Refining Precious Metals To Pure Gold & Silver

hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and metals and in this Crucible I have a bunch of miscellaneous gold beads and on today's video we're going to refine them all down to a high Purity gold button here's the stuff we're going to be working with today and this is gold buttons from miscellaneous experiments and samples I've run in the past and what I want to do is use some wet chemistry to get these refined down into super high Purity gold button but first let's take a look at the highlights kind of where I got this stuff from and how I process the gold ore to get these gold buttons we're going turn these two bags of rusty old rocks into nice shiny yellow gold questions all right guys we got our concentrates here off the Shaker table there's a little bit of number one in there and then here's our high grade number two so we got quite a bit more volume here uh but most of our goals in the number one here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pan this out recover as much free gold as I can and then I'm going to take the rest of the stuff the panning tailings and I'm going to smelt them down and see how much gold I lost in my panning all right so I got a gold panned out here there's our there's our gold we got all our gold sucked up in our Snuffer bottle there and now I'm going to take uh the gold and put it in this rag it's just a blue shop rag here's our golden our rag and now I'm going to take our rag pull it up and I'm just going to ring the water [Music] foreign there you go it might be hard to tell in the video but it's pretty shiny yellow so there's not a whole lot of silver in there ends up weighing about 19 and a quarter grams and that those bags are somewhere probably around a ton and a half maybe two tons so we're somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 grams of ton with that stuff now let's go and smelt the stuff I panned out I'll heat them up to about I don't know 800 or thousand degrees Fahrenheit for about 10 minutes and get them roasted drive off all that sulfur and then we'll smelt them foreign button here we're going to put it in one of these cupels and I'm going to put it in our little electric furnace and drive off the lead and see what kind of precious metal button we got left this little button is the stuff that came out of the number one panning tailings the stuff that I panned out that's the gold that I lost all together in the number one we ended up with about 21 and a third grams and then I took some of the number two high grade that we had and smelted 300 grams of the number two and ended up with this little tiny bead here which weighs right around a tenth of a gram and I've dried out and weighed the rest of the number two concentrates and I have about three kilograms of that stuff so multiplying this number by 10 there's about a gram left or so um in the in the number two high grade now let me know where these came from let's get them all weighed up figure out how much gold alloy we have and then we can work on getting them refined down 54.3 grams and so now I got to mix these all this gold up with silver to get it down to about a 25 percent gold 75 silver alloy here's a quick math part so we have 54.3 grams of about 90 percent gold alloy so we're expecting about 49 grams of gold to mix it up and get 25 gold 75 silver we're going to divide by 25 percent we need almost 200 grams total so when you subtract our total from the amount of gold we have we need 146.61 grams of silver did anybody else see my mistake I caught myself I don't don't need to subtract the 48 grams of gold because I have this much so if I subtract the 54.3 grams of gold and silver alloy that I have I only need to add in 141.18 grams of silver so that's our next step here's the silver I'm going to use I made this uh years ago on an old video and if you're interested I'll put the video on how I made this silver at the very end of this video it's from old film I recycled some old film uh I don't canisters I don't know what they're called and recovered this silver so if you want to see where the silver came from check it out at the end of this video but I have 745 grams of silver and I only need 141. so I'm going to melt this down in the furnace pour it into water corn flake it and then we can separate out about 140 grams of silver and leave the rest as cornflake silver so we can use it in the future put our silver in a fire clay Crucible so we'll bring it over here put it in our furnace and get it melting thank you [Music] that worked pretty well I poured it a little bit fast but we did get some nice silver cornflake there I got a few pieces that kind of stuck together like that but that's okay we'll use up these big pieces uh since we're just trying to get the right amount of weight rather than the surface area for this next part there we'll use that there we go get the flame going again and we'll do the same thing corn flake it and water I've got our stuff all cleaned up and I have a little bit of a concern here I don't know if you can tell on the camera but if you look down there there's some pieces like over here and up in here that are a little yellower and a lot of it's silver are those do those pieces contain more gold than like this big chunk here that's all silver colored because if they do that's going to be a problem we need it to be all uniformly mixed 25.75 so the acid can eat the silver away and the silver there's enough silver atoms to give the acid room to get in and eat around essentially every gold atom and clean it up and get all the silver cleaned up but we're gonna go ahead here and see what happens if we get it screwed up I can always redo it because I have a bunch of shots silver here so I'm going to add 100 milliliters of distilled water roughly that's about 150 because there's silver in there now I'm going to put my respirator on and add another 100 or so milliliters of nitric acid get it heated up boil it it'll dissolve the silver and leave us with the gold sponge Silver's starting to turn brown already and the Nitric will dissolve the silver but leave the gold and the heat speeds up the process all right well our first oil is pretty much complete a little bit of gas still coming off but I've got it on the upgraded burner here so I'm going to just decant the solution off now I'll add more water and more Nitric and we will continue the reaction well I've got some pieces in there that are still silver colored this is the third boil there's hardly any gas coming off and the solution is pretty much clear so I think what happened was I didn't mix up my gold silver alloy enough and those pieces in there have so much gold in them it's not allowing the acid to get at the remaining silver so there you might be able to see them a little better they're just not reacting with the acid at all I think they have a film of gold on them essentially so we'll melt it back down try again there's