@@kailuagarage I will admit that I was surprised with the yield. I was not surprised at the repeated refining needed to clean out the gold, and also not surprised that the weight was short. That silvery button holds the rest and there's no way to get that out without inquarting at this point.
@@kailuagarageyeah not really. When you're running a business as sreetips is, the Idea is to make money. If you wasted this amount of time and materials everytime you went to refine some gold, you'd quickly find yourself going broke.
For those saying “you were only off by 0.6g, that doesn’t seem like enough to go through the trouble of doing it the other way”, keep in mind that this was a very small batch, and that very little of it was 18k to start with. On a much larger batch, or a batch with a much higher percentage of gold, the losses would be even greater. Not to mention the fact that he is still left with the process of refining the button of mystery metal, as well as treating the mystery solution prior to disposal. Plus, there is always a small chance that some of the pieces of scrap gold were miscategorized, which could mean that his actual yield may have been several grams higher than what he estimated, which would mean that his losses by not enquarting could quite possibly be higher than 0.6g (the only way to know for sure would be to refine the mystery button by itself to find out if there is any gold left in it).
We already know that the button is gold passivated by silver. A few good nitric boils ought to refine it to acceptable 24 karat; No? And if the nitric boils are colorless there is no need to use Aquaregia unless refining to high purity is the goal; no?
Yes but hey, you cannot compare our beers with yours, well you can but it is an unfair contest. Back to Nitric, I can get a good industrail quality nitric of $4 Australian per liter. pretty good really. same with HCL but
Excellent demonstration. I like the inquartation methode best, on top of that. It seems cleaner and more predictable. On top of that, you have a second production line (999 fine silver) where all the nitric is reused and all the silver which was in the scrap jewellery is a bonus yield. Thank you for teaching us Sir!
one of the prettiest pours yet. as a machinist I occasionally do silver-brazing, where everything that gets hot gets tarnished (and I always end up spending more time cleaning up the tarnish that the actual silver-brazing), so it never ceases to amaze me that gold can be melted and poured and it comes out perfectly pure, perfectly clean, no tarnish. Amazing.
i see the method of your madness, lol i do believe i could do the street tip way in my sleep after watching your channel for the last 2 yrs,you drilled it in to us,atleast me as a student who wants to learn... thank you...GMAN...silver city new mex.
I have enjoyed your videos for quite some time. I have to applaud you and commend you for doing this video. Many people make videos about doing things but hardly any will use their resources and such to purposely make a video doing it wrong simply to teach others. You quite obviously have the heart of a teacher and that’s amazing. Thank you for this video.
All i can say is Bravo ! Doing it 'wrong' is how you find out ways to do it 'right', but there is Never only 1 'right' way. Hoke researched and experimented, then found Superb ways that work, even for us dullards. I get the feeling that Sreetips could soon expand everyone's knowledge of how to refine Gold. That can only happen by experimenting and seeing what works. Maybe good, maybe bad, but very interesting whichever way !
Works if you are out of silver for some reason, the yield was a surprise to me as well, was thinking it'd be around 30g. Nice to follow along on your experiments Kevin, thanks for sharing and big thumbs up!
Love all your lessons. Given the disaster it caused i give you even more credit for causing yourself more pain to teach us why! Thanks for doing what you do, so educational.
Senior Chief, I was wondering when we get a Sreetips melt table sweeps video? That area has to have some spatter and vapor deposits from all the years. And also, what do you do with your spent melt dishes? Would make a great video series in my opinion.
Sure would be a fine video. Crushing all the melt dishes to a fine powder by hand with a giant mortar and pestle would be a fine time-lapse wouldn't it. Using jaw Crushers set to finer and finer sizes on all of the contents not just the melt dishes, like all of his melting area would possibly yield quite a lot of gold after 20 years but like most folks I'm asking you to sweep occasionally put that over to the side and then do a recovery on that.
We are dumb animals unfortunately, so it's very important for us to see how it doesn't work right.. we learn more by failure than by success. Thank you Sreetips! You are a better teacher than most!
Not trolling sarcasm, you show the full process, warts and all. The option for me is to figure it out the sloppy way. Nobody else shows the alternative to the smartest way. Thank you! I learn not only how to do it well, but also where I'm doing it wrong and how. You are an invaluable teacher!
This kinda reminds me of the episodes with the Jewelers polishing compound that you had to try and separate from the precious metals and how much of a nightmare it was until you tried the Piranha solution to dissolve the organic compounds. Proper process has a method not because its quick or cheap but because it makes the end result better and less of a mess through the process.
The benefit of inquartation, followed by the nitric acid dissolution, is that it is very consistent in its results. The silver and base metals are all in solution, and the gold and PGMs are left behind. You're not left with a beaker of heaven-knows-what.
Are you able to go straight to melting the gold after parting out the silver with nitric acid? I know that continuing on with the aqua ragia will give a more pure end result but is it really necessary if you're just looking for something around 22kt?
