# Smelting video



## kjavanb123 (Oct 1, 2016)

All,

After a long waiting, I video recorded our smelting process. 

Feed materials are actually components depopulated manually from about 74 lbs of mixed motherboards and 2 kg of cards.

They were pyrolized prior to smelt. Please leave comments.

I will be doing more sample smelting specially on cell phone boards, ceramic catalytic converters and telecomm boards.

You can check out the video at
https://youtu.be/Ttv-qLxTs90

Best regards
Kj


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## butcher (Oct 1, 2016)

Thanks for sharing.


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

When using a rotary melt furnace like you have I would suggest collecting your fluxes and having a flux remelt day when you fire up the furnace and re-melt all of your slags and pour into a large cone mold. when you examine your slags before melting you will need to determine if you need a collector pool of molten metal to make the process more effective. If you choose silver as the collector it is easy to assay it and use the silver as is for further inquarts and continue your use and reuse of silver to collect other values.


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 2, 2016)

Butcher,
Thanks for your comments.

4metals,
We do save up the slags, and main collector used in rotary furnace is lead, then silver at the stationary furnace.
In my experience slags from rotary has 1 or 2ppm per ton of slags. But using a cone mold is an excellent idea, thanks.

Regards
Kj


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

So that bee hive shaped furnace is a cupellation furnace with a bone ash base. I thought that is what that was!

Do you have different pour spouts on opposite sides of the rotary?


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

I had one too! But used silver or copper as a collector.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 2, 2016)

kjavanb123 said:


> Butcher,
> Thanks for your comments.
> 
> 4metals,
> ...



Kevin in the videos that were shown is that your operation or someone elses operation that allows you to use their equipment?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLgvV3Cs_VdnCyIpYkJ27ew


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 2, 2016)

4metals said:


> So that bee hive shaped furnace is a cupellation furnace with a bone ash base. I thought that is what that was!
> 
> Do you have different pour spouts on opposite sides of the rotary?



Actually the buttom of that stationary furnace is not made of bone ash, it is made of refractory cement, and it oxidize the lead ingots and as you can see in part I of video it gets tilted and lead oxide is poured off into the pot shaped piece under the furnace. 

This lead oxide is reused in rotary furnace again.


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 2, 2016)

4metals said:


> I had one too! But used silver or copper as a collector.
> 
> reverb furnace and cone molds.jpg



Neat. I remember seeing this lovely setup in your posta few years ago. 
So you used silver or copper then went to electrolysis path?


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 2, 2016)

4metals said:


> I had one too! But used silver or copper as a collector.
> 
> reverb furnace and cone molds.jpg



4metals, a couple of questions.


I noticed you have 8 cone molds on the table in the photo.

When you processed with that rotary furnace how many mold's were required for the slag and how many for the actual metal were used and accumilated?

How much material were you able to max process with that furnace in each load?

I notice on the right side of the furnace is the drive assembly and the burner on the left. How did the exhaust system hook upto that unit?

Looking at the picture I don't see any marking on the drum indicating that it rotated/turned during it's operation so am I wrong in assuming it stayed stationary during the process and was only rotated to empty the contents of the chamber after the completion of the of the melting process?

Looking at the size of that thing I'm guessing it was a 3-4M BTU/Hr fuel requirement?

That is a massive sucker.


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 2, 2016)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> kjavanb123 said:
> 
> 
> > Butcher,
> ...



He is my partner, as I am doing the PGM and gold refining and also invest in raw materials.

He still does jewlery sweeps smelting. That is why he has the rotary and I suggested a partnership with him because we can do large volumes.

Regards
Kj


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 2, 2016)

kjavanb123 said:


> Barren Realms 007 said:
> 
> 
> > kjavanb123 said:
> ...



That's good. I like the simplicity of the setup. :mrgreen:


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

The melts done with silver, the preferred route as I ran a lot of material with silver, were cleaned up in a silver cell. And PC boards, after pyrolysis were done with copper and cleaned up in a copper cell. 

The furnace as it is seen in the picture was not where it operated, believe it or not it was portable. A long exhaust hood with a bag house, almost like a one car garage enclosed on all but 1 end, housed either the reverb or the pyrolysis oven as needed. 