our gold I'm gonna wait for that to cool and then I can pull it out of there and dunk it we can get a weight on it here's our melted gold button we get a weight on it but you can clearly tell there's still a lot of silver in there it's not very gold colored there you have it we've gone backwards we've got more silver in there now than when we started okay let's get that back in there and cross our fingers well that definitely looks better it's all more uniform color there's a little bit of flex of slag on there and stuff I don't know if you can see them there but uh it's all it's all nice and shiny silver color so I think we've got our alloy mixed up pretty well so now we can repeat the nitric acid baths we're back on the heat I'm recycling the last Nitric bath I did since there was hardly any Nitric used so hopefully we can save a little bit of time and money there now we can take our spent Nitric and silver solution here I have a bucket with some copper pipe and I can pour this in here and any silver dissolved in this solution will play it out on the copper pipe the silver is plating out on the pipe and so the copper will go into solution is copper nitrate and you'll have silver sludge on the bottom here so that's how we can recover our silver here's a look at our second boil there's no more gas coming off the solution is clear because there's no copper in there and it looks a lot better I don't see any silver pieces or it's all turned brown at this point there you'll see it's all just nice Brown gold mud essentially so we'll do one more boil and see what it looks like this is our third boil and at the beginning it made a little bit of brown gas but hardly anything and now it's just absolutely clear the solution is clear there's no gas coming off all the mud in the bottom is a nice Brown a little bit of orange color so we have gone to completion on our reaction now we have our gold mud I'm going to filter it through my funnel here there's our filter paper a little bit of borax on top let's see how we're doing here oh yeah we're melting down nicely it's almost all molten there all right we are completely molten now there's a little bit of bead of borax on top I'm gonna try something different what I'd really like to do is get a nice finish on the button so I'm going to add some more borax right on top and see if I can completely cover the surface of the button with Borax and let it cool down and see if I get a nice mirror finish so you probably can't tell but the button is now covered in borax and it's molten so now I'm just going to turn off the furnace I'll let it heat back up just because but then I'll turn it off we're going to sacrifice that melting dish but hopefully we get a perfect mirror finish button well I've turned it down to about 1800 degrees to keep the borax Molten the gold should be solidified now I got gold solidified so let's see if I can take it come on nope well that didn't work very well my surface is not like I wanted it's still kind of Pock marked that it's covered borax and now it's stuck to the melting dish so that's not the best way to do that but hey we got our gold bead let's get it cleaned up and see how much it weighs let's sacrifice our melting dish here oh boy that welded on there real hard okay don't do it this way so look at that shrinkage on the top and shrinkage on the bottom it just sucked it right up from the bottom sucked a bunch of borax under there so you can't I guess you can't cool it down slowly you got to just pour it into an Ingot mold or something and that's how you get a good finish well it's the best way I know how to clean all that borax and junk off of there is get about a hundred milliliters or so of water and then add some of this sulfuric acid to it maybe another 20 30 milliliters and just let it boil for a little while that'll eat up all that borax and stuff on there and give us a nice shiny button okay let's have a look at our bead here get it rinsed off there we go nice purified gold bead and now the fun part we're looking for somewhere between 48 and 50 grams I think 50.9 or so so that's a little bit more gold than I was expecting but it's all one piece now nice shiny color we're going to be smelting down some silver from some of this old film canister stuff the solution comes through here there's typically a an iron mesh in here like steel wool and as The Silver solution comes in it replaces silver onto the steel mesh and the iron goes into solution so hopefully we can get quite a bit of silver out of this stuff this is just anhydrous borax so I'm going to mix that in just hold it right there where's your hot lava yeah and all our silver is right down there at the bottom of that cone [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] I've got all our our cornflake silver in a number 12 Crucible and I've added a whole bunch of potassium nitrate and I'm going to try and oxidize some of the iron out of there together all right guys let's see what we got here [Music] so there's our metal block so now we got to take this and get our pure silver out of it get rid of the lead get rid of the rest of the iron I'm going to get some Portland cement and I'm just going to make a little dished uh concave Bowl here out of Portland cement and that's going to absorb the lead oxide when it gets molten and starts running off that bead okay there it is we'll see if this works that looks like it'll hold about a kilogram of silver we're gonna find out so there's a little silver wafer down there and this was not as easy as I thought it was going to be you can see all the little the little beads of silver around the edge there was a huge amount of iron in there and it took me forever to get the iron oxide scraped off to get the lead exposed to start driving the lead oxide and any other little base metals that were in there you can see what came out and here's the here's a cross section of what that looks like and that silver wafer is sitting you know right here on top and then the lead oxide has permeated into the Portland cement down there maybe an inch all right there's our fused up cupel here's our little silver wafer there's still some junk in the back I'm going to take this and melt this down all right I got our three things in here I've got the silver and a little bit of borax down the bottom of that Crucible there I've got our iron oxide skimmings from the cupel and then I've got uh our Portland cement with a bunch of those little silver beads in it with some borax and and that has borax and a little bit of sodash in it all right all right here's our silver block and here's our silver block all cleaned up see how much she weighs right about 750 grams so that's pretty cool so I hope you guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching and we'll see on the next one

Channel: mbmmllc

Views: 60,074

Keywords: mbmm, mbmmllc

Id: GxqE4xpSPU8

Length: 24min 49sec (1489 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023