Smelting and Casting gold! *Lots of it!*

well hold on Dan her with Dan her prospecting here welcome back to my channel and if you're new welcome I hope to earn your subscription today I am here today with dad and Evan and we are going to be doing some smelting with the kk8 kiln the quick kiln and possibly casting a gold bar I have a gold pearl here from one of my viewers I did some smelting last year I haven't got his gold back to him yet he probably thinks I've stolen it by now but no I'm gonna cast that into gold bar so I can get it back to him that's the plan for today hope you enjoy first job today is to start getting the material ready for the smelt now this is the copper or the Ora I got from a copper mine a couple videos ago and what we're gonna do is we're gonna try and smelt some copper out of it which should be interesting but the first step is we have to roast it we have to take all the copper sulfides in here and burn off the sulfur turning them all into copper oxides before we can run our smelt now this gold pearl here that we're gonna cast as well well the kiln is hot this comes from one of my viewers who sent me some material that he tried to smelt and it kind of messed up on him so I fixed his smelt and got his gold back for him you may have seen that video almost a year ago now but we got to get that into a bar so I can send it back to him let's start roasting heating up Thor really hot to burn off the sulfur actually before we actually roast the or we are gonna let through the crusher here to powder it really small it always roasts better if it's a powder more oxygen gets into it [Music] now here is a shot of the or before it was crushed and here is a shot of the or after it's crushed the finer the ore is the better it will roast the dad had a bit of a fall here and has really hurt his wrist we won't talk about the dislocated finger so we're just bandaging him up a little bit here so he can continue this is real slave labour Tony Levin stop what's he's hurt himself the lazy child doesn't even start working dad ever stops working take the pressure off now if you won't learn more about the technicals of smelting roasting compelling all that kind of stuff I do have a whole video series of dad and I learning how to do it where we go through all the technical details all the trial and error as well today I'm just gonna show it to you in action and show you the results I should also note that our roasting here is out in our off-the-grid cabin area with no neighbors anywhere to pull this neighbor anywhere to be seen so the nasty smells that are given off from roasting are not going to be annoying anyone but ourselves because the sulfur dioxide that comes off from this process of roasting is nasty and we will let this roast for about an hour so see you guys in an hour dreary rainy day Gerry rainy kid apparently Evan forgot to bring his jacket today house Papa's jacket feel so we've taken it off the heat now I've separated off what I want to try to smelt in my first little run we will make up our fluxes and we will get going so one of the main components in a copper flux is some source of carbon now you're supposed to use charcoal we don't have any flour is the other option flour doesn't work as well as charcoal but we have flour with us so we're gonna put that in for reducing the copper oxides down to metallic copper let's hope the other components of course mean borax and silica those are the two main ones to give it a cap on top of glass while it smells now here's the roasted ore mixed with the fluxes I went for an extreme amount of flux with this I have about ten times more flux than I probably need I'm kind of guessing right now really we're just checking to see if this is possible if we get a little tiny bead of copper in the bottom well no it's possible because there is so much flour in that that it might be creating lot of carbon dioxide inside the melt and bubbling a lot so I kept my ammount very small for this first one [Music] and here we go that trick with flipping it all the way upside down and over is important heat flux from drooling down the outside edge [Music] now this one went funny on the surface it's usually a nice clean glassy surface not sure why this one went like that maybe I was too slow when it was bit cool as I poured it I didn't see any metallics go down in when I poured it so might not be anything I don't see any metal on the bottom at all chipping see so there is a bead of something in the very bottom of the cone it's not looking copper right now but might be because it's still really hot I mean we have to clean it up and see oh there it is there's a little round bead of metals that we got from that smelt though it's not looking bright copper maybe it's a mixture of copper and iron and maybe even some lead we got something and it doesn't look like there's anything else in that flux looks like the flux absorbed a lot probably of that iron oxide the magnetite probably absorbed a lot of my copper - I'm guessing but we ended up after a lot of effort making one copper BB we're hoping it's copper at least now our next job is going to be the melt pack into a bar that's the pearl we made when we recovered that gentleman's gold from a bad smelt we have a one ounce bar mold and about a 1 ounce of gold let's see if they work together well now a simple melt like this is really easy the gold goes into an empty crucible that's