The furnace did not spin 360 degrees, while operating it rocked and stopped just shy of material flowing out of the spout. It had a travel of about 260 degrees to keep the charge moving. I had a de-slag spout on one side which was poured into huge wheeled cone molds until metal began to pour out, then it was switched to the other side spout by tipping in the other direction, that side had a smaller pour spout. Then either the smaller cone molds or bar molds were used. I do like the way Kevin's furnace pours into a cradled crucible on a slide.

The furnace I had was connected to a 6" gas pipe (natural gas) and an average pour was 5000 ounces of copper, more weight for silver. The gas hookup on furnace took a long time to interchange the pyrolysis oven with the reverb but I ran a lot more material requiring incineration or pyrolysis than I did in the reverb, and considering the cost of the bag house and hookup, switching them out was still cost effective.


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

Kevin,



> Actually the bottom of that stationary furnace is not made of bone ash, it is made of refractory cement, and it oxidize the lead ingots and as you can see in part I of video it gets titled and lead oxide is poured off into the pot shaped piece under the furnace.



OK you lost me here. The video does not show the pouring off of the lead. And if you were pouring off lead it would be mixed with PM's so you would get no separation. From the video it appears the thin plate of metal which is remaining on the bottom of the furnace is what remains when bone ash absorbs the base metals and lead and cools enough to solidify, leaving the precious metals behind. This is what contains your values. 

If the bottom is not compressed bone ash, how does this happen? What am I missing?


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 2, 2016)

4metals said:


> The melts done with silver, the preferred route as I ran a lot of material with silver, were cleaned up in a silver cell. And PC boards, after pyrolysis were done with copper and cleaned up in a copper cell.
> 
> The furnace as it is seen in the picture was not where it operated, believe it or not it was portable. A long exhaust hood with a bag house, almost like a one car garage enclosed on all but 1 end, housed either the reverb or the pyrolysis oven as needed.
> 
> ...



I can see that being used as a portable unit. Actually not as much of a problem as most would think as long as the hookup for natural gas was arranged for. I can see it as a propane setup being even less of a problem for refueling as a portable setup. if you wanted to go that route.

UHH the mice are running on the ferris wheel with ideas now!!! 8)


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

In NYC back in the '80's a 6" natural gas pipe was welded and had companion flanges, so getting it in position where the short length of flex connector that was legal would work took some time, then just bolting up the flange. Maybe an hour to change them out. The pyrolysis unit only needed a 2" line so that was cake. 

I would think a scaled down 30 gallon drum sized one of these would be quite useful. Still I wouldn't use lead as a collector. Something about seeing the grandkids grow up makes me prefer copper or silver.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 2, 2016)

4metals said:


> In NYC back in the '80's a 6" natural gas pipe was welded and had companion flanges, so getting it in position where the short length of flex connector that was legal would work took some time, then just bolting up the flange. Maybe an hour to change them out. The pyrolysis unit only needed a 2" line so that was cake.
> 
> I would think a scaled down 30 gallon drum sized one of these would be quite useful. Still I wouldn't use lead as a collector. Something about seeing the grandkids grow up makes me prefer copper or silver.



Hooking up a 2" line is a piece of cake time wise and material wise.

Lead is out of the question. Silver would be my preference.


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## Shark (Oct 2, 2016)

> UHH the mice are running on the ferris wheel with ideas now!!!





> I would think a scaled down 30 gallon drum sized one of these would be quite useful.



Yep the mice are chugging along and that 30 gallon drum was close to what they were working at,


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 2, 2016)

4metals,

The operator adds silver to the molten lead ingots in that stationary furnace, and that silver be mixed and alloy with all the precious metals exist in feeding lead ingots from rotarty furnace.

There is a few second frame in part I video, where tiny stream of molten lead is pouring into the mold at the bottom.

Here is the photo of mold filled with lead,





That thin piece of metals at the end of video part I, is the added silver plus any other silver and precious metals in the lead ingots from rotary furnace, which gets cleaned up as it is red hot, and also hammered before put into nitric acid.