The gold can be melted after the nitric treatments, without refining it in Aqua Regia. It won’t be three nines, but very close. Perfectly fine if it’s to be sent in to a big refiner. They will probably just throw it in with their next batch and re-refine it anyway, regardless of purity.
@@sreetips thank you for the quick reply and for the information. I've always seen people refine the gold more after the nitric acid so I wasn't quite sure about stopping after the first parting. Thank you.
I also got a mystery button once after doing a batch of jewlery (I normally only did industrial gold cleanup) , didn't know what it was but it was really hard and I kept it, found a scrapper with an XRF gun and it turned out to be ~94% palladium.. with todays palladium price that was a nice bonus.
I have even more appreciation for your inquartation process now. that was a very pretty ingot. I was wondering how close to three nines the final refine finished at.
When the chloroauric acid looks like super clear orange kool-aid, it's usually exceeding 999fine. That color should always be trade grade, provided you use a good method of precipitation.
@anthonystrawbridge In jewelry stores, I think 24k is closer to 23k. I'm pretty sure that's just so you can't dent what you're wearing with a fingernail or something. Pure gold is pretty soft metal. But here, with the refining, it's far closer to 100% gold.
13:30 It is better to mix silver chloride and sodium carbonate to homogeneous with excess carbonate (it is easier to do this in wet form or by mixing silver chloride powder with a saturated solution of sodium carbonate, then dry and melt the mixture) Also, the melt of silver chloride and sodium carbonate better to be mixed to speed up the exchange reaction 15:30 The milky gray color of the flux indicates that not all of the silver chloride has reacted; ideally, the flux should be colorless or transparent brown/transparent black. Drops of cloudy flux can be dissolved in a waste bucket
While all of what you say is indeed true, if people would just follow the correct procedure of inquartation, dissolve silver and waste metals in dilute nitric then refine the gold sponge in Aqua Regia, the production of silver chloride and other undesirable by products can be kept to sufficiently low levels where they are easily filtered out and the waste saved for later processing. Sreetips deliberately made a right mess of the process in this video because some people just can't be told and clearly don't understand enough chemistry where they can reasonably predict the outcome of such well understood chemical processes.
Hi there! Here's a thought, after precipitating the gold from solution with SMB, could you centrifuge the whole result to settle the gold faster? Especially with very fine gold powder, it seems to take an awefully long time to just let it settle on its own. Thanks for all the videos, I find these both educational and entertaining.
Yes, but I’ve found that boiling also helps the fine gold powder settle much quicker. But watch out if there’s any excess nitric present. A delayed runaway reaction could cause it to boil over vigorously.
Sreetips has made it VERY CLEAR in other videos that you need to inquart the Gold with silver so the whole process works properly and I don't know why some people have a hard time understanding that ???????
Silver is not mandatory, but he can use impure silver or sterling silver to do the inquartation. The silver is then precipitated as the chloride - which he uses in other processes, or recovers separately. Copper also works fine, but requires twice as much nitric acid as silver.
Hi , great to see the advantages of inquartation , although having followed your channel for many years I was already a convert to the process . The problem I have is a lack of silver, living in the state of QLD Australia Stirling silver is not common and tends to disappear in to pornbrokers or call a ridicules price. How hard is it to inquart with copper? Love the show, cheers
so you knew you were heading trough an inneficient process. This was costly for you (products cost + MIA gold). Thanks for sharing your knowledge and passion with us!
I’ve heard that if you inquart the gold with silver first, the procedure will go much smoother and the yield will be a bit greater. Forget who showed me how to do that……;)
I greatly appreciate your video's Keven.. The video on how you manage your waste treatment was something I've been wondering about all summer when I discovered your Sreetips RUclips page. I am starting to collect gold and golf filled items and I'm also starting to buy glassware in hopes of doing my first gold refinement next summer. I'm a teacher at my local community college and have a friend who has PHD in chemistry to help me along. Actually, she wants to be apart of this new hobby I want to start..
From what I can tell, the process works, but takes longer and produces more waste materials. I am learning more from your channel than I did from chemistry class in high school.
1. Thank you, this was very educative 2. Why kitchen timer don't have sreetips writen on it, but 99? Was it gift? Stolen? Borrowed? Is 99 code for sreetips? etc :) So many questions came to my head whenever I saw it! :)
Where do you purchase your melt dishes at? I need to find a better source. So darn expensive on Amazon and eBay. I think I may have asked you this before and you had bought a bulk container a while ago but I’d imagine you have to had used them up and bought more by now. Maybe not, but figured id ask. Also, love it when you do videos like this that show the reason for the underlying principles of refining. It really hammers home what’s happening and makes for a greater understanding for those that don’t know.
If you could grind the raw karat gold into tiny pieces (or flatten into thin strips?) the passivation issue would be less of a problem. Not clear to me what the advantage is to this process. Faster? Less nitric used? Resulting gold looked surprisingly pure though.
Im sure you realize how important it is to fall on the sword sometimes so others know what will happen, without them making that same mistake. Your videos are great!
