Paying on Assay

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The one thing you can do on a small scale is melt the material (talking high grade here or sterling) and take a representative sample. Snoman is correct the ROI for an XRF is too long in your case and since they are calibrated anyway, lots of guys use them to cheat. But short of fire assaying, you could take a 10 pennyweight sample (1/2 T.O.) and refine it. Inquart it, part it, and digest and drop the gold from parting. You will get high purity gold pretty quick (I'd say in 4 hours) and you can call up the customer and say your bar is worth $X do you want me to refine it or do you want it back?

If the customer wants it back, you have about 1/4 ounce or $300 worth of his gold, take out the assay fee and melting fee and give him the rest back as gold. Then the customer can take the bar to his refiner and see if he gets a better deal. But in reality if he came to you already, he knows he is getting beat.

This process will allow you to give a reasonable assay without the assay lab expense in about the same amount of time as a fire assay. I wouldn't do this without a balance that reads to the 100th of a gram. (0.01 grams)

If you have a customer with a couple of kilo's you can sample as outlined above and pour 2 bars. You refine one and let him take the other to his refiner and see what he is told. If he is constantly getting a raw deal this should put you in pretty good light.
 
What I'd like to know is this...if there's 100 employees, how many actually know what the real numbers are.
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The assayer knows what the sample assays at but usually not the weight of the lot or the customer.
Someone in the office knows the customer and the settlement weight, but usually not the assay. Whomever does the settlement, doing the calculation of assay times settlement weight and deducting the charges is the only one who see's it all come together. That's usually the owner or someone high up.

So your company with 100 employees (that is a big operation) probably 95 of them can be as honest as the day is long and you can still be dealing with a refiner with a bad reputation. Why, because to do it right, you need to go witness the melt and take a sample for assay. Simple.
 
4metals said:
The assay furnace should be used in a ventilated hood because of the lead used in fusions and cupellations. It does not look like yours in in a hood.
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I have not set up a work aria for assays yet,have the flux,balance .
May have to set it up out side.I do not want to run it in my gas store and hot space.
it will require a new work space with a 50A ring circuit run back to the fuse box I think.
May have to apply for a business tariff before I run up my electric bill too much.
 
Topher_osAUrus said:
How can a smaller/hobbyist/backyard refiner go about competing with the big guy, as far as the service and accountability of the assay goes. There aren't a whole lot of options, right?

Experience... data.... and more data.... oh and did I mention data? The more you process and keep records for, the more data you have. That data costs you money to learn because nobody is going to give it away for nothing. Within a reasonable amount of time you can look at a bunch of product and give a fair estimate of the return. Below are two pics of 1.5 tonnes of material we took in as part of a 5 tonne batch this morning. We know from results what the individual components are worth (both the type 43 connectors and the bridges) and we know the weight of the plastic centre piece so we can run a pretty reasonable calculation as to what the buy price should be and pay it. We couldn't do this without having processed this material before.

*Get an xrf - still has a margin of error, expensive

Only of use qualitatively if you're doing e-waste and quantitatively if you're dealing in dore bars and jewellery respectively. We use one but we operate commercially taking in all kinds of product so we need to be sure of the content.

*Set up an assay section in your lab, expensive, but accurate in informed/experienced hands
*??

Not as expensive as you would think but yes it'll cost a few grand to do it right.

Surely there must be a practical way to give a reasonably accurate account of the gold, before all the work is said and done. Or is that just the point in time to pony up and step up to the plate?

Did I hear someone say data? :D :D
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What Anachronism is doing is not paying on assay, it is paying on experience in a niche market. Unless a refiner works in a very specific market that is not easy to do. Jon is fortunate that he is able to estimate the way he does, well maybe not fortunate, he has a business that he developed and years of hands on experience have taught him the parameters where he is safe bidding on the parts. That is more skill than fortunate. (Even if he thinks I'm a doddler!)

But....... his estimates do take into account variation. And he bids accordingly. If he was an open door refinery that refines or samples whatever comes in the door, he would need to prepare the material and sample it for a proper fire assay. Then you know specifically the payable content of that specific lot. It is a lot more work, but that is how a refinery would (or should) do it.
 
But, I also mentioned when it came to his fluffs and sweeps it would be a different rate. Solely because the amount of work, and number of processes would be greater. When i mentioned I would even recover the gold from his sink pea trap (where he washes his hands after work) as well as dust masks and papertowels that he uses to wipe his touchstone, he laughed, thinking I was joking. :shock: I assured him I was not.
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All low grade that are incinerated and either refined or made into low grade sweeps to ship to a smelter have a per pound incoming charge. That used to be $2 a pound but I do not know what it is now. The charge covers the incoming pound fee at the smelter plus the cost to burn crush and sift.

And as far as a sink trap is concerned, if all he has is a pea trap, he is losing values. Many jewelers put a drum with an internal pleated filter to catch all the solids. They are worthwhile investments for the jeweler and the refiner, who routinely visits and changes out the filter, (based on how long that particular shop takes to clog it) which is processed by incineration and annually the entire tank is drained and the (often God awful smelling nasty) sludge is also processed for values.

