# First buttons



## Richard NL (Feb 8, 2016)

First buttons. :mrgreen: 

Poured in cold water.
I'm hoping that it is industry standard, or very close to it.
Thank you all members GRF. 8)

Best regards, 
Richard


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## Barren Realms 007 (Feb 8, 2016)

Pretty nice looking. But they look like they could use another refining.

Good job.


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## Richard NL (Feb 8, 2016)

Barren Realms,

Thank you for sharing your insights.

Best regards,
Richard.


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## nickvc (Feb 8, 2016)

Well done Richard.
If you are using AR to refine the easiest and cheapest way to re refine them is use them to consume any free nitric in subsequent batches, they get refined for free.


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## Richard NL (Feb 8, 2016)

Thank you Nick.

Yes I'm using AR. 

Thank you for the tip, but i already knew that it is called "Harold's added gold button"

In fact changed the procedure(added gold button) on this gold.

As a newbie, i did not have any gold to add, so from the first extraction off the jewelers sweeps I evaporate the solution to almost syrup added HCl and water and precipitating the gold.
Removed the solution after testing with stannous chloride.
All off the next extraction's where put in the same glass coffeepot (with the gold) and slowly heated to +- 65 Celsius/149 Fahrenheit until there was no more bubbles coming from the gold.
Precipitating the gold still in solution with sodium metabisulfite, Harold's washes, redissolving the gold fore a second refining.
Dilution and adding a little sulfuric acid and ice and filtering.
Precipitating the gold, Harold's washes, melting the gold.

Best regards,
Richard.


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## Anonymous (Feb 8, 2016)

Looks good Richard. 

As has been said before it could be better but you're big enough to take that on the chin without getting butthurt 8) 8) 

You highlighted the problem with the gold button to remove Nitric approach very nicely. Could I suggest buying sulphamic acid to get rid of your nitric? It's readily available in holland.

Jon

Edit for clarity. The gold button approach is great. I use it. However and it's a big however - it relies upon you both having gold in stock AND not having gone too mad with the excess Nitric otherwise you're left with the button disappearing and still free nitric in solution.


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## Richard NL (Feb 8, 2016)

spaceships said:


> Looks good Richard.
> 
> As has been said before it could be better but you're big enough to take that on the chin without getting butthurt 8) 8)


Thank you Jon ,no problem :lol: 



spaceships said:


> You highlighted the problem with the gold button to remove Nitric approach very nicely. Could I suggest buying sulfamic acid to get rid of your nitric? It's readily available in holland.


it is on my shopping list already!



spaceships said:


> Jon
> 
> Edit for clarity. The gold button approach is great. I use it. However and it's a big however - it relies upon you both having gold in stock AND not having gone too mad with the excess Nitric otherwise you're left with the button disappearing and still free nitric in solution.


Than there are still options without buying sulfamic acid:
1# Evaporate the solution, drop the gold.
2# Evaporate a part of the solution, drop the gold and use that as added gold.
3#Multi extraction, you can use to little nitric acid or evaporate the first solution(s), drop gold, siphon and continue extracting and putting it with the gold.
I think, much faster than a gold button really big surface area → more complete removal of nitric acid.
That's what i did.

Next time I'm going to melt some gold, i do not want to drop it in water.
maybe that is the problem with the surface.


Best regards,
Richard.

Edit spelling: sulphamic acid=sulfamic acid, no big difference.
And on April 3rd, 2016 edit spelling gonna=going to .


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## nickvc (Feb 9, 2016)

Richard personally I wouldn't get to hung up about the surface or quality of your gold, ask Jon he knows my views..
I can and have produced high quality gold but my view now is why waste my time and effort for no better return, I view refining as a recovery operation but I'm happy to recover melt and sell at 40% + purity, but that is a commercial decision.
If you want to prove you can refine to 999 then great do so but my advice keep recovering your values and do one decent refine to achieve the purity you require or desire, working with small amounts constantly leads to loses that add up, refining a gram or an ounce will probably result in the same loses tied up in papers etc. Concentrate on your recoveries, get your values ready to refine.


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## Richard NL (Feb 9, 2016)

I have jeweler as a customer, I can not return bad gold.
This was a test, the jeweler gave me his waste what he had lying around in his shop.

First thing i am going to do by the jeweler: jewelry rolling mill!
And see how good or bad it really is.
Then we will see how big we can make the surface area, malleability.
If it isn't good: another refining!

I'm still learning and i want to make it worthwhile.
I hope you understand.
By the way, I'm still loving this forum  

Best regards,
Richard.


