AMALGAMITE 982 PROCESS

[bmgold2]

To answer the tin question. I was told there is a very small percentage of it in their amalgamite.there is something else too,but he would not devulge what,except that it was not lead.
Thanks oldgeek, for referencing your old thread

Possibly antimony? Just a guess. Lead-free solder doesn't look to be cheaper than bismuth but might be more available. Maybe it makes the bismuth less brittle? Who knows. What I bought was 99.99% pure bismuth which cost me $25.80 including shipping for one pound. Lowes has lead-free solder for $29.99/pound so there must be another reason other than cost.

 

[bmgold2]

It warmed up enough here to squeeze a bit of acetylene out of my torches so I decided to finish cupelling the bismuth test I started a while ago. I'm not 100% sure this was the bismuth test. It could have been a piece of a lead sinker that I was trying the same process with. I should have kept better track of which one was which but I didn't.

Anyway, what I did was melt some bismuth (or lead) in a small cupel and added a tiny pinch of my bought gold ore to the molten metal. I tried to cupel it (get the bismuth or lead to oxidise and soak into the cupel) using a small plumber's torch. That didn't work. Then I tried using the hotter Mapp gas torch (using propane) and still didn't seem to be working fast enough. Finally, I used the oxy/acetylene torch with a very small oxidising flame and that worked. I ended up with a bunch of oxidised, yellow/orange metal and one VERY TINY bead of gold.



I didn't even attempt to recover this tiny speck of gold but it is there. I guess I couldn't expect much gold considering the tiny amount of ore I used but I did want to prove to myself that the process worked. It does appear to have worked but you would need to get a lot more gold alloyed with the bismuth (or lead) to make it even close to being worth doing.

I have no intention of doing any more this way but just thought I'd share the results I did get. The picture was taken with a cell phone camera with a small magnifying glass up against the lens of the camera. Extremely small bead of gold and hard to see let alone photograph.

Take this for what it is worth. Like I said, I won't be doing it again.