introduction

[Anonymous]

Greetings All,

I am a self taught professional artist. I have carved stone/mammoth ivory most of that career and began working in pm's a couple years ago. It has been a huge amount of work and fairly expensive to acquire the tools and skills to get a start in this medium. My passion for art extends to knowledge of every aspect of the materials I work with hence my presence here. I live in the Yukon and come across a fair amount of placer gold and scrap karat gold in the form of broken/worn out jewelry and want to learn how to process this material myself. I have had the introduction from Steve on where to find things here and am going to spend the next while doing just that. If this is anything like learning the to make jewelry then I will be at it a while. I look forward to learning and expanding my skill inventory here and hopefully can add something meaningful to the forum too.

James

 

[4metals]

Welcome to the forum.

I know more than a few "home schooled" jewelers who refine their own gold to put back into their craft. It's on of the easiest things to refine, just inquart in silver and dissolve in nitric, the gold remains undissolved and after a clean up boil in nitric is 99% gold with the major impurity being silver. Just add more silver, zinc, and copper to make your alloy and you're good to go. The silver recycles for re-use as an inquart by cementing it on copper.

Good luck