Love your video's. Thanks for taking the time to record, edit and upload them, I have watched just about every video you have uploaded. Quick question, have you ever tried sweeping up the area you do your melts in and incinerating your sweeps like you do for the jewelers? I know you are very careful and do not like to make excess waste, but have you ever considered sweeping up and processing your sweeps?
You've created a "Two Prong" approach which gives you 1) pretty close .999 fine gold in minimal amount of sreetips time, chemicals and energy plus 2) dirty
The viewers that inspired this video are fortunate you do not lash out in frustration. Unfortunately, I doubt this example will prevent them from asking the same mundane questions in future. Scotch was invented for a reason 😂
That was my number one question. What would happen if you use Aqua Regia as the first step? Even if you are 0,6 g off it was a chaotic process in my oppinion. To watch the process without inquartation kinda feel wrong. With the whole inquartation you have way more control about the process in every step. This was a waste of liquids and even dealed with a Frankenstein Smoothie afterwards. Really interesting video, thanks for that.
Great video, Mr. Sreetips! I don't think you had any excess nitric acid. If anything you probably didn't have enough. You ended up with 38.7 grams of gold which would require a good 35 to 40 ml of nitric acid on its own plus all the base metals in the alloys. Copper requires 4.2 ml of nitric acid per gram and I'd assume there was a lot of copper in these alloys along with the silver, zinc, etc. Passivatiom is a real problem, but I think a deficit in nitric acid is what caused the remaining undissolved metal here. Just my thoughts. Thanks for the content, sir!
I've found the old gold pan us a really effective way of sepparating agcl from undissolved gold. Straight to aqua regia with 22ct is ok to get 3 9's though. Shere's such a tiny amount of agcl to deal with. But as the master says, the only way to get 4 is inquartation.
I enjoyed this experiment. I don't want you to have to prove the science. Although, I wonder why all the other stuff in stumpout doesn't change the reactions. Is it the hydrochloric boils that clean up any possible unwanted chemicals?
Nothing escape waveform does it? I noticed it in one of the other videos, but felt like saying something about it this time. I'm astonished that the reaction will go through periods of high and low activity, almost like breathing, or a heartbeat of sorts. Very cool.
I absolutely love it. The 24 karat pure gold bar is beautiful. Me thinks the value should be top; is it not? And the remaining gold in the button is already inquarted; is it not? Am I wrong to deduct that the nitric spent is a minimal cost than would be the ip front cost of sterling silver used for inquartation? ( The sterling cost is recoverable but the Nitric acid cost is not). 🤔
Hello Mr. Sreetips! Great video. I have a question, is the liquid gold heavier than the same amount of anything else in liquid form? Thank you for your time.
Hello, love your videos. I have a question I would appreciate if you could answer, I see that your muriatic acid is very clear while the options I see at the hardware store seem to have some contamination. Do you treat your muriatic acid before use? Thank you for all the videos!
Hi. just want to say, that i love watch you videos. Saddly i cant try to refine gold, because i live in Denmark, and its illigal to buy hydrochloric acid and nitric acid here in DK. But i have a question, how many litters of air does your fume cupboard extract pr mintue ? Keep the videos comming 🙂
I agree, inquartation is better for less cleamup/workup... but, you forgot to count the amount of NO2 you usually use in the parting process after inquartation.... several hundred ML... on top of whats used to dissolve the sponge. This method does save on nitric; at the expense of having to deal with the SNCL during workup.
Interesting experiment. Thank you for making the video. Maybe do a video showing the jewellery just melted down into shot and then treated without adding extra silver, or doing a video adding copper instead of silver when inquartationing. (is that a word lol)
This video is exactly that, except he didnt spend time making it into shot. This just shows a less effective method vs inquartation like he normally does
@@chrism4008 in this video he went straight to aqua regia, I was just suggesting a video that shows the effectiveness of adding silver and or base metals to bring gold down to 25%. We have seen the few times he adds his wedding ring in and it comes out cleaner lol, but that is high purity gold
Presumably, there was a lot of silver chloride in the filter that you melted down. What does silver chloride become when melted? Is it a button of silver chloride or is it metallic silver contaminated with chlorine?
Silver chloride can be melted into metal with plenty of soda ash (sodium carbonate) present. But it’s not a very efficient way to do it. It’s better to convert the silver chloride with lye and sugar.
kind of wondering if Aqua Regia can leach the gold out of ore and out from between the black heavy stuff that sumtimes mixes with the gold and is verry hard to remove trough panning , think you could desolve the gold flakes and powder gold out of the fine sand and stuff in the Aqua Regia then filter out the solids then using the treestump removal stuff to get out back out of the solution
Yes, that would probably work. Boil the black heavy stuff mixed with fine gold dust that hard to separate with panning. Then dilute with distilled water, allow it to cool, filter out the solids, collect the pregnant solution in a clean beaker, add some SMB and precipitate out the pure gold. This sounds like it could work. But remember I’ve never tried it so I can’t be sure if any unseen problems could foul it up.