And as for the spout for slags and one for metals, our rotary has only one output, they pour the molten lead first, and I guess the operator can determine the molten slags from the molten lead.

I really like the rotary furnace as for my experience has much better recovery of PMs, and it makes the smelting time faster vs my stationary furnace which I had been using before this partnership.

The entire smelting from start to time we melted the gold was 6 hours, he said it would have taken 1-1.5 hour more melting time had the batch been 500 kg.

Oh an one more thing, operator mentions using natural gas instead of diesel for furnaces, make the time to get to needed temprature longer.

Best regards
Kj


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

Let me summarize this from what you have said;

The lead ingots from the rotary furnace are poured in the first part of the video. Lead is your collector metal. These are added to your stationary furnace which is shown in the picture above. 

When the lead melts, the operator adds silver to the furnace. I assume this is essentially inquarting because without the silver you would not be able to successfully part with nitric acid. So the silver addition is at least 3 times your expected gold content. 

I did see the stream of molten lead alloy pouring off into the round mold. Are you saying all of the lead will pour off and leave just precious metals on the bottom? That is not cupellation. 

From looking at the design of the furnace, it does not appear to tip to pour out the molten metal but maybe it does and I just don't see it. If it doesn't tip and the bottom is a dish shaped bowl made of refractory it must be difficult to empty out when the metal is molten. Are you sure they don't slag off the crust on top of the melt into the pots and the lead and base metals absorb into a bone ash base? If this isn't your shop, maybe they're not telling you everything. From the video, I cannot see how you could get the silver and gold alloy for parting the way you describe it. 

Please explain how you get separation of the precious metals from the lead. While working at a mine in Ecuador I used cupellation extensively to clean up doré metals and never experienced the values separating from the lead, but the furnace I used did not have an oxidizing flame blowing directly at the charge. The lead and base metals were absorbed into the bone ash hearth.


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## 4metals (Oct 2, 2016)

OK I watched the video again and see the stationary furnace tipping when you pan across the room with your camera. 

So if it tips and pours right off the bottom you never need crucibles. The oxidizing flame puts all of the base metals into a slag that floats and is skimmed into the pots. That is what you pass through the rotary a second time. 

That means you get separation of values by burning off the remaining lead. Does that sound right?

I also noticed the stationary furnace has a little twin brother. Can you post a picture of that?

So this refiner produces all of his gold from jewelry and jewelers sweeps by inquartation and parting?


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 3, 2016)

4metals said:


> OK I watched the video again and see the stationary furnace tipping when you pan across the room with your camera.
> 
> So if it tips and pours right off the bottom you never need crucibles. The oxidizing flame puts all of the base metals into a slag that floats and is skimmed into the pots. That is what you pass through the rotary a second time.
> 
> ...



4metals, 

The video shows the rotary furnace being tapped and some of the lead being poured into the crucible the user pours into the ingot molds. It then shows at another part where the rotary furnace is tapped for the final recovery of the remaining lead going into a cone mold with the slag running out onto the ground.

It then jumps to the other furnace with the user throwing another bar in at the 1:44 mark but I don't think this is the silver being added because it is too large of a piece of metal for what is recovered for the final digestion in nitric to recover the final gold. Also the pot is not large enough to handle the amount of lead that was used in the recover process in the rotary furnace if it is poured off from the smaller furnace.

I think a longer video would be necessary to make this more understandable.

I think Kurt made a post last year on how he did this process that went into good detail with the person he was working with with a good explination. He might want to post a link to that thread.


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 3, 2016)

4metals,
The first 3 paragraphs of your statement is describing what we do there.

If you look at the following photo, you notice a chained craned that hang on top of the stationary furnace, that is what they use to tilt the furnace to pour out lead plus base metals oxide to round mold.



Once all the lead is out, remains only the silver alloy which does not oxidized. This is what the silver alloy looks like after being cleaned out and prior to dissolving it in nitric,



The way we do oxidizing is lower the flame and let the air flow on the charge, if fuel is cut it produces a very dense yellowish lead oxide fumes, it does oxidation a lot sooner but major hazarod. That is why he sticks to his model of controlled heat and oxygen to oxidize base metals with minimum to no fumes.