very hot we put a significant amount of borax on top of the gold some silica ground-up silica to keep the crucible from eating away from the borax and melter down very accurate scientific measurements yes lots and more of lots some is good more is better too much is just right close up the kiln turn on the gas and it won't take long to melt that I think we'll do it on top of the cone mold in case I spill over he'll get caught the cobalt sure so we learned last year that the bolt has to be nice and hot for pouring and ice bar and we need a very large excess of flux so that's why I put so much borax in silica in so that when we actually cast it in there that the flux keeps things hot well the dole goes down and makes forms the really nice bar what do you see in there dad glass and a copper bead suppose although we scratched the edge of the copper bead at underneath the glassy steel looking surface there is definitely copper we'll get some good shots of that for you already let's do this nice hold and let's hope we get a good pour Oh terrible horror and we'll do that again with more flux more borax the flux was too viscous not enough borax in it it wasn't a bad bad pour it actually looks quite nice but we're gonna make it look better we want the perfect bar so we have it back in there for round two eating oxy to get a better four so here is the bead just sitting in a little bit of a recess in the deck where I scratch the surface you can see it's definitely copper inside wonderful little dip in acid would clean that up to make it look like nice copper we'll try that when I get home [Music] or if his hot [Music] here comes the flocks that's what we want flux flux flux go go go go go go go oops I missed I think that will be a nice pour - the two little beads I didn't want to rush through the flush did too though beads that drift out not sure how that happened but look at that two ball beads but I think underneath the flux we're gonna have a beautiful bar I think that one did it I think he'll be happy with that bar gold I see gold looks like the flux is stuck down to the turbine I got a good-looking bird oh there we go a little bit of flux went underneath it got caught and they made a little bit of a recess but I think this could be a beautiful looking bar that's what the problem was originally with this stuff was it would break mmm-hmm so what do we got in there for a bad guy we might need another smelt get those beads licked well look good on the surface mm-hmm so obviously something's still wrong with our gold because that gold just broke so we still must have a lot sulfites are melted in with it even though we refined it a lot the last time we're not there yet I think that was perfect perfect bar let's hope good looking good so that poor seem to turn out quite nicely just go wait for it to cool and see if I can pop it out of the mold strange how it sir cleared the flux on the top this time [Music] so I think I'm gonna try to dip this in an acid and see if I can clean off whatever is coating it and show just the copper below well apparently we don't get to see what it looks like cleaned up in acid because well go figure something that is perfectly spherical rolls very well I had it sitting on the table over here taking pictures of it and I accidentally bumped it it rolled over bounced on the floor a couple times over the edge and who knows where it went from there and there's too many different metal things down there to use my metal detector to find it at least I got some really good pictures and video of that bead and it was definitely pure copper with a coating but I don't have it anymore Wow oh well at least it proved what I wanted to prove now for the gold piece I ended up refining this piece of gold a couple more times actually before I did the final pour and got a good bar it was still brittle which meant it still had some impurities in it I actually managed to break it in half at one point so it's not pure gold but it is very very close we tested it's very high but there's still something in there still a really nice piece of gold let's see what it weighs 1.7 ounces in grams forty eight point seven grams it actually reduced in weight a little bit when I refined it a couple more times which means it is getting rid of the impurities which is what we want pure and pure gold that's a nice-looking little gold bar hope y'all enjoyed my smelting of copper ore and my melting and casting a gold bar video it was a lot of fun basically I'm just playing around at this point if you like this video there's a good chance you like the videos I have taken in the past and videos to come please consider subscribing to my channel and check me out on Facebook and Instagram where I have lots of behind the scenes footage stuff that doesn't make it onto YouTube and maybe even some hints of videos to come big big thanks to my patrons out there you guys are awesome thank you for your support until the next one everyone bye you

Channel: Dan Hurd

Views: 119,398

Rating: 4.9120622 out of 5

Keywords: gold bar, gold csting, smelting, kk8, Kwik Kiln, Melting gold, smelting gold, smelting copper, copper ore, gold ore, prospecting, gold, gold panning, gold mining, copper mining, gold ingot, gold refinery, gold refining, gold melting at home, gold melting furnace, gold melting process, casting gold bars

Id: G9-1bKGp2Ng

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020