First post and have been reading a lot, thank you all for a wonderful resource in this community.
Have been working through a large lot of sterling and am about to embark on my first scrap karat gold refining. I have about 800g of scrap Karat gold which is mostly a mix of 10-14k with some 18 and 24 k mixed in, mostly yellow gold but a fair quantity of white gold (maybe 10%).
I mostly trust the lot I have which is composed of several hundred small bits of scrap, however, I am worried about inquarting too low a % of gold and winding up with a mess during refining if some filled or plated material found it’s way into this pile of material to refine.
My plan is to take the entire lot and melt it together before inquarting it and test the output of that pour for gold content. Based on that I would then calculate the silver content to add before inquarting and pouring into shot.
My question is whether or not this is a sound strategy, or should I go through the tedious process of acid testing this small mountain of scrap bits? I am willing to do that if that is what it takes but I was hoping to save the considerable time it would take to do that. However, I wanted to ask here first before I melted everything into one solid block in case that would create more problems for me in the refining process.
Secondary question, I do not plan to refine for PGMs as it is beyond my skill and equipment level as a hobbyist refiner, am I out of my mind to lose what small content of PGMs or should I work a trade of my white gold content with someone for yellow gold and let them recover whatever may be recoverable from this lot?
Have been working through a large lot of sterling and am about to embark on my first scrap karat gold refining. I have about 800g of scrap Karat gold which is mostly a mix of 10-14k with some 18 and 24 k mixed in, mostly yellow gold but a fair quantity of white gold (maybe 10%).
I mostly trust the lot I have which is composed of several hundred small bits of scrap, however, I am worried about inquarting too low a % of gold and winding up with a mess during refining if some filled or plated material found it’s way into this pile of material to refine.
My plan is to take the entire lot and melt it together before inquarting it and test the output of that pour for gold content. Based on that I would then calculate the silver content to add before inquarting and pouring into shot.
My question is whether or not this is a sound strategy, or should I go through the tedious process of acid testing this small mountain of scrap bits? I am willing to do that if that is what it takes but I was hoping to save the considerable time it would take to do that. However, I wanted to ask here first before I melted everything into one solid block in case that would create more problems for me in the refining process.
Secondary question, I do not plan to refine for PGMs as it is beyond my skill and equipment level as a hobbyist refiner, am I out of my mind to lose what small content of PGMs or should I work a trade of my white gold content with someone for yellow gold and let them recover whatever may be recoverable from this lot?