Jason. I have done this process before. You pulled the zinc off of the lead too soon. Wait for the zinc to solidify completely on top of the molten lead. I used to poke the surface until it solidifies and then u can grab it with pliers. In my experience you will still have a small amount of lead come with the zinc but it isnt much. When you are doing this dont worry so much about the oxides. If you try to get rid of the oxides you can lose a lot of your silver. As an alternative you can also pour the lead and zinc mix out into tall skinny mold. Like a round stock mold. This will make lead be on bottom and zinc on top. Then u can find the place where each layer separates and cut them apart to get the zinc with most of the lead away from it.
Thank you for the tips! Should I get the zinc molten first before adding to the lead? Also should I stir and agitate the zinc/lead for a while to get it mixed in? Once the zinc is added and mixed in slowly cool till the zinc solidifies and then pull it form the molten lead? I'll give it a try! Thank you!
@@mbmmllc so the way i used to do it was just throw it all together. Lead and zinc. U have to make sure the zinc becomes completely liquid. Otherwise it doesnt do well gathering the silver. If you have too much trouble with the zinc oxide lighting on fire you can put something over top of crucible. As for the amount of time stirring. I didnt stir for long. Only about 5 minutes and it seemed to work. I believe i got something around 90 percent recovery with my experiments. I like the thermometer technique u have. Here is what i would do. Heat lead and zinc up to about 900 fahrenheit. Stir it vigorously for about 5 minutes. Then let it cool down to about 700 and start checking to see if the zinc is solidifying. Once it goes solid pluck it off the surface.
Awesome I will give it a try. Did you have a percent zinc to lead ratio you liked? The research i have done talks about 1-2%, next time I try I will be in the 3-5% I think. Thanks again for the tips
@@mbmmllc i was doing about 10-15 percent just because it is easier to handle. I had some trouble grabbing the zinc at some times so what i did was i just held the tip of needlenose pliers in the molten metal and let it solidify so it would stick to the pliers. My thinking was the more zinc the faster it captures the lead.
Great video! The dross skimming you mentioned @15:54 I think this is were you lost most of the silver. When I process Parkes crust I'm melting it in stainless steel tray (large surface area) with NaOH then I I'm blowing air above the melt with constant stirring to oxidise the zinc, once all the zinc has oxidised (everything becomes like powder and has stopped producing blue zinc flames) I'm adding more NaOH which liquifies the powder, when that's done I'm left with slag, silver and a bit of lead which is cupelled in the usual manner.
Great effort. The fact you recovered about half your silver back with such a cumbersome process was a success. Looking forward to you producing some silver from the Cerro Gordo ore. You have acquired a great deal of knowledge with your research and patient approach to experimentation.
I melt lead all the time to cast balls and bullets for my black powder. When my lead is melted and the dross is on top I throw in some wax. It kind of acts like a flux but it also reduces the oxides back into metal. I've seen fairly thick crusts reduced to very little and the surface become bright and mirror like. Helps to stir it around too. I also use a 50/50 mix of household vinegar and drug store hydrogen peroxide to remove the leading from my barrels. This works great! I think the metallic lead becomes lead acetate. A black slime that just wipes out of my barrel. Just a little food for thought! Keep up the good work!
I think by trying to melt small pieces of solid zinc in the lead in order to collect PMs, you are losing considerable values. At industrial scale, as I recall, molten lead containing PMs is introduced into a bath of molten zinc. On the scale you are doing it at, try first melting the zinc, probably 1/3 the amount by weight of the lead bearing the PMs. Then, pour in the molten lead containing the PMs--this will ensure a much better transfer of PMs from lead to zinc than by just stirring in some solid zinc. After the metals have been thoroughly stirred and drossed, as you've done, I would pour the molten metals into a column--even a soup can will work. Once cooled and peeled away from the can you will see a clear separation between the 'lead' layer on the bottom, and the 'zinc' layer on top: their crystalline structures are very different, Finally, you can hacksaw the layers apart very accurately (careful not to breathe the stuff), and dissolve away the zinc with HCl, leaving any PMs as residue. Looking forward to your next posts!
