Jeweler’s Dirt

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Fantastic work! Sweeps can be a pain to refine to fine gold and your results speak for themselves. That is some nice looking shot to boot, maybe you would like to talk about the process you used for shotting your gold.

Job well done!
 
Hi Emmjae
That looks really good
Congratulations
It would be nice to give details if you can
step by step
Sorry for asking for too much
I have also done polishing dirt and it is really labour intensive
For example how many times did you boil and siphon in the AR.
and I guess you do this until the AR does not show gold with the Solution A
Thanks
 
He was estimating an ounce of gold possibly and I was able to refine 52.56 grams
Click to expand...

That's 70% more than he expected. He was obviously dealing with a less than creditable refiner. Seems like you've got his attention and maybe even a long term customer.

Good work.
 
Hi folks,

Thanks for all the great compliments. It means a lot to me coming from my favorite online teachers.

Oz: As far as how I made my gold shot, I took the advice from one of Harold’s posts and watched Steve’s excellent video and came up with a plan based on what I had on hand.

Don’t laugh too hard but I didn’t have a stainless steel container that I could put 12” of water in so I used a 5 gal. Bucket and an old stainless steel dog bowl to set in the bottom. It was almost a perfect fit. Also made it easy to retrieve my gold without having to dump all the water. Just lift the bowl up.

I then drilled an 1/8” hole in one of my 100 DWT silica melting dishes and form fitted it into a piece of firebrick making sure I had a large enough hole in the brick to allow for easy flow through. I placed the firebrick on the edge of a table with some steel to protect the edge and rigged a map gas torch so the hottest part tip was on the hole I drilled. Centered the bucket under the prefluxed melting dish and blocked it up. The distance from the dish to the water ended up being approx. 22”. Fired up the torch to heat up the dish while I started melting my gold with another set up.

When my gold was ready to pour I gave the water in the bucket a vigorous stirring and slowly pour my gold into the dish. I firmly believe the key is the water agitation. The shot got flatter near the end of my pour when the water swirl had slowed down. Needed a third hand to keep it going..lol. I will come up with a way of doing that mechanically for next time.


Refiner232121: As for a step by step guide on how to process polishing dirt, this was my second attempt at this process and I’m no where near an expert. However here is a brief list of the steps I have done.

1: Incinerate everything and sieve through a fine mesh strainer. Remove any large metal bits, glass and trash. Grind and sieve again. Anything left I put into a separate container. Incinerate again.

2: Run a magnet through the incinerated power and put anything that sticks into the separate container from above. I process this the same way but keep it separate from all the other batches.

3: Do several low boils in HCL or until there’s no significant change in color. Check with stannous and save to reclaim some of the silver chloride that may have accumulated.

4: Do several low boils in AR, (I boil for 6 – 8 hrs per run), combine and evaporate, filter and drop gold.

I feel that you have to make the decision on how many times you boil your dirt in AR. The quality of the material will never be the same. I watch the intensity of my stannous test per batch and take it to a point of what I believe is a fair stopping point based on time and material expense needed to process. It’s reaches a point to where it will cost more that the gold is worth to retrieve it.

I also believe there is a ratio of material amounts to chemical amounts needed based on the size of vessel you are using to get the best results with the least amount of time and AR boils. That ratio is still a mystery to me and I will keep working at it till I find it.

Hope this helps and thanks again.

Mike
 
Emmjae when I was refining sweeps I used to find that if you had heated the AR and stirred the powders regulary your sweeps would yield around 90% of the total there in the first digestion so if I found 100 grams in the first digestion there would be 10grams left to extract in the next digestion and 1 gram in the next. This was never spot on but never far off but one difference that might cause a variance is that I used. 12 inch filter beds with good vacuum extraction, hope this helps and confirms what you found.
 
Hi Emmjae

4: Do several low boils in AR, (I boil for 6 – 8 hrs per run), combine and evaporate, filter and drop gold.
Click to expand...

