MY wedding ring was 12k white gold and was 5.1 grams. My first foray into refining white gold was done with it since I figured I wouldn't need it any more what with no longer being married. I tried to sell it off once I was separated but was never given anything close to a decent price and so it just sat in a drawer. But when I finally got around to working with it I am proud to say that I managed to recover 2.49gm of Au and 2.47gm Pd. I melted the Au into 2 1gm beads and one gave them to one of my daughters who made a pair of earrings from them. The Pd I still have in powder form and one day I hope to make something from it. Oddly enough as much as I don't miss the ring I don't feel right selling off the metals and it did my heart good to see my daughter use the Au as she did.
Fascinating & informative. I never knew about those colored golds having alloys. Your one of my top favorites on You Tube. Thanks for the great videos!
You have made me a hobbyist... it's still just vicarious, but I will be ready. You would love this video I saw where someone had, essentially, mined the sidewalks of 5th Avenue, outside of every jeweler he vacuumed up all the silt in the cracks of the sidewalks. Sooo much was recovered. I can't even imagine what the storm drain would've had in it!
Another amazing video. Ive actually been saving my white gold until i saw a video on the subject. If i had the cash to buy that bar of gold I definitely would. I just wish there was like a tip jar for videos or something. Id be happy to tip a few bucks your way anytime one of your videos helps me out, which come to think of it, might come up to the value of that gold bar.
very coincident! i stumbled in this white gold video by chance. now I will the composition and better understanding on white gold. thanks Sreetips, bob
Well for sure I know now why you use the first method as this one here is very much more work time-wise and what do they say TIME IS MONEY lol thanks mate great Vlog
As a gemologist, I can tell you a diamond tester will never indicate a natural ruby from a synthetic. You have to look at the stone under 10x magnification and look for curved striations and or flux and two phase inclusions.
The best way to tell is to examine the Ruby under high magnification. A natural Ruby will have imperfections inside. If no imperfections are present then it's 99.99% probability that it's a lab-created stone, or 0.01% chance it's a very high quality natural Ruby. I think the gemologist can use a refractometer to tell the difference
A refractometer will only tell you if it is natural OR synthetic corundum (ruby and sapphire are corundum.) The ONLY way to distinguish between a natural or synthetic is like I said in my previous post. Examine the stone under magnification (preferrably a dark field illuminated microscope) and look for curved striations which would indicate a flame fusion grown synthetic, or look for fingerprint like flux inclusions which would indicate a flux grown synthetic. A natural ruby can be flawless, so just because it has no inclusions in the stone doesn't mean it's a synthetic.
In the past a ruby has been any sapphire with more intense color than a pink sapphire. Because of this ambiguity, the international organizations now consider all the chromium bearing reddish corundum to be rubies. Most rubies contain rutile crystals - known as silk. Apparently some are heat treated to make the rutile become invisible to the naked eye. But stones with a bit of silk are far more valuable than one that is "flawless".
Fantastic video, I really appreciate them. Keep up the good work! If you ever get around to casting your 999 silver into bars to sell them, I would probably buy a few!
I've got lots of silver, but I'm saving it for my chess set. Plus the spot silver market is just too low to be selling a whole bunch of silver right now. Thank you for watching.
@@sreetips; Thank you for your prompt reply.i very much appreciate that, i didn't know there was a specific reason for the oxalic acid until now. and makes perfect sense for producing the upmost quality and purity that can be obtained.thanks once again, your vids are very informative and interesting
Some day it would be nice to have you show your safety equipment to show what is required to do these process's refining gold and silver safely. Really enjoy watching your videos!
Another phenomenal video from start to finish... very informative and interesting to watch. I am always learning something new watching your videos. Question, I’ve watched you do these gold refining videos a few different ways. Is there be a difference in the purity of the gold if you just dropped the gold with just SMB as apposed to using copperas or oxalic acid to drop the gold? Which method do you prefer to use to drop the gold (SMB, copperas or oxalic acid) or do you just go with what you have on hand when your refining?
Eric, three nines gold can be produced all day long with just SMB. For some refinings, such as Gold Filled, where some junk tends to follow the gold, it may be best to use a different precipitant for the second refining. For example, SMB will drop platinum, if present, with the gold. But oxalic acid or copperas won't. But oxalic will drop copper and tin if present, SMB won't. Copperas could contaminate the gold with iron, but SMB won't. Each precipitant will selectively remove contaminants that the others may not remove. But refining straight yellow gold, inquart with silver and two SMB refinings usually gets the gold very clean. Oxalic acid is like a polishing step. It's used when the gold is already quite pure, like in this video. You can see by the color that the gold is already high purity after parting with nitric before the first aqua regia treatment.