Refiners like to use them because it gives them an excuse to visit to change the filter, and pick up any other refining work that they might have missed.
 
4metals said:
Many jewelers put a drum with an internal pleated filter to catch all the solids....

Refiners like to use them because it gives them an excuse to visit to change the filter, and pick up any other refining work that they might have missed.
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That right there is some biz dev gold!

Oh--for non-native speakers, biz dev = business development ;)
 
I have never seen one of these drum filter traps made for sale, only refiners having them custom fabricated for their own use to sell to their customers. Dental labs do use something similar which you will find if you Google plaster sink traps.


A pea trap will only catch big stuff or a stone that the steamer knocks out of a setting (steamers are usually over a sink) but for the rouge and fine dust you need to trap the fine mud. A pea trap is convenient because you can open it up easily when you drop a ring or lose a stone without having to dive into that previously mentioned putrid smelling sludge that happens to be also valuable. So a pea trap and a sludge catcher is ideal. Another benefit of the water volume in the pleated filter tank is cyanide destruction. A lot of jewelers still bomb jewelry to polish it and steam clean it in the sink. That runs traces of CN- into the sink too. If the municipality checks in on you it is trouble. But keeping a floating tablet chlorinator in the tank all the time with a slow dissolving chlorine tablet used for pool chlorination, takes care of any CN- rinsed into the drain from cleaning off bombed jewelry. They routinely pop the lid and check to be sure there is still a tablet dissolving and if needed they add one.

This site describes it well and has a picture of a plaster sink trap.
http://www.stebgo.com/blog-0-Precio...t-your-precious-metal-scrap-go-down-the-drain
 
I had a reply to Jon's previous post about data, data, data. But, got distracted an before I could reply, 4metals wrote on one of my concerns. Variation in similar scrap.

Like ten lots of 10 pentium pro's each. 3.5 should be close to what they all run, but, law of averages tells me, some will be bunk, some will be the bomb! (idiot idiom, for awesome -for the non native english speakers)

So that philosophy is one I can only implement sometimes, unless I play it conservatively, constantly.
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I am curious about his sink now, as well as looking into making a simple backyard bred drum filter trap.

I'm almost certain there isnt one installed currently, so that could definitely be another good thing I bring to him. What filtering medium would be best? An activated carbon, carbon felt, or is a pleated filter the best/only real option?

Man, do I love this place!
 
Pleated spa filters are the best.

pleated filter.jpeg

You can strip out the pleating and burn it and scrub off the plastic/rubber ends if anything is caked on. What some refiners do is stop in to change the filter but don't process it and say "To save you processing fee's, I'll run this with your sweeps / sludges." Then they have the guy because he knows you already have some of his values so he sends you everything.

Kind of a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush theory of marketing your refining services.
 
Beautifully put, and will definitely be something I implement.

Thank you, again.

A great many twists and turns from the threads original intent, but I learned a great deal.
 
4metals said:
What some refiners do is stop in to change the filter but don't process it and say "To save you processing fee's, I'll run this with your sweeps / sludges." Then they have the guy because he knows you already have some of his values so he sends you everything.
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Insidious! :twisted:

Dave
 
You should also ask him if he does bombing. I know a good number of polishers and jewelers who offer a service to their customers where they shine up a ring with a quick polish on the wheel and a bombing. The customer, who is thrilled to get back the ring which now looks brand new, but what he doesn't know is bombing removes a layer of gold which dissolves in the reaction. When they accumulate 20 gallons (which is the size the drums of BCR jewelry cleaner used in ultrasonics) it is refined. Not unusual to have 5 ounces in there. Guys that do enough of it use a sealed glove box system so the bombing process and the collection of the cyanide bearing waste liquid (with gold) is contained and the finished piece is removed and steamed to rinse it. The bombing process is far superior to mechanical polishing because it gets into recesses that a wheel just can't get. Here is a link to a sealed unit that is popular. https://balco.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/DS-21-Bombing.pdf

But a lot of jewelers shy away from cyanide because of the traces that end up in their rinse waters after steam cleaning a bombed piece. (Customers like to put on a ring that has been steamed, nice and warm, makes them feel special, especially in winter.) Meanwhile they've been fleeced for some of their gold. But the pleated filter drum with a swimming pool chlorinator floating in there solves that worry too. (A few more facts for your sales pitch!)
 
4metals said:
I know a good number of polishers and jewelers who offer a service to their customers where they shine up a ring with a quick polish on the wheel and a bombing. The customer, who is thrilled to get back the ring which now looks brand new, but what he doesn't know is bombing removes a layer of gold which dissolves in the reaction.
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I used to do a bit of polishing. No bombing. Customers loved getting back that "like new" piece. I remember one customer asking my manager "Doesn't that take off some of the gold?" "Not if you do it right!" was his reply. BS.

(Customers like to put on a ring that has been steamed, nice and warm, makes them feel special, especially in winter.) Meanwhile they've been fleeced for some of their gold.
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Yep, and yep!

Dave
 

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