Ililchrisp,
Here is my best shot at trying to help you learn to recover and refine gold.
You are going about this the wrong way. Basically making the same mistake most of us have in the beginning, you have only tidbits of information and are trying things way over your head.
You do not even know yet how much you do not know.
You believe the science, art, and skills are simple, but this is a field of work that there is no one book that could hold all of the information to it. Not something you could learn from watching videos...
Put the chemicals and torches away.
Collect scrap, study where to find scrap, learn to test the scrap for values. What it may, or may not be worth, and the different ways to mechanically process it for recovery, this will not only give you a good education in this field but your work will pay off with the material you collect.
As you collect scrap spend time in study, Hokes book will teach you the basic principles, it may not be obvious what all she is teaching the first time you read her book, but after you read it more, and study the forum her message will become more clear, many small details she explains in her book are very important and often easily overlooked by the person wanting to learn to recover values, like removing base metals before putting the values into solution...
Hokes book has some simple experiments, doing these, you can observe how metals and acids react, this can help you in many different ways and keep you away from many problematic situations once you understand how the metals react...
The most important thing to study is safety, and dealing with the toxic waste, we have a section dedicated to that, but like other things we study we do not just limit our search for more understanding to the forum or one book, we are on a quest to learn as much as we can.
Study one simple material to work with first like something easier to process to recover the gold, I suggest memory fingers, study the copper II chloride etching solution, also called acid peroxide, there is much written about it on the forum, Laser Steve's web site has a very good document on this etching solution, after studying as much as you can about it and you have a fairly good understanding of it good you will be more ready to begin learning with hands on to recover your gold, then you will need to study on how to refine that recovered gold, and what methods are used, like using HCl and sodium hypochlorite method, testing for gold in solution, and how to prepare your gold solution for precipitating the gold from solution, washing and drying it, and then study how to melt it....
This will be the beginning of your search for more, and just a small bit of what you will study if you wish to learn the skills of a gold or precious metal refiner.
Welcome to the forum, working on your skills in writing, will also help you get a better answer when your study finds that brick wall, and you have those unanswered questions that you cannot find where to study them, the better we write the better others can understand what we are trying to say.
I look forward to your membership here on the forum and watching you improve your skills.