Hello Jason, I actually have something that will help you, I can send you 5 kilos of this material. We collected old miners molten material found in our property back when the Spaniards and Indians were mining over 400 years ago. When melted and poured it actually separates into 3 layers, lead,rare earth metals and silver, gold and platinum group metals. Enjoy your kilo of silver gold and platinum group metals. Free. All I ask in return is a video of it. I have gathered over the years roughly 1 ton of this material found in our property about a foot deep plowing dirt for crop.
I have enjoyed the video as well as all your other videos. And I like your way of thinking and how you go about all these processees that you try out and iterate over and over while documenting and giving all of us a peek into this dangerous and fascinating world. I dont know exactly why - but you seem like the kind of guy who will wear it out, use it up, make it do or do without. So you make it do what you want with all your knowledge and testing. I just like to follow along for your successes 🙂
You explain this process so well. Your videos are so enjoyable because you do something that, if you’re watching these videos you’re obviously interested in, and you explain it thoroughly and it’s easy to follow. Keep up the good work bro!
Maybe if you set up some kind of retort rig, as the old timers did with mercury. You could re-condense the lead and be left with the silver (and whatever else). IIRC, the Romans used to get the lead up to oxidizing temps and keep skimming off the oxides until only the silver was left. They then recovered the lead by melting the oxides. The retort rig would be faster due to modern heating options, just remember to stay upwind no matter how good you think your seals are LOL. I have no idea how this is done by modern methods :)
So, the skimming of oxides is the same process that is completed in cupellation really, except now you are being exposed to much more litharge when skimming.
@@outdoorloser4340 you are correct. You COULD make a reducing environment that could reduce the oxide vapors back to lead metal in one go, but it’s really just not worth it
Absolutely amazing "crossover series" and i will be amazed by both the lead and silver coming out of the ore for the first time. You know, we normies deal with premade metals, but seeing them coming out of the ores, that's where it's at. I myself want to make some bog iron one day and ofc get more gold out of the Norwegian rivers, enough so i can play with it and form it into something and explore it's mechanical properties myself.
Amen to that ! There's something so special about holding a chunk of gold in your hands that you spent years prospecting and then hours melting into a bead that you can now wear around your neck or on your finger... You will never get that feeling from a cold piece of jewlery that you bought at the mall!
I'd suggest 1) heat the lead and zinc hotter, then cool. At higher temps lead and zinc will alloy, but as they cool they separate. Skimmings come off the cooling step. 2) do a two stem zinc addition and skim. Add a couple percent of zinc, then skim, then add another percent and skim in a second step. When I do this (one of these days) I am going to add about 10 percent zinc, then heat to well above the zinc melting point and allow the whole thing to cool slowly, hopefully giving me a two metal final solid where the zinc has fully separated from the lead like oil and water. I have some other info I collected, send me an email if you want more info
I love that you share all this with us. Thanks Jason. I'm at a loss with silver, I have a pile of galena grading around 4500gm/tonne but there is so much arsenic. I'd love to be able to drive the arsenic off in a bomb still but can't bring myself to just vent it.
i dont think i would have tried to do a parkes process, jason. there is a better way that boosts ore recovery and gives a product you know how to manage as well as i do right in the crucible with flux. here is what you do: grind your ore to 40 percent or so @ 50 mesh and 60 percent 200 mesh.... set it aside. it doesnt have to be 60 percent 200 but get close to that number. but in your hands it should feel like really fine all purpose flour. go buy an aerator head for a high speed drill (hand drill, but not a screw gun.) or fabricate one, and get a 2 gallon bucket to set inside a five gallon bucket. *OR...cannibalize an old milkshake machine for a small batch recovery system (assay lab stuff). then, go read/watch about flotation systems, and the solution they use to float the precious metals over the edge in a froth. the concept is pretty simple and making your own is pretty straight forward after you see one work. the process: froth flotation. most froth flotation systems are ginormous. but youre just a small guy who wants to make a small amount, so i think that you could really benefit from designing your own froth flotation machine, and building it too. it could be a good video too. :) lab flotation machines are horrendously expensive. DIY 100%
Becareful with zinc and acid man I had a bad experience with zinc and nitric once and it was a very close call.... Some metals and acids explode. Always have protective gloves and mask. May seem overkill sometimes but the time something happens you will be glad you were prepared.
