Lead recovery from cuppeling...

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jadedalex

Active member
Joined
Feb 20, 2017
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43
Doing research on fire assays and learned that bone ash cuppels absorb lead during the assay. Is there a method of recovering the lead from the cuppels or is the effort not worth the cost of trying?
 
It's not an economical effort worth trying, but if you'd like to experiment it only takes pulverizing the cupels and adding a source of carbon, charcoal or flour ect... Charcoal reduces appx. 30 grams of lead per gram and flour reduces 19 grams per gram. Proper flux is another conversation.
 
Believe it or not, this the method used by the ancient Greeks and Romans to separate lead from silver. They smelted silver-lead ore into a metal mix, then did a giant cupellation to separate the lead into the giant cupel and recover the silver left behind, then they processed the crushed bone ash material to recover the lead. This produced a fairly pure lead product and a separate fairly pure silver product.
 
If you are using lead for pgm recovery from ashes , then yo do not need to recover lead. Just crush the bone ash cupel that absorbed lead and mix it with ashes as a substitute of lead in new smelt.
You can do this if you use Portland cement cupel?
May be Harold v, gaurave or Kurt or Steve or..... Can answer you
 
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