Hi Sreetips, a question: Could a stirring bar be useful to brake all this crust all along the aqua reggia boil? And is this possible to get out of the crust problem by grinding the material as finely as possible before the first aqua reggia bath, and stir it constantly? Sorry to annoy you with all those questions in bad English...Best regards from France, have a good day!
I understand inquartation and I agree it is simply the best way to ensure a very close prediction for yield and as shown all that chloride. However I have seen many go right to AR after nitric boils when processing gf material. What is the difference? Not trying to sound art lol just curious
@@sreetips interesting. Btw I successfully conducted this for the first time it was a learning curve lol mainly the filtering I need to invest in better equipment vac filters funnels pump ECT but I did recover 5.89grams from 114g gf material mainly ring sizers and a few old rings and a pocket watch absolutely addicted now lol however my gold is slightly dissolved by 18l test acid and fully dissolved by 22k acid would putting back into AR solution and and dropping it back out again push it to a higher purity or do I need to inquart it and start over?
18.51 that looks more red than inquartation yellowish. Have never seen inquarted under light either but this under light seems more red in light. Garnet more so imo. Amazing
If you inquart with copper you don't get the solubility issue going straight to aqua regia. You can probably save on nitric acid this way but I don't feel like it gets to the same degree of purity.
I would prefer to get rid of as much base metal (and silver) as possible before dissolving the gold. Also, some alloy gold contains silver, so you can still get some passivization if going straight to aqua regia.
Thanks for showing us the “why.” Your lessons are so impactful.
Great to be able to point people at this vid when I am trying to explain why one should always inquart. Well done.
Thanks for going through the trouble to show us how to do it the long way. This was another very interesting show sir.
love watching that refined gold sludge convert to shiny on the melt table as the torch moves around ... just cool...
Congratulations, everyone who pestered him about 'Why do you inquart with silver?' Now you know, and he made a royal mess of a demonstration for you.
Some folks just have to learnthe hard way... 😕
Seemed the same in the end
And we all learn! This is for us that are students right?
@@kailuagarage I will admit that I was surprised with the yield. I was not surprised at the repeated refining needed to clean out the gold, and also not surprised that the weight was short. That silvery button holds the rest and there's no way to get that out without inquarting at this point.
@@kailuagarageyeah not really. When you're running a business as sreetips is, the Idea is to make money. If you wasted this amount of time and materials everytime you went to refine some gold, you'd quickly find yourself going broke.
Thanks for demonstrating a technique you don’t like to use. It’s interesting to see how things don’t work well!
Oof. That first dissolve was so filthy, it looked like the recovery phase of electronic scrap.
For those saying “you were only off by 0.6g, that doesn’t seem like enough to go through the trouble of doing it the other way”, keep in mind that this was a very small batch, and that very little of it was 18k to start with. On a much larger batch, or a batch with a much higher percentage of gold, the losses would be even greater. Not to mention the fact that he is still left with the process of refining the button of mystery metal, as well as treating the mystery solution prior to disposal.
Plus, there is always a small chance that some of the pieces of scrap gold were miscategorized, which could mean that his actual yield may have been several grams higher than what he estimated, which would mean that his losses by not enquarting could quite possibly be higher than 0.6g (the only way to know for sure would be to refine the mystery button by itself to find out if there is any gold left in it).
You did it wrong so we don’t have to! Thanks for taking one for the team!
Agreed. The cost of nitric in Australia is so cheap that inquartation is the only way to go. Also on my 1/2 kilo batches I dont want losses this high.
@@julianalcorso5703 Yes, I'm amazed how much more expensive nitric is in America, but then again we more than make up for it in the cost of our beer!
We already know that the button is gold passivated by silver. A few good nitric boils ought to refine it to acceptable 24 karat; No? And if the nitric boils are colorless there is no need to use Aquaregia unless refining to high purity is the goal; no?
Yes but hey, you cannot compare our beers with yours, well you can but it is an unfair contest. Back to Nitric, I can get a good industrail quality nitric of $4 Australian per liter. pretty good really. same with HCL but
Excellent demonstration. I like the inquartation methode best, on top of that. It seems cleaner and more predictable. On top of that, you have a second production line (999 fine silver) where all the nitric is reused and all the silver which was in the scrap jewellery is a bonus yield. Thank you for teaching us Sir!
one of the prettiest pours yet. as a machinist I occasionally do silver-brazing, where everything that gets hot gets tarnished (and I always end up spending more time cleaning up the tarnish that the actual silver-brazing), so it never ceases to amaze me that gold can be melted and poured and it comes out perfectly pure, perfectly clean, no tarnish. Amazing.
I am very happy that you did this demonstration, because it was something I have wondered about often.
Another great video. Thank you. You're showing us the wrong way to do it so we don't have to make these mistakes
Thanks for showing us a perfect example of why things should be done a certain way. I appreciate all the hard work you do!
i see the method of your madness, lol i do believe i could do the street tip way in my sleep after watching your channel for the last 2 yrs,you drilled it in to us,atleast me as a student who wants to learn... thank you...GMAN...silver city new mex.
