Palladium said:
That does bring up a good point. How do you shot it ????
While this may not sound like it makes sense, you must dispense the gold from an orifice. That is the one and only thing I was taught be a professional refining house.
To create shot, height is not a factor, or need not be, anyway. Drill a 3 mm (1/8" diameter) hole in the center of a clay melting dish. Because the dish is abrasive in nature, the drill should be run at very low speed, with the dish supported by a piece of wood at the point of contact, to avoid breaking the dish. The clay dishes drill well enough if you use a sharp drill. The drill will be dulled, but drills can be resharpened, so that's not an issue.
The dish should be properly seasoned and coated with a thin layer of flux (borax). Make a setup whereby the dish can be held in a ring on a stand, with a torch playing on the center of the dish, to prevent the gold from freezing. Melt your gold in a different dish, which is then emptied to the dish with an orifice. The receiving container, which is filled with cold water, should be quite deep, to avoid molten metal hitting the bottom, where it would fuse to a common mass. I used an old stainless steel round sink that had a permanent stopper installed in the bottom. It was about the size of a 5 gallon bucket and worked adequately.
While molten metal hitting the bottom sounds impossible, it happens all too easily due to the hot stream of metal vaporizing the water, creating a tunnel to the bottom. To limit the possibility, I used to ice the water, and place a circulating pump in the bottom, off to one side, where it would not interfere with the gold stream. That eliminated the problem. I used to place my metering dish about a foot above the surface of the receiving container.
Harold