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## nickvc (Feb 9, 2016)

For jewellers the kiss of death is usually lead, if a little silver or copper is in the refined gold it won't matter too much if he is going to alloy it down they are usually part of the mix of metals in the alloy.
If you refined his material correctly removed any lead and filtered well the gold should be good to go, good rinses once you precipitate the gold is important and if you want to be really sure it's good next time simply dissolve the precipitated powder with HCl and bleach or hydrogen peroxide and HCl and it should come out really clean on the second precipitation.
What exactly was the source material, gold filings, sweeps or karat scrap or a mixture?


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## upcyclist (Feb 9, 2016)

nickvc said:


> For jewellers the kiss of death is usually lead, if a little silver or copper is in the refined gold it won't matter too much if he is going to alloy it down they are usually part of the mix of metals in the alloy.
> If you refined his material correctly removed any lead and filtered well the gold should be good to go, good rinses once you precipitate the gold is important and if you want to be really sure it's good next time simply dissolve the precipitated powder with HCl and bleach or hydrogen peroxide and HCl and it should come out really clean on the second precipitation.


I mostly agree, except I would beg to differ on "the only thing that matters is lead". If I buy 24K gold for alloying, it had better be pure. Not necessarily four nines pure, but at least 0.99. 

If I'm alloying gold for my own use (to give to family/friends), and my "14K" is actually 13.5K, I'll live. But if I alloy it, stamp it with 14K and my maker's mark, and sell it, it had damn well better be 14K. I use plumb solder and generally throw in a touch of extra gold, but if your refined gold makes it less than my target karating and it fails an assay (not generally done in the States, but done with a fair amount of rigor in some Euro countries), you just blew my reputation. A small/niche/high-end jeweler values nothing more than his reputation.

Now, if you sell it to me as .94% or something, I can calculate out the difference of what I need in alloy, but then I can't produce consistent color (is the 6% copper? silver? nickel?). It's also a pain to have to store everything in different batches and recalculate constantly.

_Edit: reduced last sentence from PG-13 rating to G _


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## Richard NL (Feb 9, 2016)

nickvc said:


> For jewellers the kiss of death is usually lead, if a little silver or copper is in the refined gold it won't matter too much if he is going to alloy it down they are usually part of the mix of metals in the alloy.
> If you refined his material correctly removed any lead and filtered well the gold should be good to go, good rinses once you precipitate the gold is important.


I refined his material correctly removed any lead with sulfuric acid and filtering well.
I have used the washing process Harold has posted.
The only contamination in the first round was rust, silver chloride, and platinum.
(According the jeweler it is palladium what previous refiner found.)


Yes, that is toilet paper divided into 6 pieces. :lol: 
It gives my the best and fastest results on testing: gold in solution, pgm's with gold, to much nitric/oxidiser, tin dissolved in HCl. 


nickvc said:


> and if you want to be really sure it's good next time simply dissolve the precipitated powder with HCl and bleach or hydrogen peroxide and HCl and it should come out really clean on the second precipitation.


In combination with the pgm? 
I personally believe that it was better to use ferrous sulfate that i made myself for precipitating.



nickvc said:


> What exactly was the source material, gold filings, sweeps or karat scrap or a mixture?


The source material:


Best regards,
Richard.
(1 reply 3 hours, English is not my first language :|)


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## Barren Realms 007 (Feb 9, 2016)

I love it when someone is persistant and keeps after it.


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## nickvc (Feb 9, 2016)

upcyclist said:


> nickvc said:
> 
> 
> > For jewellers the kiss of death is usually lead, if a little silver or copper is in the refined gold it won't matter too much if he is going to alloy it down they are usually part of the mix of metals in the alloy.
> > If you refined his material correctly removed any lead and filtered well the gold should be good to go, good rinses once you precipitate the gold is important and if you want to be really sure it's good next time simply dissolve the precipitated powder with HCl and bleach or hydrogen peroxide and HCl and it should come out really clean on the second precipitation.


I mostly agree, except I would beg to differ on "the only thing that matters is lead". If I buy 24K gold for alloying, it had better be pure. Not necessarily four nines pure, but at least 0.99. 

If I'm alloying gold for my own use (to give to family/friends), and my "14K" is actually 13.5K, I'll live. But if I alloy it, stamp it with 14K and my maker's mark, and sell it, it had damn well better be 14K. I use plumb solder and generally throw in a touch of extra gold, but if your refined gold makes it less than my target karating and it fails an assay (not generally done in the States, but done with a fair amount of rigor in some Euro countries), you just blew my reputation. A small/niche/high-end jeweler values nothing more than his reputation.

