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Refining & Recovering Gold From Rings and Jewelry

Refining & Recovering Gold From Rings and Jewelry

hey guys my name is jason with non-baker 
mining metals and on today's video   we're going to be trying to recover 
the gold plating off these rings   all right so here's a little 
bit closer look at these things   the story here is that these were imported rings 
and they're gold-plated but apparently there is   too much lead in these to go for sale in the u.s 
and so supposedly they're uh they're gold-plated   i don't know if that's 24-karat or 14-karat 
or what but they're supposed to be about one   percent gold in these about 50 lead than about 
equal parts copper and nickel so um i'm gonna   do my best here to try and come up with solution 
for this guy to recover the gold off these rings   all right so the first thing we're gonna 
do is we're gonna try and uh do kind of a   faux assay on these things and so i'm gonna 
take a couple of them and i'm just going to   quell them in our furnace and try and oxidize all 
the base metals and see how much gold uh see how   much our gold button weighs so to get these things 
weighed i just want to weigh a couple of make sure   they're all about the same weight it doesn't 
look like they are this one's 5.8 grams or so this one is 5.5 grams let's try another one 5.6 grams all right so they're all uh a 
little bit different weight which is um concerning you'd think if they were just 
producing these rings mass they'd all be   the same weight um but let's take i 
don't know three how much do we have here 16.7 grams i'll try and cupel these three rings 
and recover the gold off them and then we can   do our uh our calculation so 16.7 grams we 
should end up with 0.167 grams of gold a   little gold bead from these three rings so this 
is called the cupel spelled c-u-p-e-l and this is   something that fire assays uh fire assayers 
use for recovering the gold when they assay   a gold ore and what we're gonna do is we're gonna 
use them uh to oxidize all the base metals and get   our precious metal beads so i'm gonna mix some 
bismuth in here with these the bismuth is gonna   melt it'll alloy with the rings and it'll form a 
liquid molten puddle in the bottom of this cupel   we're gonna get it up to about 1800 maybe 1900 
degrees with the nickel and at that temperature   the bismuth oxidizes in the air in the furnace the 
oxides become molten and flow off the bead that we   create or the the button the molten button here 
and they're absorbed by this cupel and the molten   liquid metal stays uh impervious to the the capel 
is impervious to the metal so the the liquid metal   stays this thing absorbs the oxides and as the 
bismuth keeps shedding its oxides it takes with   it the copper the lead and the nickel hopefully 
and we will end up with a little tiny gold bead in   the bottom of this cupel when we're done so i'll 
get the the furnace over there set up and we can   see how that thing works all right here's 
our haggard little electric furnace here   and i'm going to place our cupel in there empty 
and you want to get it warmed up and dried out   as best you can before you put any metals in there 
so i'm going to get it up to temperature probably   about 1700 degrees and then i'll place our three 
rings in there along with some of the bismuth and   uh we'll show you that process and show you how 
it melts down and oxidizes the base metals away so i haven't even added any any uh business 
yet and the rings are already decomposing at about 1400 degrees so they must have a lot of lead in them   or some low melting point metal to 
have them melt down at 1400 degrees all right the next thing we're going to try 
is we're just going to melt some of these down   and uh get them all as a as a combined alloy 
and then i'm going to take them over to my   recycling yard and get them uh analyzed 
with their xrf and that'll tell us the   the true percentage of each metal in these rings 
so let's get some weight out i'll melt them down   in our little furnace in a crucible like this and 
we can get them poured in um a little mold and   then we take the mold over and get them analyzed 
all right we've got just over 67 grams in here   so we'll get it in the furnace and 
melt it down and see what we get now here's a little furnace we're going to use 
this is just a a wrap of kale wool held together   by some baling wire uh and some kale wool on top 
i've got some fire bricks down there in the bottom   that uh hold our crucibles i've got a little uh 
injector here this black hose goes up to a propane   bottle that i keep in water when i'm running 
that helps keep the ice off and keeps the propane   moving and this blue hose goes up to a little shop 
vac i have set up as a blower to introduce more   oxygen in so you can get complete combustion and 
this thing gets uh up to about 20 to 2300 degrees   fahrenheit and it hopefully will easily melt the 
stuff or rings that alloy with the 50 lead over   here we got supposedly should uh should have a 
low enough melting point even with the nickel   that the alloy will melt below the temperature 
that we're going to reach in our furnace so i'm gonna add just a little bit of borax to 
absorb any oxides that have formed on the surface so so all right guys well here's 
our metal from those rings   and a little borax cover looks like it's 
turned kind of red um but it was it was wild   to look down in the crucible you could see right 
through the borax cover it was completely clear   and the metal was there was bubbles forming on 
the top of the metal i don't know what that was   but that was pretty cool i've never seen that 
before so let's just turn this cone mold over there's our little metal pyramid look here and i'll uh i'll get that   borax slag chipped off of there and we'll see 
what we got here but i'll uh i'll get this kind of   cleaned up a little bit and get a fresh 
surface i'll sand or grind down a little bit on   one of the surfaces we'll take it in and get 
it zapped with the xrf gun and see what metals   are in there all right so i'm just taking 
this little hammer i'm just chipping off the   the cover the borax glass on top and it 
gives us a real nice pretty shiny finish but i don't know if you can tell let's see if 
i can get the camera here because it's still   pretty hot the borax is like this kind of deep 
ruby ruby red and what happened was whatever   oxides were forming on the top of this uh metal 
puddle in the crucible were absorbed in the the   borax that i put in there and so whatever oxides 
make ruby red color with the borax that's what we   got and i don't know if that's copper or nickel 
are the two that are supposed to be in there lead   is also supposed to be in there but i think lead 
makes a kind of a green oxide when it mixes with   borax so and what do you guys think what what 
uh what metal oxide forms this ruby red color   with borax i'd be interested to know leave a 
comment below and uh let us know your thoughts   but i'll get the rest of this cleaned up and we'll 
get it zapped with the gun and see what we got all right so we're up over our 1800 degrees 
fahrenheit i think our metal tunnel should   be all molten by now yeah there it is you can see 
the cupel is turning a darker color that's where   it's absorbing the oxides and as those oxides 
get absorbed that metal tunnel shrinks down   and it'll just leave the precious 
metals the gold and silver   when all the base metals are oxidized away okay 
we'll check on our bead here it should be all done i don't know if you can see it in there but it's super tiny let me pull it out and 
uh we'll take a look at it and get it weighed   so there's that little tiny bead in there is 
what we're after so we'll let that cool down a   little bit and then we'll get it pulled 
out and weighed here's our little bead let's see if we can even get a weight point zero 
zero five so point zero zero five the other thing   is i don't know if you can tell let's get 
in here a little closer it's not very gold   colored so i don't know if there's silver in there 
as well we didn't get any silver show up on the   on the xrf but let's just assume 
that it's all gold and we'll do   some math and figure out how much gold's 
in there that point zero zero five grams   okay so check my math here i did uh 16.7 grams 
for our what we had in our original rings   and we have .005 grams of assuming 
pure gold which i don't think it is   and i did that math i ended up with 
point zero three percent gold by weight   so thanks guys for watching point zero three 
percent gold is not very much but if you had   enough of those rings it might be enough for 
you to go after and i might keep playing with   them and maybe in the future do a video on 
uh trying to de-plate the gold plating on   the surface so thanks again for watching hope 
you enjoyed it and we'll see on the next video

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