I have spent a reasonable amount of time developing technique and understanding processing, where I haven't spent time developing skill is the assay. And it's been said more than once that you make your money in the assay.
I have no difficulty in the understanding of procedure for material like karat scrap, silver, or even the higher grade PGM's. Where it seems like it's all technique, is the assay of low grade scrap.
The idea of digesting a 2 gram pin full of copper and every other base metal to get MAYBE .02 grams out, and not making money unless you can do it to within .005 grams is obviously a bit intimidating, but I'd like to start.
So here's the actual questions:
Scorification vs Cupellation - Cupellation seems to work better for lower melting point impurities, but if it's a high copper/nickel material, scorification works better I believe. Given a low grade material, how many scorifications should one expect to do before they can blow off a reasonable portion of the copper? Is this where the addition of silver helps an assay? Loss of gold during this stage?
How difficult is the actual technique of digesting the copper bead after rolling it out? And not losing gold when decanting...as in my experience, it's not easy. Not at all. And it doesn't seem like it's enough gold to anneal in to a
I have no difficulty in the understanding of procedure for material like karat scrap, silver, or even the higher grade PGM's. Where it seems like it's all technique, is the assay of low grade scrap.
The idea of digesting a 2 gram pin full of copper and every other base metal to get MAYBE .02 grams out, and not making money unless you can do it to within .005 grams is obviously a bit intimidating, but I'd like to start.
So here's the actual questions:
Scorification vs Cupellation - Cupellation seems to work better for lower melting point impurities, but if it's a high copper/nickel material, scorification works better I believe. Given a low grade material, how many scorifications should one expect to do before they can blow off a reasonable portion of the copper? Is this where the addition of silver helps an assay? Loss of gold during this stage?
How difficult is the actual technique of digesting the copper bead after rolling it out? And not losing gold when decanting...as in my experience, it's not easy. Not at all. And it doesn't seem like it's enough gold to anneal in to a