How cool would it be to set up a working mount baker processing plant at Cerro in unpainted steel - so it would rust nicely and almost look original. Visitors could run some material and even smelt. Look at the popularity of tourist placer panning for example.
Hey Jason absolutely love the videos.I discovered them because of my own interest in smelting.I just wanted to share a cool method i discovered for making cement cupels. I found that a 22oz aluminum can cut about 2 in from the bottom makes a great mold when you flip it over you get a almost perfect shallow cupel and they stack good. Hey thanks again for doing the exact experiments i wanna do but just dont have the resources or equipment to pull them off.
“I’ll leave them in there for a little while and see what happens” *5 minutes later dumps it all in “Well I’m committed now” Dude either plan this perfectly or are unintentionally hilarious 😂 I love it
if you pour the molten lead into a large tub of cool water, it will form little lead pellets called lead shot (you may know this already)...then you can use the quantities of lead you want more manageably. ;-)
Its funny when you start a process and you have done "all your research". Then you look back on your experiment and realize there are a ton of things the instruction manual didn't tell you or forgot to include. Leaves you with more questions than answers
You're just noodling around with a good knowledge of chemistry and metallurgy... I FREAKIN' LOVE IT. Just keep doing what your doing. BTW, the portland cement cupell is really interesting. I wonder if there's a way to standardize the process.
Great video. I have a bunch of lead that I use to cast bullets. Some of it is contaminated with zinc which prohibits good casting. I understand that adding sulphur to the melt can get the zinc out. Any ideas with clearing zinc from lead?
ionizing matter, then electric/magnetic field trajectory separation, mass spectrometry filter, different mass/charge ratios strike different target surfaces, effective atom/ion level separation
must be using ion acceleration field, like tooth-brush high voltage, to sling the ions in motion, assume this type of sling is free, no additional powering needed, just initial power-up
That was a great video Jason but I'm still waiting to see you grind up some stainless steel submersible pumps through the hammer Mill... this is my request number 7 I think
What an interesting video. I cast lead bullets and zinc contaminated lead is a big problem; it causes 'skin' to form when you pour the alloy. I saw some of it while you were pouring the lead. I was interested that lead and zinc don't mix and was hoping for a way to separate them by watching this. Perhaps allowing the mix to cool more slowly would allow better separation?
I have been looking everywhere for a pyramid mold to pour copper in... I see you have one... where did you get it from? Ps, love the video. Very informative.
I would use borax to clean the lead. Then clean the dross off the top. Add your silver and zinc after the lead is cleaned up. I use borax for flexing lead before I cast bullets. Should help your process as well.
Your lead and silver protect the zinc in acid. For this to work you would need to have a 75 to 25% ratio. Watch sree tips in quartation videos. He uses 75 % silver to 25% gold when he refines karat scrap. This way the acid can reduce the silver and leave the gold behind.
since lead has such a low melting point, cant you just heat it until it is liquid and pour it off and leaving only the non melted silver. Your method really seems like the long way around. Have you tried chemicals, like acids, etc.
Looks like Brent Underwood and MBMM could run the Cerro Gordo mining process again, if MBMM learns this process of silver extracting under heavy contamination of ore with other impurities present.
I would keep hydrochloric acid away from silver. That's probably where half of your silver went, converted into silver chloride in the hcl. It can be recovered, when it's isolated from the lead.