Sometimes the best way to explain how to do something the right way is to show it being done the wrong way. Great vid!
I have enjoyed your videos for quite some time. I have to applaud you and commend you for doing this video. Many people make videos about doing things but hardly any will use their resources and such to purposely make a video doing it wrong simply to teach others.
You quite obviously have the heart of a teacher and that’s amazing.
Thank you for this video.
The kitchen timer was a nice addition to the time lapse.
Also, on the plus side, it did turn the solution a nice shade of green
All i can say is Bravo !
Doing it 'wrong' is how you find out ways to do it 'right', but there is Never only 1 'right' way.
Hoke researched and experimented, then found Superb ways that work, even for us dullards.
I get the feeling that Sreetips could soon expand everyone's knowledge of how to refine Gold.
That can only happen by experimenting and seeing what works.
Maybe good, maybe bad, but very interesting whichever way !
Works if you are out of silver for some reason, the yield was a surprise to me as well, was thinking it'd be around 30g.
Nice to follow along on your experiments Kevin, thanks for sharing and big thumbs up!
Love all your lessons. Given the disaster it caused i give you even more credit for causing yourself more pain to teach us why! Thanks for doing what you do, so educational.
Senior Chief, I was wondering when we get a Sreetips melt table sweeps video? That area has to have some spatter and vapor deposits from all the years. And also, what do you do with your spent melt dishes? Would make a great video series in my opinion.
Sure would be a fine video. Crushing all the melt dishes to a fine powder by hand with a giant mortar and pestle would be a fine time-lapse wouldn't it.
Using jaw Crushers set to finer and finer sizes on all of the contents not just the melt dishes, like all of his melting area would possibly yield quite a lot of gold after 20 years but like most folks I'm asking you to sweep occasionally put that over to the side and then do a recovery on that.
The lighting on the last precip sequence was perfect. No glare and a warmer bulb works well on screen. Oh, and good job all around.
Answers a ton of questions about the benefits of inquartation! Nice result, I thought you had left more gold behind!
We are dumb animals unfortunately, so it's very important for us to see how it doesn't work right.. we learn more by failure than by success. Thank you Sreetips! You are a better teacher than most!
Not trolling sarcasm, you show the full process, warts and all. The option for me is to figure it out the sloppy way. Nobody else shows the alternative to the smartest way. Thank you! I learn not only how to do it well, but also where I'm doing it wrong and how. You are an invaluable teacher!
A smart man will learn from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
I had often wondered about that. And you showed me why without me asking you for the answer. Thank you, you're the best
I'm always fascinated when I see that first spoon of SMB go in and see that instant color shift.😮
Interesting to see it done that way. Not that I had any doubts, but I can see why you inquart it now.
You are welcome. It’s clear there is a correct way and several incorrect ways to perform a task. I’ll leave it at that. Thank you Sir!👍👍🤟
Awww you made it snow on the melt table ! What a nice transitional element for moving from summer to fall... :)
You get snow in the Fall? 🤠
I’ve been waiting for this for a while. I’ve always wanted to see the benefits of inquarting with silver cuz everyone thinks it’s a waste of time…
This kinda reminds me of the episodes with the Jewelers polishing compound that you had to try and separate from the precious metals and how much of a nightmare it was until you tried the Piranha solution to dissolve the organic compounds. Proper process has a method not because its quick or cheap but because it makes the end result better and less of a mess through the process.
Well said
The benefit of inquartation, followed by the nitric acid dissolution, is that it is very consistent in its results. The silver and base metals are all in solution, and the gold and PGMs are left behind. You're not left with a beaker of heaven-knows-what.
Are you able to go straight to melting the gold after parting out the silver with nitric acid? I know that continuing on with the aqua ragia will give a more pure end result but is it really necessary if you're just looking for something around 22kt?
The gold can be melted after the nitric treatments, without refining it in Aqua Regia. It won’t be three nines, but very close. Perfectly fine if it’s to be sent in to a big refiner. They will probably just throw it in with their next batch and re-refine it anyway, regardless of purity.
@@sreetips thank you for the quick reply and for the information. I've always seen people refine the gold more after the nitric acid so I wasn't quite sure about stopping after the first parting. Thank you.
excellent video and explanation of why you refine the way you do
Love how you surprised yourself with your own superb technic.
A wonderful video to show why you inquart the karat gold. 👍
Bless you sir, Taking one for the team so that we know why we shouldn't ever have to👏👏👏👏
Thank you for the trouble you went through Sreetips ❤
Thank you for showing this, i wondered what would happen. Big fan!!
I also got a mystery button once after doing a batch of jewlery (I normally only did industrial gold cleanup) , didn't know what it was but it was really hard and I kept it, found a scrapper with an XRF gun and it turned out to be ~94% palladium.. with todays palladium price that was a nice bonus.
I have even more appreciation for your inquartation process now. that was a very pretty ingot. I was wondering how close to three nines the final refine finished at.
