Trade Need 15+lbs of >55% Au powder smelted near CO Springs

[AndiB]

Hi! This forum has been an invaluable (thank you!) resource as I slog through the final stages of processing this auriferous....quartz-pebble conglomerate?...paleoplacer?...thing. Photos to follow.

-I used the following process to arrive originally at a homogenous +-55% Au concentrate from about 91lbs of the pictured material

1. used a heavy duty barrel tumbler to ball mill 2-3in pieces to a thin slurry containing a lot of small quartz pebbles and a bunch of fine gold
2. strained and allowed whatever passed a (sorry, I can't find a number on it to be precise with mesh but it's blue, traps sand, and fits on a 5 gallon bucket if that helps ID it) fine sieve to settle out, then pouring off

**At this stage I took a sample from 15 lbs of a uniform powder I recovered from steps 1&2 which tested very consistently both as a powder and a bead -- but was determined to be out of the refiner's wheelhouse in that form.
"Enough Au content by far, but it would have to be melted into a solid." Unfortunately, the combination of my gravely limited grasp of smelting/flux/what-the-heck-I'm-even-doing and even more limited propane melting furnace has -- you guessed it-- limited my ability to make the jump from concentrate to metallic gold with that many impurities present. In an effort to avoid doing an AR process, (time constraints but also...I'm leery of turning gold I can see into gold I can't in a process I've done successfully before -- but I suspect mainly from luck) I scoured the forums for anything relevant. Did those things. I arrived at a powder that appears to meet all the physical criteria for a much higher purity Au by:

3. following the instructions for rinsing the mud in Hcl/Ammonia/water cycles found here on the forum + diluted sodium nitrate solution at one point for kicks
4. used stove and pyrex 9x13 to dry the mud in batches (though I do think it behaves more like cornstarch/water will when you try to manipulate it - which was cool, and surprised me)
4. Repeat.



There was a lot of free gold in the material, and any grit was easily snagged by the sieve, not to mention the filters; otherwise I would feel truly silly claiming these approx. values. That being said, I estimate I will end up with 35 or so lbs (18lbs currently processed with the additional cleaning steps) of a powder that, with a confirmed Au content of at least 55% should theoretically be easy to smelt for someone with the experience and equipment to do it properly. If you are that person and would like to speak about a really favorable trade for your services, please message me! Regarding the photos of the final result - I could not get a photo that showed the true color for some reason, but it is very much the pale cinnamon I have seen described here. Any glitter would be a residual Pyrex sliver from a near-catastrophic lesson in the limits of bakeware as labware that occasionally crop up and are removed. Thank you!


Andi

 

[realhumangold]

HI, can you give us more details? Who confirmed the richness of this ore? Have you called a reputable refining company and asked what the charge would be to refine your screened ore? If it is as rich as you believe, you shouldn't have to be looking for a refiner. They will jump at the chance to get a favorable fee for doing the work.... hal

 

[AndiB]

HI, can you give us more details? Who confirmed the richness of this ore? Have you called a reputable refining company and asked what the charge would be to refine your screened ore? If it is as rich as you believe, you shouldn't have to be looking for a refiner. They will jump at the chance to get a favorable fee for doing the work.... hal

My thoughts exactly. The refiner (Elemetal) I have an account with was the first place I went - they are the ones who melted a bead, did the XRF, etc. that provided me with the baseline figures above. To my surprise, however, the verdict from corporate was that it was too far out of their wheelhouse in that particular location. They mainly serve jewelers, pawn shops, etc., and only do chemical leaching at their Dallas plant. They stated they would purchase any/all material of the exact same composition if it was melted into a solid shape first. Sorry, I thought I had mapped that out clearly in my initial post.

The other refiner that is relatively local to me has been jammed up with dept. of mining and reclamation nonsense for quite some time, and I would be very far down the queue of people waiting for them to be fully operational again.

Even just renting the use of an induction furnace would do the trick here - but preheating furnaces for welding have been the extent of anything available locally.

 

[Lou]

If it's 55% metallics by weight it should be easily smelt-able, probably with just flux.

I would probably run something like that with an equal weight of silver and twice its weight in borax, and then remelt the slags with a thinning flux and more silver. That bullion can then get assayed.

Elemetal is no longer a refiner. They just aggregate and send out to the low bid on the refining side. Just as FYI.

 

[AndiB]

If it's 55% metallics by weight it should be easily smelt-able, probably with just flux.

I would probably run something like that with an equal weight of silver and twice its weight in borax, and then remelt the slags with a thinning flux and more silver. That bullion can then get assayed.

Elemetal is no longer a refiner. They just aggregate and send out to the low bid on the refining side. Just as

That is really helpful info, thank you. And sheds a little bit of light on their reluctance, I suppose? I was dumbfounded - they refine 10k scrap, so I thought I was in the clear once we had those values. Ha. Do you have any other recommendations? I'm willing to get it where it needs to go to have someone more knowledgeable take over.