# From the filter to the torch....



## firedan525 (Jun 4, 2007)

Hey yall, my wife let come out and play, LOL. 

I pride myself on being a perfectionist, never get really anything perfect, but perfect to me is the best possible outcome or product I can produce with what is available to me. 

First, I haven't had real good luck with filters lately. I'm not losing any gold or nothing and its catching all the junk. My problem is after I acid wash 3 times and then H2O wash 4 times and I spend all this time making sure the mud is as pure and clean as possible. After it dries into a cake I sprinkle borax onto it and kneed it in I notice that either the filter starts to rip or I smear the gold into the filter and I am not getting a very clean filter paper at all so what I end up doing is cutting away the clean part of the filter and torching the rest. I hate doing that but what else was I suposed to do? So now I have about 12 grams of gold done in this manner. Well I'm not upset with how my gold looks but I want to dissolve it down and refire it w/o any filter so I know that it is the best I can do. Can somebody tell me if it may be the brand of filter or possibly some other reason.

Next, I have not had any problems using cruciples, but when I got ahold of some of Steve cupels, wow. I might not have the technique down yet. I either get them too hot and the crack em, or I get them to hot and they drink so much borax that the gold likes to stick to the cupel itself. Never had that problem before using cruciples. I guess I am going to try some melting dishes and try them. I'll just transfer gold to a pouring cruciple when time comes to pour into mold. as anyone had similar problem with cupels like I have discribled. Is there a way to prep them. I know with my cruciples I heat them up w/ borax and swirl them around and get them good and coated with borax before processing any gold in them and I did put some borax in the cuple but it got sucked up so fast that my gold was sticking. 

Thanks yall, DAN


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## lazersteve (Jun 4, 2007)

Dan,

The washings can be done without using a filter for the bulk of the powder. Just put the powder in a casserole dish and do the washes in the dish. You can filter the wash liquid that you pour off so you don't lose any gold. Once you have all the washes done, wash the powder into to a clean filter and water rinse one more time to get the gold into the center of the filter. Once this is done I let it dry overnight and transfer the still moist powder to a fresh dry filter. 

From here I mix in the borax and add to the dish/cupel/crucible. The cupels are designed to absorb the flux to pull the slag and base metals out of the gold. They are very delicate and take practice to use with the torch. After one heavy use they tend to collapse. If you are gentle with them you can milk 3 or 4 melts out of one.

The melting dishes and crucibles don't function like cupels. They are for melting and pouring the gold and annealing. Sounds like you are doing the preparation process correctly by primeing with a coating of borax. This keeps the gold from sticking to the dish/crucible. I'm going to make an updated smelting video soon using the melting dish. The crucible is designed for use in a furnace or oven/kiln.

I'm sure some of the other guys have some good info on this subject as well.

Steve


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## Anonymous (Jun 17, 2007)

how many grams of mud is worthwile melting ? i harvested 200 grams of gold fingers and succesfully refinded the gold, but is this worthwile melting ? i quess it was only 1 or 2 grams of mud. any help would be appriciated thanks


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## Harold_V (Jun 17, 2007)

All depends on your objective. 

In the course of refining, I melted buttons that represented various new processes, including one tiny one that weighed about 48 grains. For you folks that talk metric, that would be about three grams (15.432 grains/gram). 

I still have that tiny button------it represents the very first time I used a cyanide column to extract gold from an ore. It was a very good learning experience--but was a complete failure in extraction. From assays of the ore after the column attempt, I learned that the ore in question had to be crushed fine, and had to be oxidized in order to liberate the values. Looking at that button helps me recall the hard work I did in getting the knowledge I acquired. Yours may do the same for you, assuming you keep it as a memento. For me, it wasn't about money----it was about learning, and gold. 

Harold


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## lazersteve (Jun 17, 2007)

I started out melting everything as soon as I had recovered it. I quickly accumulated a quantity of small impure buttons. As time went on I found better ways to process the raw materials and clean the recovered gold resulting in purer gold. Since I didn't want to mix the impure gold buttons with the pure gold I had only one choice.. refine the impure buttons into purer gold. 

As I became more adept at processing larger batches at one time, the smaller buttons had no appeal to me. At that point I was only interested in pouring bars of 1 ozT or larger. Now I always accumulate larger quantities before considering processing and melting. The melting process can sometimes induce impurities and losses.

I learned it's a lot easier in the long run to spend extra time cleaning the gold while it is in foil or powder form before melting. This extra effort will pay off as purer gold.

If I were you I would make sure the small batch is as pure as you can get it, then store it. When you have accumulated enough for a ingot, then combine the pure batches, melt, and pour. One exception would be if you are performing an assay to determine the value of gold in a given quantity of scrap or ore as Harold had mentioned.

Steve


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