So today I was melting some gold in a forced-air propane furnace that I built myself. During the melt, a hole formed through the graphite crucible and most of the gold spilled to the bottom of the furnace. I didn't realize this until the pour. During the pour, the rest of the gold spilled out the hole onto my driveway. :evil:
After everything cooled down, I gathered every piece of matter in and around the area using a fine toothed brush. There were quite a few tiny gold pebbles scattered around.
The furnace had a firebrick floor topped with a thin layer of inswool that was covered in satanite. I removed this the inswool-satanite layer in order to recover dropped pieces of gold.
I started off with 1072 grams of mostly 14k scrap. So far, by manually picking through the mess, I was able to gather 1059 grams of it back. The rest of it is in a large mixture of crushed slag, satanite, rock, pieces of inswool,dirt, graphite, and other debris.
I'm thinking that I should try to recover gold from the debris mixture by crushing everything to a fine grain and then panning it out. As for how to crush and pan the mixture, I'm not really sure. Do any of you have any ideas about how I should go about doing this? The satanite breaks apart really easily. I'm thinking I should put it into a metal box and pound everything with a hammer. Then, I can put it into my rock tumbler along with some .45 caliber lead balls, and let it tumble for a few days. After that, use a gold pan. There are YouTube videos on how to pan out the gold.
Now my questions are about melt loss. I'm concerned that some of my gold has gone to oblivion. From my experience in melting my own gold, I've never had much melt loss, never more than .10 %. Is it possible that a significant amount of my losses are attributable to the vaporization of impurities that were in the scrap, such as zinc? I removed all the removable stones and clasp springs. There's no way that there were 12 grams of junk in my lot. I'm not sure if there's much gold in my debris mixture.
It doesn't get much hotter than 2500 degrees F inside my crucible, but I'm sure it gets way hotter on the floor of the furnace, and this is where most of the gold had spilled. It probably gets well above 3000 degrees there. The gold was sitting down there for quite a while. Perhaps I won't have much melt loss when I re-melt and take the gold to my refiner. (There's always a melt loss at the refiner. I'm wondering if that's beacuse they heat it up hotter than I do.)
After everything cooled down, I gathered every piece of matter in and around the area using a fine toothed brush. There were quite a few tiny gold pebbles scattered around.
The furnace had a firebrick floor topped with a thin layer of inswool that was covered in satanite. I removed this the inswool-satanite layer in order to recover dropped pieces of gold.
I started off with 1072 grams of mostly 14k scrap. So far, by manually picking through the mess, I was able to gather 1059 grams of it back. The rest of it is in a large mixture of crushed slag, satanite, rock, pieces of inswool,dirt, graphite, and other debris.
I'm thinking that I should try to recover gold from the debris mixture by crushing everything to a fine grain and then panning it out. As for how to crush and pan the mixture, I'm not really sure. Do any of you have any ideas about how I should go about doing this? The satanite breaks apart really easily. I'm thinking I should put it into a metal box and pound everything with a hammer. Then, I can put it into my rock tumbler along with some .45 caliber lead balls, and let it tumble for a few days. After that, use a gold pan. There are YouTube videos on how to pan out the gold.
Now my questions are about melt loss. I'm concerned that some of my gold has gone to oblivion. From my experience in melting my own gold, I've never had much melt loss, never more than .10 %. Is it possible that a significant amount of my losses are attributable to the vaporization of impurities that were in the scrap, such as zinc? I removed all the removable stones and clasp springs. There's no way that there were 12 grams of junk in my lot. I'm not sure if there's much gold in my debris mixture.
It doesn't get much hotter than 2500 degrees F inside my crucible, but I'm sure it gets way hotter on the floor of the furnace, and this is where most of the gold had spilled. It probably gets well above 3000 degrees there. The gold was sitting down there for quite a while. Perhaps I won't have much melt loss when I re-melt and take the gold to my refiner. (There's always a melt loss at the refiner. I'm wondering if that's beacuse they heat it up hotter than I do.)