You boil with the hot plate on low
6 -8 hrs is something I was not doing
Is it necessary to boil for so long

I have noticed in your fume hood that you have those vibrating machines
I don't think Harold had one of those but it seems like a good idea.
How much do they cost,is guess the vessel is heated when it is being vibrated and how much do they cost

Thanks for all the details I will read them more carefully later on
Take care
 
I then drilled an 1/8” hole in one of my 100 DWT silica melting dishes and form fitted it into a piece of firebrick
making sure I had a large enough hole in the brick to allow for easy flow through. I placed the firebrick on the edge
of a table with some steel to protect the edge and rigged a map gas torch so the hottest part tip was on the hole I
drilled. Centered the bucket under the prefluxed melting dish and blocked it up. The distance from the dish to the
water ended up being approx. 22”. Fired up the torch to heat up the dish while I started melting my gold with another
set up.
Click to expand...
Hi Mike
I am reading your post carefully and I dont understand this part very much,would it be possible to explain this a bit more or maybe a photo
Thanks
 
I think I will have to buy a magnetic stirer
I boiled some 10K gold and I saw that it needed stiring all the time and this is needed for plishing dirt.
Where is the best place to get one of these things at a good price.

I also tried to make one of these stirrers and the magent broke the motor
I know that there is thread about that in this forum but I was not able to benefit from it

I was wondering if Harold used one of these things.
Thanks
 
Emmjae
How about vacuum filtering
http://www.amazon.com/Vacuum-Filter-Kit-Hand-Pump/dp/B003SSM77K/ref=sr_1_47?ie=UTF8&qid=1300459394&sr=8-47
I am thinking of buying one of these
Did you have one of these things

I think 4metals had a link to a simple vacumm pump device
I am trying to find that but I cant
I would like to order just a simple pump

I think I found that link
http://www.crscientific.com/aspirator-pumps.html
http://www.crscientific.com/vacuumpumps.html
Which would be a better buy
There is even a metal kind
Since this will be used for water only I think that might be a better choice
Thanks
 
http://www.lmine.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=LMS&Product_Code=18533&Category_Code=hotplates_stirrers

This looks good
Hotplate Stirrer
 
Here is a nice alternate sight that seems to have good prices. Posted before by GSP I think.
https://www.pelletlab.com/
 
golddie said:
Emmjae
How about vacuum filtering
http://www.amazon.com/Vacuum-Filter-Kit-Hand-Pump/dp/B003SSM77K/ref=sr_1_47?ie=UTF8&qid=1300459394&sr=8-47
I am thinking of buying one of these
Did you have one of these things

I think 4metals had a link to a simple vacumm pump device
I am trying to find that but I cant
I would like to order just a simple pump

I think I found that link
http://www.crscientific.com/aspirator-pumps.html
http://www.crscientific.com/vacuumpumps.html
Which would be a better buy
There is even a metal kind
Since this will be used for water only I think that might be a better choice
Thanks
Click to expand...

Here is one that takes less water pressure to opperate and a lower price.

http://www.amazon.com/Aspirator-minimum-water-pressure-vacuum/dp/B003NUWGM4/ref=pd_sbs_indust_2
 
Refiner232121 said:
Hi Emmjae

You boil with the hot plate on low
6 -8 hrs is something I was not doing
Is it necessary to boil for so long

I have noticed in your fume hood that you have those vibrating machines
I don't think Harold had one of those but it seems like a good idea.
How much do they cost,is guess the vessel is heated when it is being vibrated and how much do they cost
Click to expand...

Unless I’m doing something major wrong (which is usually the case) 6 to 8 hrs is what it seems to take for my reactions to complete. At the moment I use a 2-liter beaker without a pour lip and a small saucer for a watch glass. With no pour lip on the beaker I get a pretty good seal so I have very little loss in fumes.

