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
