guldspecialisten
Member
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2012
- Messages
- 8
Dear Forum,
I have been a member here for some years and not posted very often as I have mostly been reading and learning. Maybe the information I am asking for is already here, but I have been unable to find any threads mentioning a case similar to mine.
For seven years, I have been refining gold containing PGM’s, selling the fine gold, cementing out the metals from the barren AR solution with iron, and saving the cemented concentrate. The gold refined was dental gold, both the yellow and white palladium alloys; white gold alloys some with Pd and other probably with nickel.
I have some kilos of this concentrate mostly consisting of copper. I do not know the exact palladium content, but it could be everywhere between 10-40%. I have washed the first third of this concentrate 6-7 times and dried it. Some parts of this concentrate got greenish when drying. I imagine this could be from lumps of cemented metals, that did not permit the water to penetrate very well during washing.
I wanted to melt everything into a bar, take a drill sample, send it to a lab in order to know the content of PGM’s before selling to a refinery. I do not have experience melting this type of material and therefore I took a 200gr sample and melted it, just using borax as a first trial.
I have an induction furnace with a crucible large enough to melt 5 kg of silver. Melting this material generated a lot of smoke when the temperature got high (A bit yellowish as far as I remember). The furnace is placed under a hood. Unfortunately I am unsure how high the temperature was as I was too busy focusing on the melt I forgot to measure. However, from experience I am 100% certain it would have been more than enough to melt fine gold or copper.
When pouring, there was a lot of liquid/slag and the metal solidified before reaching the ingot. The weight of the metal was only 100 grams. Half of the sample taken.
The solidified slag was very soluble in water, almost as pouring some paint into water. Water turn cloudy very fast.
I do not think this was a success , and before wasting more time and maybe, even loosing PGM’s experimenting I was hoping someone more experienced could help me.
My next trial would have been mixing the dry metals cement with 50% silver powder in order to lower the melting point.
But, I most likely need the right flux for the job (How much?) or maybe melting is not the way to go?
Any suggestions?
Wish you all a Merry Christmas
I have been a member here for some years and not posted very often as I have mostly been reading and learning. Maybe the information I am asking for is already here, but I have been unable to find any threads mentioning a case similar to mine.
For seven years, I have been refining gold containing PGM’s, selling the fine gold, cementing out the metals from the barren AR solution with iron, and saving the cemented concentrate. The gold refined was dental gold, both the yellow and white palladium alloys; white gold alloys some with Pd and other probably with nickel.
I have some kilos of this concentrate mostly consisting of copper. I do not know the exact palladium content, but it could be everywhere between 10-40%. I have washed the first third of this concentrate 6-7 times and dried it. Some parts of this concentrate got greenish when drying. I imagine this could be from lumps of cemented metals, that did not permit the water to penetrate very well during washing.
I wanted to melt everything into a bar, take a drill sample, send it to a lab in order to know the content of PGM’s before selling to a refinery. I do not have experience melting this type of material and therefore I took a 200gr sample and melted it, just using borax as a first trial.
I have an induction furnace with a crucible large enough to melt 5 kg of silver. Melting this material generated a lot of smoke when the temperature got high (A bit yellowish as far as I remember). The furnace is placed under a hood. Unfortunately I am unsure how high the temperature was as I was too busy focusing on the melt I forgot to measure. However, from experience I am 100% certain it would have been more than enough to melt fine gold or copper.
When pouring, there was a lot of liquid/slag and the metal solidified before reaching the ingot. The weight of the metal was only 100 grams. Half of the sample taken.
The solidified slag was very soluble in water, almost as pouring some paint into water. Water turn cloudy very fast.
I do not think this was a success , and before wasting more time and maybe, even loosing PGM’s experimenting I was hoping someone more experienced could help me.
My next trial would have been mixing the dry metals cement with 50% silver powder in order to lower the melting point.
But, I most likely need the right flux for the job (How much?) or maybe melting is not the way to go?
Any suggestions?
Wish you all a Merry Christmas