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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3611 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022

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Mt. Baker Mining and Metal. I have no idea if they're any good but they sell machinery and the guy has a YouTube presence doing all kinds of mining. He had a similar story to yours, where his dad owned some property that was mined.

The machinery is mills and shaker tables, so the high density ore moves along the table while the lie density rock gets flushed across the table. The YouTube content is also smelting gold with flux, mostly. The mill/table combo would recover whatever your gold oxide is, as long as it's denser than the rest. It will be mixed with copper and other metals.

If you want to watch someone refine gold from scrap, or what you'd be doing with the best off of the the table, Sreetips on YouTube has years of videos of basement precious metal recovery and refining. He uses the acid methods you mentioned, where the gold is inquarted with silver or copper, then the base metals dissolved away with nitric acid, leaving the gold behind which is the recovery. The refining is when he then dissolves the remaining gold in aqua regia, precipitating out lead and filtering, then precipitating out gold with sodium metabisulfite. He also runs a silver cell, where he grows pure silver crystals.

I honestly have no idea if this works with gold oxide. If not, I can't imagine a torch would have any trouble driving off the oxygen and melting the gold, especially with flux. Between the two of them I think you have a good start. Your friend would be out tens of thousands of dollars for the equipment, think a tractor or new vehicle. Some more for glassware and reagents if you're doing it all yourself. And then you'll be left with .999 gold which you sell at market rate.

https://mbmmllc.com/

https://youtube.com/@mbmmllc

https://youtube.com/@sreetips

Welcome to The Motte.

This is exactly the type of thing I’m hoping to do, thank you. I’ll dive into it.

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