Now, if you sell it to me as .94% or something, I can calculate out the difference of what I need in alloy, but then I can't produce consistent color (is the 6% copper? silver? nickel?). It's also a pain to have to store everything in different batches and recalculate constantly.


I was assuming that the gold produced was at least 995 as this with what is here on the forum is reasonably easy to do.
For your information I refined professionally for the jewellery trade for the better part of 20 yeas, in the UK where if your material was assayed at 374 instead if 375+ the assay office would destroy the work, not say never mind and and send it back but crush the items, my major income from my work was re alloying so I also have a little knowledge of what's required or not required for the alloy to work so please don't try to tell me what score is when it comes to working within very very tight restrictions.
The lax hall marking rules allowed in the US do not exist in the UK and the companies I worked with produced volumes of items that sold internationally with a UK hallmark.
Further if your working with 18k white gold or 22k yellow gold you cannot always use plumb solder as you claim as it will not run and create the join or strength required, from memory some 18k White solders run at around 70% Au and 22k yellow at around 80%.
My point to Richard which you seem to have missed completely is that so long as you have removed the one problem metal that is usually encountered in jewellery scrap, ie lead which was used in old repairs, you should be good to use the refined metal again so long as you have refined properly, where you comment on having 6% copper left in the so called refined gold is a joke, simple rinses at the precipitated stage will remove most base metals and also any silver carried over by drag down, also note I suggested to simply refine the precipitated power again using different reactants to ensure high quality gold.
One very large company who I know of always produced their own casting grain at 374 because they knew that when they then produced the castings the copper and zinc in the alloy would oxidise enough to pass assay, also when we rolled very thin sheet, 4-10 thou, from plum assay material it frequently raised the assay to 378-380 gold.
In the UK there is no grey area on the actual gold content 1 point off assay and your 14k piece is marked as 9k, 748 it's marked as 14k if it's 374 not 375 it's destroyed.


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## upcyclist (Feb 10, 2016)

nickvc said:


> I was assuming that the gold produced was at least 995 as this with what is here on the forum is reasonably easy to do.


Ah, that's the kicker--you assumed .995, but I did not. Other readers may have missed that as well. 

Regardless, I apologize. It was not my intention to insult your intelligence or experience.


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## Anonymous (Feb 10, 2016)

That's ok upcyclist. We all make the odd slight error in judgement when it's all based on text. That's the nature of forums. 8) 8) 

Nick certainly is a mine of information he's just very very good at hiding just how much he knows! Trust me when you've sat over a table a few times sharing a bottle of gin and another of whiskey between you, and you STILL have to drag the detail out of the rotten swine you'll get what I mean :lol: :shock: :lol: 

Jon


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## kurtak (Feb 11, 2016)

spaceships said:


> That's ok upcyclist. We all make the odd slight error in judgement when it's all based on text. That's the nature of forums. 8) 8)
> 
> Nick certainly is a mine of information he's just very very good at hiding just how much he knows! Trust me when you've sat over a table a few times sharing a bottle of gin and another of whiskey between you, and you STILL have to drag the detail out of the rotten swine you'll get what I mean :lol: :shock: :lol:
> 
> Jon



:lol: :lol: :lol: Sounds to me like you just didn't give him enough whiskey/gin Jon :lol: --- or maybe to much :lol: :twisted: :lol: 

Kurt


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## Richard NL (Feb 11, 2016)

A little update on my gold.


The jewelry rolling mill was not clean but it functions, a lot of dirt on the gold.
That was probably also the reason that it did not go straight through.




Best regards,
Richard.


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## FrugalRefiner (Feb 11, 2016)

Very nice! As you said, it picked up a lot of crap from the rolls, but no cracking or splitting. Did you anneal it at all, or were you able to roll it that thin and long without it?

Dave


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## Richard NL (Feb 11, 2016)

No, I did not anneal, no heat treatment.
I was able to roll it that thin and long without it.
I did want to go further but the rolls where already under good tension.

Best regards,
Richard.


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## upcyclist (Feb 11, 2016)

Looks good! Multiple runs in a rolling mill will almost never come out straight--even a single run often puts a bend in it. If your gold was perfectly uniform, and the rollers were too, then I guess it'd be straight 

That's one great thing about gold--you don't have to anneal it nearly as often as sterling or copper/bronze/brass...

--Eric


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