When the chloroauric acid looks like super clear orange kool-aid, it's usually exceeding 999fine. That color should always be trade grade, provided you use a good method of precipitation.
That's pretty fine me thinks. Isn't 24 karat gold just 23.5 karat anyway?
@anthonystrawbridge In jewelry stores, I think 24k is closer to 23k. I'm pretty sure that's just so you can't dent what you're wearing with a fingernail or something. Pure gold is pretty soft metal. But here, with the refining, it's far closer to 100% gold.
@@jacobforrester9827 In the US - and probably all other countries with gold purity standards - the gold must be at least 23.5k to be stamped 24k.
13:30 It is better to mix silver chloride and sodium carbonate to homogeneous with excess carbonate (it is easier to do this in wet form or by mixing silver chloride powder with a saturated solution of sodium carbonate, then dry and melt the mixture)
Also, the melt of silver chloride and sodium carbonate better to be mixed to speed up the exchange reaction
15:30 The milky gray color of the flux indicates that not all of the silver chloride has reacted; ideally, the flux should be colorless or transparent brown/transparent black.
Drops of cloudy flux can be dissolved in a waste bucket
While all of what you say is indeed true, if people would just follow the correct procedure of inquartation, dissolve silver and waste metals in dilute nitric then refine the gold sponge in Aqua Regia, the production of silver chloride and other undesirable by products can be kept to sufficiently low levels where they are easily filtered out and the waste saved for later processing. Sreetips deliberately made a right mess of the process in this video because some people just can't be told and clearly don't understand enough chemistry where they can reasonably predict the outcome of such well understood chemical processes.
I didn't know that. Thanks
Hi there! Here's a thought, after precipitating the gold from solution with SMB, could you centrifuge the whole result to settle the gold faster? Especially with very fine gold powder, it seems to take an awefully long time to just let it settle on its own. Thanks for all the videos, I find these both educational and entertaining.
Centrifuging it would settle the gold faster, yes. A centrifuge spinning two 4 liter beakers (you need two for balance) would be scary.
Yes, but I’ve found that boiling also helps the fine gold powder settle much quicker. But watch out if there’s any excess nitric present. A delayed runaway reaction could cause it to boil over vigorously.
Sreetips has made it VERY CLEAR in other videos that you need to inquart the Gold with silver so the whole process works properly and I don't know why some people have a hard time understanding that ???????
Silver is not mandatory, but he can use impure silver or sterling silver to do the inquartation. The silver is then precipitated as the chloride - which he uses in other processes, or recovers separately.
Copper also works fine, but requires twice as much nitric acid as silver.
Hi , great to see the advantages of inquartation , although having followed your channel for many years I was already a convert to the process . The problem I have is a lack of silver, living in the state of QLD Australia Stirling silver is not common and tends to disappear in to pornbrokers or call a ridicules price. How hard is it to inquart with copper? Love the show, cheers
Copper works hood. It takes more nitric to dissolve copper.
so you knew you were heading trough an inneficient process. This was costly for you (products cost + MIA gold). Thanks for sharing your knowledge and passion with us!
I’ve heard that if you inquart the gold with silver first, the procedure will go much smoother and the yield will be a bit greater. Forget who showed me how to do that……;)
Loved that you tried something different!
I greatly appreciate your video's Keven.. The video on how you manage your waste treatment was something I've been wondering about all summer when I discovered your Sreetips RUclips page. I am starting to collect gold and golf filled items and I'm also starting to buy glassware in hopes of doing my first gold refinement next summer. I'm a teacher at my local community college and have a friend who has PHD in chemistry to help me along. Actually, she wants to be apart of this new hobby I want to start..
First get a fume hood. No way to safely fo these reactions without one.
@@sreetips I have a full chemistry lab to work with. I just need to buy my own glassware.
Another very nice informative video.
But isn't it easier to dissolve the silver chloride in dilute ammonia?
I’ve excluded ammonia from all my processes.
From what I can tell, the process works, but takes longer and produces more waste materials. I am learning more from your channel than I did from chemistry class in high school.
کار شما خیلی درسته ❤فقط اگر زیر نویس فارسی میداشت خیلی عالی بود
I have subtitles enabled
A convincing proof of concept video.
Nice work Sreetips.
A mighty fine looking ingot for a metal soup.
"Burn all the people off of here"🤣
1. Thank you, this was very educative
2. Why kitchen timer don't have sreetips writen on it, but 99? Was it gift? Stolen? Borrowed? Is 99 code for sreetips? etc :) So many questions came to my head whenever I saw it! :)
It was $0.99 at the thrift store. I’ll get sreetips on it pronto. Thanks for pointing it out!
Where do you purchase your melt dishes at? I need to find a better source. So darn expensive on Amazon and eBay. I think I may have asked you this before and you had bought a bulk container a while ago but I’d imagine you have to had used them up and bought more by now. Maybe not, but figured id ask. Also, love it when you do videos like this that show the reason for the underlying principles of refining. It really hammers home what’s happening and makes for a greater understanding for those that don’t know.