The way we part the precious metals are from lead, the silver is used at the stationary furnace, prior to rinsing off the lead oxide.

The rest is just nitric acid and silver alloy, silver is precipitated as silver chloride, then filtered and palladium nitrate is dropped using DMG.

Regards
Kj


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 3, 2016)

4metals,

".That means you get separation of values by burning off the remaining lead. Does that sound right?"

That is correct sir. After silver is added of course, then burning off lead, and we are left with a silver alloy containing all precious metals.

He actually has two more stationary furnaces, smaller in size. They are used for testing small samples. I will take photos of them and post here as soon as I get back there.

His main business has been jewlery sweeps, and from what I know he follows the same procedures for the sweeps as well, and based on the constant clients that show up at his shop I am guessing his yields are good.

I was the one who told him about the concept of smelting PCBs and we started a joint venture since then.

I cant get this out of my mind, seeing all those ewastes in that town in China or Ghana with all the toxic smokes from burning, all I need is showing our capability and fume scrubbers to their governments, and we can set this system over there and buy boards from those who burn them like that to just get the copper, I am sure that would be a major business.


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 3, 2016)

Barren,
The operator allows the pouring of the molten lead into crucible and case it to ingots, and as soon as the slags start to pour into crucible he holds under the rotarty furnace, they spin the furnace.

At the later frame in the video what pours on the floor is just the slags. No lead is found in there.

I will try to make a longer video next time when we will smelt ceramic catalytic converters or this lot 75 lbs of boards.



Regards
Kj


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 3, 2016)

kjavanb123 said:


> Barren,
> The operator allows the pouring of the molten lead into crucible and case it to ingots, and as soon as the slags start to pour into crucible he holds under the rotarty furnace, they spin the furnace.
> 
> At the later frame in the video what pours on the floor is just the slags. No lead is found in there.
> ...



Curiosity would probably get the better of me and I wold ball mill the slags and pan them just to check and see if any metals were in the slag. I think it is a simple and good setup.

You are incinerating and sifting and getting the magnetic parts out of the material before it goes into the rotary furnace, correct?

You answered my biggest question when you stated that the lead is burnt off.

Thanks for posting this thread.


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## 4metals (Oct 3, 2016)

Kevin,

Thank you for posting this thread, it is interesting. 

Concerning the pots of lead oxide poured off from the stationary furnace that are added back into the rotary furnace, is that remelting performed as part of your job with you getting credit for the values recovered? I hope so because I will bet they are holding values! While skimming the surface it is impossible not to skim a little molten lead. That lead has your values in the alloy. 

Another secondary point is that burning off of the lead is a rather toxic way to go. Cupellation with a bone ash hearth will still result in 10% of the lead volatilized but 90% is absorbed into the bone ash so you don't have to breathe it. 

What you are doing is oxidizing lead metal into lead oxide and removing the lead oxide, along with the other base metal oxides, from a floating surface slag. Essentially the exact opposite of a litharge assay fusion.


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## 4metals (Oct 3, 2016)

Kevin,

Your process does not take copper out of the system. The copper, as an oxide is constantly reintroduced into the rotary in the reprocessed slags. Are you fluxing to remove copper?

With copper as a collector in the rotary, instead of lead, you could set up electrolytic copper sulfate cells and get paid for copper, eliminate the health risks associated with lead fumes, eliminate silver inquarting and the expense of recovery. The downside is you will not see payment as quickly.

As you grow in size, greater profitability comes from the ability to batch jobs together, that will involve more of the analytical lab side of the business.


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 3, 2016)

> You are incinerating and sifting and getting the magnetic parts out of the material before it goes into the rotary furnace, correct?
> 
> You answered my biggest question when you stated that the lead is burnt off.
> 
> Thanks for posting this thread.



Barren,
Glad I could be any assistance. As for your questions, no we do not use magnet or any pre treatment of ashes from pyro or incineration.

Everything is fluxed, mixed with lithrage and some coals and charghed the rotary furnace.

Regards
Kj


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 3, 2016)

4metals said:


> Kevin,
> 
> Thank you for posting this thread, it is interesting.
> 
> ...



Thank you sir. 

