to you as a strong oxidizer for that I'll use nitric acid I'm just gonna add in a little at a time so it doesn't get all consumed with side reactions should need around 30 milliliters of this for this quantity of gold so what's happening here is the nitric acid is oxidizing the gold because it's such a strong oxidizer it's able to do that and the hydrochloric acid which is all over in solution you know the chlorine ions they attack the oxidized gold forming chloroauric acid and that carries it away so that horn nitric acid can react the fresh gold you can actually see that the gold has been etched see that crystal boundaries are now visible as the metals being removed you got this little bead over here just turned dark this is the the bead that came out of the mercury I think what actually happened there is I used an old crucible and it must have had a little bit of silver or something in it it looks like it is dissolving just more slowly oh my Wow look at that those bullets been dissolving in the acid for a little over an hour now you can see those huge crystals getting exposed so I've weighed out the 700 grams required let's open this back up looks like our Gold's melted you see it down in there a little bit of dross certainly a much smaller volume let's start putting in the silver here we go the silver spoon goodbye spoon that's lovely hook it down with another one [Music] [Music] see I appealed open this little heart thing to make sure there wasn't anything in there like moisture oil let's throw it in so it was clear that's the last of it stir in just a couple of extra spoons just to make sure I've got enough give it a little stir while I do it that's awesome all right let's let that come up temperature again and we'll pour it out I'm going to be pouring it into this bucket of cold water that way it breaks up into little tiny pieces so make it faster to dissolve in the acid all right here goes [Applause] okay so here's the material all turn to shot you see when I hit the water it kind of splattered increase the surface area so the acid can get at it more quickly as you can see I've got the silver and gold alloy spread out inside of this large jar that's to help minimize losses due to frothing or whatever and I have here some red fuming nitric acid this is what I'll be using to dissolve the silver the gold should be left behind so I'm going to dilute the acid with a little bit of distilled water right there this is to help dissolve the silver nitrate better and also slow down the reaction rate you actually don't want the reaction to going very fast you can also see I'm adding the acid in small increments so here we go at the acid it's pretty cold out here as evidenced by the snowing but I've got on this hot plate so it should warm up a little bit and the reaction will proceed at a more appreciable rate now we've got a reaction going see if I tip this over a little bit you can see the metal has turned a brownish color as the gold particles are forming on the surface oils are insoluble the gas that's coming off this should be nitrogen dioxide otherwise known as red death that's why I'm doing this outside a little bit is okay but a lot can kill you because it forms nitric acid when it reacts with water just why you want lots of good ventilation when you're working with this now one thing that you'll notice is that the gas that's coming off of this isn't actually read it usually is but since it's so cold out here right now the nitrogen dioxide has formed into a nitrogen tetroxide which is clear still this is toxic though don't you have to keep it warm with a pot of water looks like it needs another shot of acid I'm running a bit low on nitric acid so I decided to make some more you see I've got some nitric acid dripping down into that flask here I have a solution containing potassium nitrate and sulfuric acid you see the nitric acid is boiling out as condensing on this condenser here this is how I've been making most of my acid recently by the way so here's our 24 karat gold as you can see the bullet is still mostly there I guess nobody should be surprised by that you know it's so thick it would take forever to dissolve you can see that there's some either silver or lead sitting on the bottom of the beaker so there was some contamination there anyway that's a poor off this liquid and recover the gold from it I'm just gonna carefully pour this liquid off being careful not to get any of that silver in there now I'll just rinse this with some distilled water suppose to recover more of it let that settle out for a minute to reduce the gold back to a metallic state I'm just gonna add some sodium metabisulfite and I should purchase I should precipitate some gold that looks like it is working you see that dark color of the gold forming analyst slowly add this here the sodium metabisulfite actually forms a sulphur dioxide when it reacts with the hydrochloric acid it's actually that sulphur dioxide that pulls the gold out of solution here's something I haven't been able to show before you can actually see the detail of the top of the liquid some of the gold is forming at the surface and you can see us actually has the metallic color that's lovely here's what the beaker looks like sidon you can see the gold particles are slowly settling to the bottom see some that has already settled out there yeah here we are a few minutes later you can see that the solution is just about clear everything's settled down on the bottom that's our gold sponge so you can see the solution is still colored and the gold powder is reacting forming bubbles and the solution above it is getting darker that's telling me that there is a little bit of nitric acid left which is Reda's all v''m the gold so to fix this problem i'm going to add a little bit of a diesel exhaust fluid that should neutralize the nitric acid okay a bit of a stir now I can add more sodium metabisulfite and it should precipitate out the rest of the gold see that settled out much better this time looks like all the silvers dissolved finally that took all night to do that and now I just wash the silver out had some hydrochloric and nitric acid just like I did with the solid pieces of gold and dissolve it and then any remaining silver like if there was any trap between some gold particles will remain behind mainly the difference between this and that is this gold is already very fine and so the dissolution will take hours and not days so here's the gold powder from the jewellery I just got through drying it out in the furnace here's the gold from the 24 karat pieces that I dissolved set that in there as well well I'm added I may as well melt down this rest of this bullet the furnace is up to temperature let's open it up looks like the Gold's liquid it's poured into that graphite mole looks like it's just about cooled down to hold enough that I can work with it pop it out of the mold no problems there look at that yeah don't getting some water and they'll go way it look at that I got a little bit of sunlight to work with so here's my bar set on the scale I focus the camera so 345 grams of gold oh my goodness that's definitely the biggest chunk of gold ever had in my possession let's see I was expecting to get eleven point seven three ounce troy let's figure out what I actually got so I should have gotten three hundred and sixty four point eight grams I got three hundred and forty-four all right future Cody here so I thought that number was a bit low so I actually just gotten through and recovered all a little bits of gold that were left out of the main bar there was some bad bits that were left in the crucible some gold that hadn't dissolved completely in the nitric acid you know the the carrot was too high you know the liquid that I poured off the the silver nitrate and copper that would carry over gold particles and that's actually with a substantial amount there and there was also a little piece of the silver gold alloy that I took out to show Canyon because it was an interesting shape and I forgot to put it back in so I've got all that reprocessed and that here's the gold that I was able to cover looks like I got an additional twelve point six nine grams so that brings my total to 357 grams of gold that I recovered in this video that still is about seven grams less than I was expecting but that is a discrepancy that is probably about what you'd expect the carat value of the jewelry is not 100% accurate and also there was a few gemstones which so given the current price of gold that's like $15,000 worth that's crazy if you guys are curious how much I actually bent on the jewelry and how much profit I made I've got a spreadsheet set up over on my patreon link of course is down the description I'd like to refine it once again before I'd guarantee any sort of purity is probably at least 99% though alright so I promised the waterjet cutting guys that I'd let them cut a gold bar I'll take that down to them I'll put a link in the description you guys can go over and watch this being cut with a sixty thousand psi water jet so hope to see you over there

Channel: Cody'sLab

Views: 3,184,435

Rating: 4.8610692 out of 5

Keywords: Gold, pure, jewelry, bar, melt, metal, silver, money, water jet, water, acid

Id: wuwbwYNnAKA

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018