I bought about a hundred of them back in 2011 from Miller’s Jewelry Supply in Chicago.
If you could grind the raw karat gold into tiny pieces (or flatten into thin strips?) the passivation issue would be less of a problem.
Not clear to me what the advantage is to this process. Faster? Less nitric used? Resulting gold looked surprisingly pure though.
I believe this video is to show how less effective it is without inquartation, which is his normal method
Grinding gold would add another step to an already lengthy process.
Im sure you realize how important it is to fall on the sword sometimes so others know what will happen, without them making that same mistake. Your videos are great!
Love your video's. Thanks for taking the time to record, edit and upload them, I have watched just about every video you have uploaded. Quick question, have you ever tried sweeping up the area you do your melts in and incinerating your sweeps like you do for the jewelers? I know you are very careful and do not like to make excess waste, but have you ever considered sweeping up and processing your sweeps?
I sweep the table into a container. Then I add it to my cement silver when I’m making shot for the silver cell.
The yield was quite surprising. Strait to aqua Regia will work but Inquartation is 100% the way to go
You've created a "Two Prong" approach which gives you 1) pretty close .999 fine gold in minimal amount of sreetips time, chemicals and energy plus 2) dirty
Awesome 👏👏👏 these what not to do videos and how to proceed next are great
This should show all the people who keep asking why well there's your answer thanks sir for another awesome video six stars
The viewers that inspired this video are fortunate you do not lash out in frustration. Unfortunately, I doubt this example will prevent them from asking the same mundane questions in future. Scotch was invented for a reason 😂
it was fun seeing a different sequence of steps to see what would happen☺
That was my number one question. What would happen if you use Aqua Regia as the first step?
Even if you are 0,6 g off it was a chaotic process in my oppinion. To watch the process without inquartation kinda feel wrong. With the whole inquartation you have way more control about the process in every step. This was a waste of liquids and even dealed with a Frankenstein Smoothie afterwards. Really interesting video, thanks for that.
Let it be known forever, inquartation is important! So mote it be!
Surprisingly good yield, possibly the excess nitric helped somehow, at least it might keep the passivation layer from forming for a while.
Great video, Mr. Sreetips! I don't think you had any excess nitric acid. If anything you probably didn't have enough. You ended up with 38.7 grams of gold which would require a good 35 to 40 ml of nitric acid on its own plus all the base metals in the alloys. Copper requires 4.2 ml of nitric acid per gram and I'd assume there was a lot of copper in these alloys along with the silver, zinc, etc. Passivatiom is a real problem, but I think a deficit in nitric acid is what caused the remaining undissolved metal here. Just my thoughts. Thanks for the content, sir!
Love it when you do these different videos
I've found the old gold pan us a really effective way of sepparating agcl from undissolved gold. Straight to aqua regia with 22ct is ok to get 3 9's though. Shere's such a tiny amount of agcl to deal with. But as the master says, the only way to get 4 is inquartation.
I enjoyed this experiment. I don't want you to have to prove the science. Although, I wonder why all the other stuff in stumpout doesn't change the reactions. Is it the hydrochloric boils that clean up any possible unwanted chemicals?
Yes
Thanks for the lesson, Nice bar.
This was a great video !
You did it the hard way for our entertainment
So good to see you making more PMs.
Excellent Work My Friend Nice Score 🙏 God Bless
Nothing escape waveform does it? I noticed it in one of the other videos, but felt like saying something about it this time. I'm astonished that the reaction will go through periods of high and low activity, almost like breathing, or a heartbeat of sorts. Very cool.
Ahh, good catch. I'll have to keep an eye out for that. Thanks@@laserfloyd
I thought that was just the hot plate cycling on and off.
It was
13:35 ITS SNOWING!! 🤣
Another great video, sreetips! Thank you for educating us. 🙂👍
Funny, what started out really ugly came out real pretty nicely done, sir.
I absolutely love it. The 24 karat pure gold bar is beautiful. Me thinks the value should be top; is it not? And the remaining gold in the button is already inquarted; is it not?
Am I wrong to deduct that the nitric spent is a minimal cost than would be the ip front cost of sterling silver used for inquartation? ( The sterling cost is recoverable but the Nitric acid cost is not). 🤔
Yes and yes.
I dissolve the sterling in nitric to refine it. So using to inquart, I’m refine both metals at once.
24👍's up sreetips thank you for sharing 😊
I aslo suppose its a good refresh for new viewers of yourself to actually see why u inquart
Hello Mr. Sreetips! Great video. I have a question, is the liquid gold heavier than the same amount of anything else in liquid form? Thank you for your time.
Yes
Well, anything we run across in jewelry. Liquid mercury is slightly denser than solid or liquid gold. 🤓
Hello, love your videos.
I have a question I would appreciate if you could answer, I see that your muriatic acid is very clear while the options I see at the hardware store seem to have some contamination. Do you treat your muriatic acid before use?