I keep my solution temperature just below the boiling point. When I see that I am not producing anymore of the tiny fizzing type of bubbles, I’ll stir my solution and observe. When I see no more fizzing bubbles I feel that my nitric acid has been consumed. I’ll then let it cool, siphon off and add a fresh batch of AR.

I start off using a 3:1 ratio for my first AR boil. After that I go to a 4:1 ratio. My nitric acid is homemade using the cold recipe formula found here on the forum. I’m not too concerned with having added too much nitric acid in my final AR boil because I evaporate my solutions to cut down on volume.

I have used my magnetic stir/hot plate to run my polishing sweeps but I found it harder to see if my reaction has completed. It also took the same amount of time so I saw no real benefit. Also if you stop the stirring at any point during the reaction, the materials settle on the stir bar and it’s very difficult to get it going again.

I mainly use my magnetic stir/hot plate for making my cold recipe nitric acid. It works excellent for getting all of the sodium nitrate dissolved in the water and having a constant stirring action while adding the sulfuric acid. I can produce enough to make 1-liter of nitric acid at a time for a cost of less than $10.00 per liter.

The magnetic stir/hot plates can be very expensive if buying new. I purchased both of mine from eBay. It took a couple of months but got them both for under $110.00 each shipped. I purchased my stir bars from eBay too. Found a 20 piece assortment ranging from ½” to 3” in lengths for $48.00 shipped.

Mike
 
You sweeps are more than likely karat scrap and would therefore have some silver content which would slow down the AR process. If this is the case then perhaps next time you could perform a small experiment and take a sample of perhaps 10g of normal sweeps and 10g of sweeps after having been inquarted and processed in nitric, how much inquarting per karat of scrap that is required would be a hard one to guess given the different grades of karat scrap the jeweler has processed but you probably couldn't go wrong in regarding it all as 12k but this would depend on how much silver was already in the sweeps...
 
golddie said:
I then drilled an 1/8” hole in one of my 100 DWT silica melting dishes and form fitted it into a piece of firebrick
making sure I had a large enough hole in the brick to allow for easy flow through. I placed the firebrick on the edge
of a table with some steel to protect the edge and rigged a map gas torch so the hottest part tip was on the hole I
drilled. Centered the bucket under the prefluxed melting dish and blocked it up. The distance from the dish to the
water ended up being approx. 22”. Fired up the torch to heat up the dish while I started melting my gold with another
set up.
Click to expand...
Hi Mike
I am reading your post carefully and I dont understand this part very much,would it be possible to explain this a bit more or maybe a photo
Thanks
Click to expand...

Hi Golddie,

Check out Lazersteve’s web site and look under his melting video’s. That will give you a very good idea of what I was doing. I used firebrick to hold my melting dish because I didn’t have the ceramic blanket. I elevated my dish above my water source so I could agitate the water before I poured.

At the moment I am still using the hand operated vacuum pump like in your link. I would love to set up a water supplied vacuum source but I’m on a city water hook up and my water bill is too high as it is. I don’t have the room to set up a water holding tank with a pump to operate a water type system. I will probably end up making my own set up using an old air compressor unless I find a vacuum pump at a decent price.

Hope this helps,

Mike
 
stihl88 said:
You sweeps are more than likely karat scrap and would therefore have some silver content which would slow down the AR process. If this is the case then perhaps next time you could perform a small experiment and take a sample of perhaps 10g of normal sweeps and 10g of sweeps after having been inquarted and processed in nitric, how much inquarting per karat of scrap that is required would be a hard one to guess given the different grades of karat scrap the jeweler has processed but you probably couldn't go wrong in regarding it all as 12k but this would depend on how much silver was already in the sweeps...
Click to expand...


Hi stihl88,

You have me a little confused. I think were talking about different kinds of sweeps. I was refining polishing sweeps (more like a powder or dirt) and I believe your talking about what I would call bench filings/sweeps (more like small metal bits). I'm not sure how to inquart a powder/dirt.

Mike
 

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