Refining & Recovering Gold From Rings and Jewelry

Recovering the gold plating from these rings and jewelry a customer sent over for me to experiment with. These rings should have some gold plating on them and we are using some assaying and metallurgy techniques to determine the amount of gold that we can recover. We use the cupel method for determining the weight of gold in 3 rings and also melt down several rings and use an XRF gun to determine the percentages of metals in the entire alloy.

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Filming Equipment:

Complete Smelting Kits:

Fluxes:

Smelting Supplies:

Furnace Building Supplies:

Underground Mining Equipment:

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[haroldishoy]

Jason, I think your laugh when weighing the single tiny bead told the whole story, you may as well be gold panning in the Los Angeles River. Thanks for the demo and the detailed explanation.

[andybaldman]

This video will make him more money than the recovery did. (And that's true for most of these recovery channels.)

[larrybobbitt]

You are the best Jason.From EAST Tennessee. I really enjoy your work all of it.Stay safe out there.

[rockbutcher]

The red colour was produced by the presence of Antimony (Sb). I've seen that in the slag from gold pours in mines where antimony occurred within the ore as stibnite. Stibnite in a floatation circuit will suppress other (perhaps gold-bearing) sulphides, so your chemistry has to be just right to avoid losing those to tails.

[Enjoymentboy]

So here we have literal proof that not all that glitters truly is gold.

[biffedya]

pretty amazing how thin gold plating can be ...one ounce of gold can cover an area of 950 square feet so if you get enough gold rings to cover 950 square feet you'll be in the money brother...awesome vids Jason

[privateuser]

reverse electroplating would be the most cost effective I think

[rockman]

Looks like the 'Lord of the Rings' material someone was selling on eBay. They had a 55 gallon drum of them. Good Luck!

[Alondro]

And when they are all melted... One Ring floats on top, untouched... so bright, so beautiful... give to us, precious. It's our birthday! ;]

[BIGREDDOG]

@12:51 "but it's super tiny let me pull it out and..." I died.

[rickpierson]

Good video! What we can take from this is that it's not feasible to go after that little amount of AU. I think I would have tested with a magnet and jeweler acid scratch test b4 firing up the furnace.

[Rob_aka_CancelProof]

Where did you get the little Electric furnace and how hot does it get will it get to 2100 F?
If so could you please share a link because it's the perfect size for me?

[elbowomar]

Yes gold oxide makes red glass but that might be lead crystal that I've seen and I've seen Italian army desert service goggles from the 30s with purple red glass that's said to be coloured with gold.

[kleptordemagnifico]

The story here is that we caught some hobbits on our mountain claim...

[svenp]

8:17 The bubbles could be zinc evaporating... not sure what kind of low melting alloy they used but zinc is often a component of that kind of alloy. Saw the XRF... could be Antimony, it boils at 1500 C.

[homesteadworks]

I once read that Gold was used in the ruby glass making process to give it the ruby color!

[ScienceFoundation]

@ 12:50 "It's super tiny, lemme pull it out"

Kek

[grebulocities]

It looks like they took an antimony-hardened lead alloy to make it relatively dense and hard enough to wear without deforming, covered it with a bronze alloy, and then flash-plated it with like a micron of gold. Definitely just a little too much lead to meet regulations, haha!

[charlestosi]

Is the disposal of the used couples a hazardous waste issue? Thanks for more fascination.

[pneumatic]

You could be boiling the lead (1744 C) for those bubbles. Usually, gold plated stuff yields approximately nothing.