Thank you for all the videos!
No, it’s close to reagent grade right out of the bottle. Get it at Ace Hardware. Don’t buy the “green” muriatic. It’s watered down dilute.
I did get a bottle of HCl that was yellow once. But never again in the 13 years I’ve be refining gold and silver.
Hi. just want to say, that i love watch you videos. Saddly i cant try to refine gold, because i live in Denmark, and its illigal to buy hydrochloric acid and nitric acid here in DK. But i have a question, how many litters of air does your fume cupboard extract pr mintue ? Keep the videos comming 🙂
I think it’s about 250 CFM or 424 CM/H
I agree, inquartation is better for less cleamup/workup... but, you forgot to count the amount of NO2 you usually use in the parting process after inquartation.... several hundred ML... on top of whats used to dissolve the sponge.
This method does save on nitric; at the expense of having to deal with the SNCL during workup.
Thanks for this man you probably saved soo much effort and piosen time ❤
Awesome demonstration of the importance of inquartation .. Anyone who would argue with your lesson is completely ridiculous.
Interesting experiment. Thank you for making the video. Maybe do a video showing the jewellery just melted down into shot and then treated without adding extra silver, or doing a video adding copper instead of silver when inquartationing. (is that a word lol)
Sreetips did a video inquarting with copper instead of silver already:
ruclips.net/video/3J2Bjx6CsSk/видео.html&ab_channel=sreetips
This video is exactly that, except he didnt spend time making it into shot. This just shows a less effective method vs inquartation like he normally does
Yes, I’ll do one using copper instead of silver.
@@chrism4008 in this video he went straight to aqua regia, I was just suggesting a video that shows the effectiveness of adding silver and or base metals to bring gold down to 25%. We have seen the few times he adds his wedding ring in and it comes out cleaner lol, but that is high purity gold
Presumably, there was a lot of silver chloride in the filter that you melted down. What does silver chloride become when melted? Is it a button of silver chloride or is it metallic silver contaminated with chlorine?
Silver chloride can be melted into metal with plenty of soda ash (sodium carbonate) present. But it’s not a very efficient way to do it. It’s better to convert the silver chloride with lye and sugar.
1:36 Dam people get everywhere 😂😂😂
I will try this but with ferros sulfate instead of smb to precipitate the gold.
I believe Sreetips has a video where he uses copperas as the gold precipitant.
kind of wondering if Aqua Regia can leach the gold out of ore and out from between the black heavy stuff that sumtimes mixes with the gold and is verry hard to remove trough panning , think you could desolve the gold flakes and powder gold out of the fine sand and stuff in the Aqua Regia then filter out the solids then using the treestump removal stuff to get out back out of the solution
Yes, that would probably work. Boil the black heavy stuff mixed with fine gold dust that hard to separate with panning. Then dilute with distilled water, allow it to cool, filter out the solids, collect the pregnant solution in a clean beaker, add some SMB and precipitate out the pure gold. This sounds like it could work. But remember I’ve never tried it so I can’t be sure if any unseen problems could foul it up.
and that's what happens when you don't do a inquartation. thanks for showing us
Nice clean bar, all things considered.
Hi Sreetips, a question: Could a stirring bar be useful to brake all this crust all along the aqua reggia boil? And is this possible to get out of the crust problem by grinding the material as finely as possible before the first aqua reggia bath, and stir it constantly? Sorry to annoy you with all those questions in bad English...Best regards from France, have a good day!
No problem. Grinding would be an extra step. A stir bar would help.
Things like this convince me that a small hammer mill is a good investment.
The last step of purifying the gold you have what you called the gold waste solution. What do you eventually do with that?
Add it to my stock pot. They were both full. And I didn’t want to add that dingy brown liquid to my large glass waste container.
I understand inquartation and I agree it is simply the best way to ensure a very close prediction for yield and as shown all that chloride. However I have seen many go right to AR after nitric boils when processing gf material. What is the difference? Not trying to sound art lol just curious
In my experience, skip incineration, and the yield and purity suffers. Why? Don’t know. It just does.
@@sreetips interesting. Btw I successfully conducted this for the first time it was a learning curve lol mainly the filtering I need to invest in better equipment vac filters funnels pump ECT but I did recover 5.89grams from 114g gf material mainly ring sizers and a few old rings and a pocket watch absolutely addicted now lol however my gold is slightly dissolved by 18l test acid and fully dissolved by 22k acid would putting back into AR solution and and dropping it back out again push it to a higher purity or do I need to inquart it and start over?
18.51 that looks more red than inquartation yellowish. Have never seen inquarted under light either but this under light seems more red in light. Garnet more so imo. Amazing
If you inquart with copper you don't get the solubility issue going straight to aqua regia. You can probably save on nitric acid this way but I don't feel like it gets to the same degree of purity.
I would prefer to get rid of as much base metal (and silver) as possible before dissolving the gold. Also, some alloy gold contains silver, so you can still get some passivization if going straight to aqua regia.