[Rockhounds] Any Gold home refiners here?

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Kevin,

It is not that difficult to make a home smelter that can process a pail 
of crushed ore and give you bloom, or maybe a batch of molten metal and 
slag, depending on the metal/ore. A length of large diameter pipe 
(sheet metal will do), a large and small cardboard tube, some firebrick 
cement, some clay, a canister vacuum for tuyres, a flux, and some 
charcoal or coke. Plans are readily available if you do a little 
searching (online or at your library).

A small kiln/smelter can also process scrap metal and give you molten 
metal you can cast. This is a lot more friendly to the environment, and 
much easier to do. Your neighbors, and the EPA, may object to your 
smelting ore, but they probably won't object to you occasionally 
melting scrap in small volumes (unless it contains lead) for casting.

I made a smelter over 30 years ago that could process around a half 
gallon or ore, and smelted several batches of iron in my backyard. It 
was one of those mad scientist things, just to be able to say I had 
done it. I had a blast melting hematite (it took a carbon arc to boil 
asbestos -- I was in a melting phase).

The problem that arises is when your ore is not a single mineral and 
you end up with an alloy of several metals in your ingot. If you are 
really lucky the different metals will separate and harden in layers 
that can be split. You might want to gravity separate your crushed ore 
and do multiple batches.

Lead can be removed from a bloom with a cupellation hearth. Watch out 
for the nasty fumes. Add some charcoal on top as you need a reducing 
atmosphere.

Silver and gold are often recovered by dissolving the remaining base 
metals with acids, and chemically processing the residue to separate 
the silver from the gold.

You could do it yourself, but it may be more cost effective to sell any 
mixed metal ingots to a precious metals recovery firm. You might be 
surprised how profitable recycling metals (even scrap iron from dead 
appliances and pipes) is.

Unless you have a _LOT_ of ore/tailings, I would suggest you would come 
out ahead selling good specimens of the ore/tailings available to you . 
. . but it is a _LOT_ of Fun to smelt a batch of ore and get metal.

Kreigh




On Monday, Jul 7, 2008, at 17:25 America/Detroit, Paintricks at aol.com 
wrote:

> Hi there,
>   I recently have become interested and am learning how to refine my  
> gold
> and scrap metal.  I'm looking for the best ways to refine out the  
> copper and
> leads out of the final end steps.  What are the safest ways  without 
> noxious
> chemicals with my heated bucket foundry?
>   Would it be possible to crush up the tailing pile material off the  
> old
> gold mines here in the area and at least get some amounts of gold from 
>  it?  I'm
> finding Phonolite with Fluorite, galena, some Copper, Sphalerite  and 
> pyrite.
> Gold has to be in there somewhere.  The gold mines here  are going 
> through
> the old tailings from the gold rush and producing values out  of it.  
> This stuff
> sure has all the characteristics of gold values.   It would be fun to 
> at
> least try to refine some of it in small amounts to see  what comes out 
> of it.
>   Kind of a mad scientist approach at it.
>   Thanks,
>  Kevin
>
>
>
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