The lead which is used as the main collector metals and its final poured off lead oxide belong to my partner. So I dont get paid or anything for that.
As for the values being in those lead oxide, I have tested this myself twice, gathered all the lead oxides which we have accumlated using my stationary furnace, and melt them in our own furnace and result was absolutley 0g of values.

I also remelt the slags from my previous operations, and from over 500 kg of slags which was smelted using rotary furnace, we only recovered 2.2g of gold at the end. This was from many different batches, which tells me still a good recovery rate and minimal losses.

But I will do what Barren mention to just break a few slags and pan it.

Also skimming is where these operators got skills, This is a simple test they do to make sure the lead is not coming off with the skimmed oxides, as they tilt the furnace, they collect a small sample on the metallic part of a shovel, if it is lead oxide mixed with base metals, once cooled, that stuff on metallic part of shovel will just fall as one piece, but it contains silver or value it will stick to shovel.

They claim once the silver is added, it will collect all the PMs in the molten lead.

As for fumes, we use the following filter and scrubbing system,



It contains cooling section, bag house and cyclone, all the lead fumes are collected by bags in the bag house. These recovered lead can make up to 6% of the lead used up in operation. Also recovered once a year.

So it is very enviromentally friendly operation, and local EPA approved. 

Regards
Kj


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 3, 2016)

4metals said:


> Kevin,
> 
> Your process does not take copper out of the system. The copper, as an oxide is constantly reintroduced into the rotary in the reprocessed slags. Are you fluxing to remove copper?
> 
> ...



4metals,

Copper can be used but we need to go through the whole scheme of electrolysis which is a one time large investment and as you said time consuming to get the goodies.

Since we depopulate boards manually, pyrolize both sections, smelt the components ash to get the values, we can pyrolize the bare boards and melt the ashes in rotary and get the copper.

Advantage of lead smelting using what we do is the quick value back from the precious metals and purchasing more materials next day.

With the right equipments and scrubbers etc this along other components can be so easily used for replacement of cu smelting.

Regards
Kj


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## 4metals (Oct 3, 2016)

> Also skimming is where these operators got skills,



Skimming is also why some refiners get their bad reputations. :shock: Be careful, overskimming of the floating slags is your greatest weakness.


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 4, 2016)

4metals,

There are ways to check if we overskimmed or not, one would be slag remelting or panbing the milled slags, the other one would be smelting a known amount of materials that we know how much gold we expecting, like jewlery sweeps, since in their books they know how much gold they purchased and how much jewlery they made and sold during the time they have created that sweeps.

So if they bring their sweeps for smelting here, the jewler alreayd knows how much gold is expected from this smelt, and if any parts of his smelting lacks efficency, I am sure he would be out of business.

He smelted 60 kg of cell phone boards for a client and got 49g of gold.

My case, we smelted 34 kg of half chinese and half non chinese motherboards plus 2 kg of misc cards, and got 6.56g gold.

Regards
Kj


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## Platdigger (Oct 4, 2016)

Would you happen to know or be willing to share how much pd he got from those cell boards?


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## kjavanb123 (Oct 4, 2016)

Platdigger said:


> Would you happen to know or be willing to share how much pd he got from those cell boards?



Platdigger,

We have not precipitated Pd yet. As soon as I get DMG. I will report that.

Regards
Kj


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## 4metals (Oct 4, 2016)

> So if they bring their sweeps for smelting here, the jewler alreayd knows how much gold is expected from this smelt, and if any parts of his smelting lacks efficency, I am sure he would be out of business.



I processed jewelers sweeps for years and assayed thousands of lots and I can assure you jewelers sweeps vary lot to lot. It all depends on what they were polishing. The only way he would know if he was short on a lot would be if he burned crushed and sifted a lot and sampled it before smelting. From what you describe, the rotary furnace is where it gets burned and smelted so it cannot be sampled properly. 

You are making 2 assumptions, 1 is that jewelers know how much is in their sweeps. Without proper sampling and assay they will never know. They may be satisfied with their return but that is different than knowing from having done an assay. The second assumption you are making is that he would be out of business. Generally speaking when a refiner makes a mistake, he just increases his profit.


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