TheGoldenChild
Member
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2012
- Messages
- 22
Here is a little tutorial that may help someone out it has worked really well for me but still takes alot of time. Unfortunately I am no scientist and do not know the exact reactions that are going on but know it works pretty well. I have spent alot of time trying to figure out the mysteries of gold sulphide ore and how extremely hard it is to process especially if there is a high sulphide content. Iv'e experimented with aqua regia and found it is really usefull in processing it but is not needed in most cases. Well here it goes if you have a low sulphide content gold mineral break it does and seperate it all till all you see is the yellow shiny stuff then by weight mix a about a 50/50 ratio of it with pure malleable silver. Put your silver and low sulphide content in the bottom of a clay crucible and cover it with about 3 times weight of borax then let it go in your kiln till it hits 2000 degrees and give it some time to react. Pour your mix into a cone mold let it cool then break off the borax on top of your prill. Now you should have a prill that is a brittle gray on upper portion and a little gold/silver button at bottom. Break off the little button from the bottom if you reached high enough temperature it should seperate if not it will be stuck with the gray stuff. Take your gray section of the prill and crunch it up and put it into a clean silica graphite crucible with no flux heat that up to about 2000 degrees and let it sit at 2000 degrees for a bit. Give it a little swish as your pulling it out of kiln then pour into a pre-heated mold. Let it cool and clean the carbon scale off the outside now you should have processible gold/silver mix. If you have high gold content sulphide ore you should see a nice gold looking bar if not it may of been mostly silver. If your processing a high sulphide content gold ore this will not work. With high sulphide gold ore break it down and seperate it till all you see is the yellow shiny stuff then take that and put it into a hydrocloric acid solution and let it sit for a week or so swirling it in bottom of container occasionally. Pour off your acid and save in another container so you can use it later just add a little new hydrocloric to perk it up again, clean your gold sulphide on bottom with water and use same process above. If your acid turned a nice yellow you can extract the gold out of it with small amounts of zinc just add small amounts until your acid turns clear this part is fun as it seems like magic watching it haha. Do not overdue the zinc though just a little bit at a time until it slowly removes the yellow out of acid. Well if you did all this stuff right you should be very happy with the results and you do not ever need to roast sulphide as long as you break it down into small enough particles. Good luck and I hope my years and years of experimenting helps someone! 8)