Hello, I have Gold Bars & Diamond Stones for sale, Can you help us to look for Gold bars/Diamond buyers in your country and i promise to be giving you 5 % ofany sale please ?. ganddmininggroup01@gmail.com Peter.
whens the next time you'll be doing another gold refining video? (subscribed on this video btw) watching the different amounts of acid react with the gold and the repeated process of refining and expelling all the base metals/other unneeded precious metals from the gold is satisfying to watch.
How can you tell if the white gold has lead cause I got tons of white gold I find nuggets everywhere and it all passes 18 k gold test but I'm afraid it may have lead well some of it cause some is very heavy and some light for the size
Professor oxalic acid is to precipitate gold, as well as the metabisulfite? I thought the oxalico was to purify the royal water to eliminate impurities. Thank you very much I am from Brazil and we speak little English, I do not understand what you speak, I will translate on gogle. Thanks.
Question: This might be a noob question...At 23:20 you "called" it and said you have all the base metals dissolved, leaving you with the the final product, gold. At 24:13 you add Sulfuric acid to dissolve led along with the HCL solution to dissolve gold. Should these two steps not be done separately so led could be precipitated out of the solution before adding HCL to dissolve the gold to provide an even purer gold button? I understand this question would make me sound like a complete noob, but for me to understand I need to know. Thank you for all your high-quality videos, it is really informative....never mind, answer is at 31:10
There should be no trash or impurities in that BRAND of Oxalic acid,, I called the company 3 years ago and asked what the purity of their product was and they said it was 99.8 - 99.9 ,, He went on to say that they take great integrity with their work and product
I knew you used oxalic acid to percipitatate gold once so got back to it... I saw you used a huuge amount of Oxaldihydrate... It's very potent stuff. As you've seen. You really need to use distilled water indeed else Calciumoxalate will pircipitate from the water.
@@alienrocketscienceshared8454 I’d be cutting that pavement up and putting it in a rock crusher to get that back. Ugh how heartbreaking. Thankfully I’ve never had any major losses like that when refining. 🤞 fingers crossed I never do.
@@alienrocketscienceshared8454 dude, thats why you gotta have a large bin or kids swimming pool or something in n event like that, hell lay out towels everywhere so you can just dissolve the whole towel.... I would have had a pickaxe and or a jackhammer so fast, and would have just thrown the damn asphalt and concrete in some aqua regia!! how much was lost?? I feel that pain even now...
I recently discovered you can test gold to see if it's real and even determine karat using nothing but a graduated cylinder water a scale and a calculator by weighing it and determining its volume through displacement and using its weight and volume to determine that it is gold and approximately what karat using volume and weight and some relatively simple math because we know the density of pure gold and can determine the density of the different karats through extrapolation or find it online somewhere which I really like because I work within a tight budget so any money I can save on testing supplies if they aren't necessary can go towards something I can't get around like buying glassware or reagents or scrap gold even when I can find a deal on it and possibly one day have enough to try out my idea for a gold brass alloy that is low karat but still looks like higher karat gold and still retains the other properties of gold that make it ideal for jewelry
The pH of the oxalic must be adjusted up before the reaction will work. Why, I don't know. It was part of the instructions from the procedure that I was using.
I would think the Platinum Group Metals in solution would almost certainly at least in part be rhodium but were you ever able to determine what they were exactly if they were present?
Sreetips I know you’ve said you don’t do other’s material but I could get you dental scrap (I collect it at my office), usually more palladium in dental scrap than gold but I’d send you some if interested
Hi Sreetips, I was wondering if you could incinerate the tap water off, instead of chancing that some was left in and if that would do the same but better rinsing? I was curious as well in alot of videos a ton of folks use hcl first to rid the base metals out, then they always seem to add nitric after they rinse it from the hcl; the thing that seems to happen more often than not is that some hcl is left and makes some form of chloride salts; if after rinsing the hcl would it in your opinion be better to incinerate it red hot then do your nitric acid? I was just curious thinking that would for sure rid it of all hcl that would be left in it by accident or such. Thank You for your time and would love to see the box of ash waste as well. :) Love your content, you're the best on RU-vid in my opinion for thorough content and doing it right the first time. :)
the nitric is the troublesome acid that needs to be driven off or used up, the hydrochloric is actually really weak in comparison, and it reacts with silver to form silver chloride which is a thick sticky mess that will "gum up the works". also Hcl cant really dissolve any of the base metals by itself from what i understand, which is why he uses pure nitric and avoids Hcl until he is ready to make aqua regia. i only ever see him rinse with hcl sometimes but the nitric is the real workhorse and the extremely powerful reagent of the bunch... in fact sometimes after rinsing a bunch of time with water, he will add some hcl and instantly start dissolving gold just from the very tiny amount of nitric left after all the water rinses...the only reagent that seems stronger than nitric acid is high percentage hydrogen peroxide, that stuff just shreds anything in its way, lmao!
