What I’m looking for is a base recipe for hobby scale smelting of the ore from a old mine. I’ve got some borax and plenty of soda ash and just ordered the parts to build a furnace. Main sulfide is Chalcopyrite… I’m doing this as a hobby type thing after finding a couple rice kernel size pieces of free gold clinging to iron oxides on the sides of quartz stringers running through the ore…under magnification there seems to be a fair amount of gold. Recommendations of a good, basic book would be appreciated. TIA
What I’m looking for is a base recipe for hobby scale smelting of the ore from a old mine. I’ve got some borax and plenty of soda ash and just ordered the parts to build a furnace. Main sulfide is Chalcopyrite… I’m doing this as a hobby type thing after finding a couple rice kernel size pieces of free gold clinging to iron oxides on the sides of quartz stringers running through the ore…under magnification there seems to be a fair amount of gold. Recommendations of a good, basic book would be appreciated. TIA
May not be applicable but there's a guy on youtube that does refining. Sreetips. If you could get it concentrated down to something reasonable his techniques would work. It's mainly using hydrochloride and nitric acids as well as heat to get it into solution, then sodium metabisulfite (stump out) to get it to precipitate out..
May not be applicable but there's a guy on youtube that does refining. Sreetips. If you could get it concentrated down to something reasonable his techniques would work. It's mainly using hydrochloride and nitric acids as well as heat to get it into solution, then sodium metabisulfite (stump out) to get it to precipitate out..
I’ve done that before but IIRC, I used iron sulfate to precipitate it out… it’s been about 40 years since I worked with aqua regia though…and I don’t want to dick around with acids anymore… I’ve watched a few YouTube videos of that guy from mount baker mining and though he probably has a better understanding of which oxidizers work best with the different sulfides, he’s always “experimenting” with different mixtures which often have to be recrushed and reprocessed. Maybe the library here would be a good start.
Nope.Gayghots, Suckermores, Plumdumbs and Houston_2s hero Bidet is the only Smeller and he's in the WH unless he's in Delaware get his handlers instructions.
Last edited by jaguartx; 03/21/23.
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