gold content in plated wire

[Anonymous]

Cut it into small lengths and fleabay it in bundles.

 

[goldsilverpro]

Cut it into small lengths and fleabay it in bundles.

I agree. It would look impressive all gobbed up into a mass. Maybe 1 pound (454g) or kilo lots. There's about 15 pounds there. It's worth about $430. I sure wouldn't process it. Too little profit, too much waste, too much hassle, and too much labor. If you can't make at least $50/hour on your labor, why do it? PM scrap is money. Anyone who looks at it in any other way should have their head examined.

 

[upcyclist]

can't you just drill a hole in some tool steel a hair smaller than the gold and pull all the wire through it, peeling the gold and some of the substrate off. Then simmer that lot of material in nitric and melt it?

Almost like a copper wire stripper, except we're stripping some gold and a little in copper.

Lou

Good thought experiment but it sure doesn't sound feasible to me. Might polish up the gold though. When they run bonding wire through a series of progressively smaller dies immersed in soapy water, none of the gold comes off, but the wire gets stretched. A troy ounce becomes 2-4 miles long, depending on the final diameter.

As others have said, you end up more with a draw plate (for compressing the diameter) than a stripper. Now, if you could somehow take a draw plate (slightly conical hole) and force a larger diameter object through it so that it extruded a little bit on the far side, that might be enough of a cutting surface to peel away the gold. But the cutting plate might dull, so you'd have to do it again, and figure out how to know when that happened, etc.

Edit to add: And drawing wire is already a pain in the butt. I'd hate to have to draw it through a cutting surface

Which puts us back to Lou's comment--is it worth it?