What tips would you have for a beginner that wouldn't have all the lab equipment and chemicals. Anything that could be done with household stuff and old coffee pots and mason jars?
Back when I first started I used a coffee pot because they could be heated. I used 3 liter jars from the thrift store (still use them to decant my stock pot). Pyrex measuring cups work good to heat things in as well. I have clear glass saucers that I use as cover for my beakers. Good luck.
I have seen other refiners on youtube just throw the filter paper(s) in with the final melt, would this effect your final purity if you would have included them?
I add those sweeps a spoon at a time to the cement silver when I melt it. Then run it through my silver cell. Any precious metals get trapped in the silver cell anode filters. Then I process the anode filters for the precious metals that they contain.
***SreeTips*** Do you process gold for others? If I have 665 Grams PC fingers and pins already separated from cards and melted using scrap metals flux and borax would I get most of the gold and majority of impurities out?
This is my hobby, I don't refine other people's material. Melting causes metals to alloy together. They don't separate. Refining is the only way to separate the metals from each other.
Owl Tech used potassium hydroxide in his video with good results. I don't think the soda has the power to do it. Ammonia is not the best choice. I hate using it but that's what the book called for: refining precious metals waste by cm Hoke.
im curious what this process would do to white gold with a bit of rhodium polluting the PGM or rhodium plating. The hot nitric shouldn't dissolve rhodium, but the aqua regia should, right? So if i understand it right, any rhodium would pass through the filter with the gold. I'm not sure about the rest of the process, but with rhodium being over $10,000 an ounce im very curious.
Yoda, there’s rhodium in my filters and in my stock pot. I’m sure of that. I just haven’t figured out how to get it yet. But I will and then make a new video
She buys bags of junk and broken stuff. It sells for about $30 at the thrift store - sometimes there is nothing, but she usually finds some over-looked karat gold and silver
How important is the color of the white gold alloy if it's rhodium plated? Does rhodium plating cover any other colors like yellow or Rose or does the true color bleed through the rhodium plating?
Thanks, Legend! Didn't you forget white gold holds most often Silver? Which might nearly not need that much addition of Silver? I know this video is old but since then the same?
Hey Mr Sreetips, just a question.... what if instead of inquarting, you dissolved everything in Aqua Regia at the start, then precipitated the gold and god knows what else out with the bisulphite, washed off the chlorine, then treated with nitric acid to dissolve the base metals, leaving the gold behind ????
Yes, no problem. They “color” gold by adding different portions of base metals to the gold alloy. For example, “rose gold” has the same exact amount as “yellow gold”. But it looks more red because they add more copper and less zinc to the “rose gold.”
Soo good work as alwaya I have a qust Afrend disove alloy of gold and ather metals by adding sulferc and nitruc All metals disolve and gold is purifid Can the solution have any pgm,s in it or silver or gold And how can I presitate all that metals Hope you anser me becuse its about 400lLiters of solution
Just to be clear, you cannot take 14 parts (59%) yellow anything and add 6 parts (25%) white anything and then add 4 parts (16%) orange anything and end up with a pure white anything as the end result. You end up with, as sreetips stated, a tinted yellowish off white colored metal that is not pleasing to the eye. Which is why the jewelry is then rhodium plated to give it that bright white finish people like. It should also be noted that most modern sterling silver jewelry is given the same rhodium plating to keep the item from tarnishing. This is why most gold purist or jewelers don't like white gold items for repair because they are plated with rhodium, thus needing one more step, just to look identical to sterling silver that is plated with rhodium. Moral of the story is, if you like that "white gold" look, then just save yourself tons of money and buy modern sterling silver jewelry. I promise you that your friends won't know the difference.
You misspelled endothermic. Grin. Great video, as usual. I have never used the oxalic acid precipitation method and after seeing your demonstration, probably never will.
The contaminants are measure in parts per million. Not enough to report in the assay of the gold. There are some particulate in the tap water. Hold a glass of tap water up to the light and you'll see junk suspended in the water. But filtering before precipitation should get it all out.
Thanks. I was just wondering about the possible chlorine dissolved in there (less after freezing) causing a problem. At some points you (and other refiners) are very particular about using distilled to avoid chlorine so was not sure if the ice had to come from distilled as well as it is mixed in and not in an external ice bath.
