72 Grams of an Unknown Gold Alloy just waiting on a Refine to Shine!

[00:00:03]Hello everybody and welcome back to Micronova Metals. Uh, and if you're new here, thanks for tuning in. Uh, I have a really, really awesome job going on here. Uh, this is a gold button somewhere between 22 and 24K.

[00:00:21]And this weighs 37.42 gram. And I have gold shot here that has uh oh, it has uh some 14K that was melted into it and turned into shot by my client and he wanted to try his hand at refining and uh he got frustrated and realized he wasn't ready to do it. So he contacted me um well [snorts] he he reached out for help on one of the refining forums and I answered and we had a discussion and he decided to pick me amongst the many who had offered. And so what we're going to do is we're going to encort all of this uh with 39 I'm sorry 49's fine silver uh from my own uh production here at Micronova Metals. get it in courted uh into some nitric boils and uh we're looking for a really good yield out of this. So, I'm going to go ahead and get started and try to catch at least one of the importation uh segments on camera.

[00:02:32]Okay, it took me a quick second to figure this out. So, this line right here was the button. I put 3 and 12 oz of 49 fine silver in there. And the incoration is is beautiful. That's exactly what I expect it to look like.

[00:02:49]Um over here, [snorts] this is the one that carrot scrap was added to um was added to whatever gold uh what he thought was solid gold in there. It already had uh copper exposed, which you could see. So, I saw that. I was like, "Oh, what am I going to do about that? I don't have to put it back in the melt dish." But uh it looks actually just like when I melt coin silver. There's a silver. You can see the silver tints to it. And you can see that the copper exposed. So, I do believe that is more than sufficient. Uh if not, I'm going to find out real quick, aren't I? But, uh I'm I'm confident that's what's going on there. It's just there was enough copper in from the 14K uh jewelry that he added. So, um it's still somewhat exposed and but there's um I mean I mixed the the heck out of that. You probably saw it on camera, but okay.

[00:03:45]Well, next step is to get this decanted off and uh make sure we get every little tidbit in there. And that's just so cool. That is just so cool. I love it.

[00:03:54]Um and uh get it into a nitric boil.

[00:03:59]Okay, emptied out the quench pot. And look at that, man. Isn't that beautiful?

[00:04:03]That's just wonderful. I'm so happy he picked me for this job. I'm going to thank him for that uh again and again.

[00:04:09]But anyway, uh what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get this into a two liter uh two liter beaker and I've already cleaned that beaker and rinsed it out with hot distilled. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get this material into that beaker and give it another hot water distilled rinse so we don't risk the um having chlorides forming.

[00:04:29]Okay, one by one we're checking all the boxes to be prepped and ready to go. And the next one is to cover this up with uh some distilled water. Only distilled.

[00:04:47]And I'm going to go a little bit above it. I mean, it's this is this is going to require some doing here. What do I got there?

[00:04:56]Oh, this 300 mls. [clears throat] That's more than I intended, but it's it's going to be fine. It's we we're going to use that in some more.

[00:05:04]I've got my homemade bread fuming nitric acid here. Concentration of 90 to 95%.

[00:05:13]Put that all in right now.

[00:05:20]And here we go.

[00:05:23]And uh you can see the reaction is happening already immediately. And uh I did get a comment from a gentleman uh saying that he believed that silver chlorides were being produced.

[00:05:42]And as we talk that silver is being attacked very aggressively right now and there is no heat on this.

[00:05:54]So, something in the equation here. And maybe it's just in this case I I didn't uh I didn't rinse the uh tap water out enough, but it's going to be fine. It's going to clear up and we are going to be on our way. We're trucking already.

[00:06:14]Okay. It's just been on there for about 60 seconds and there was that initial burst of silver chlorides being produced because uh my wellwater was still on the on the shot that I produced. So, it's not a big surprise, but I don't see any more being produced. It's not going to passivate or anything like that, but um there is definitely something in my wellwater that produces chlorides, and that's something I've been dealing with since I started uh uh started all of this. Um, so the gentleman was right and uh it must be that if unless everything is squeaky squeaky clean, then I'm going to expect this. But that will all get filtered out. And I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave this just for a minute or so and uh just put it on a time lapse.

[00:07:16]All right, we are about 1 hour into the reaction here. It looks like the majority of the fumage is done. Just remnants left behind. So, at this point, I don't typically put any big dosing into anything at this point, but we're going to start piping it in.

[00:07:32]See if we can work in another 30 or so.

[00:07:39]There's about four right there.

[00:07:47]Seven.

[00:07:55]We got 11.

[00:08:04]13 14 17.

[00:08:22]That's about 20. Let's just watch it for a minute.

[00:08:32]The other option I could do I could take is I could grab my 100ml beaker and uh dilute do a dilute 50/50 mix because this being red fuming nitric acid. It has very very little water in it. So um we're going to have to start adding to this at some point.

[00:08:52]And uh real quick, uh all that color right there is just straight up copper.

[00:08:58]Uh silver does not have a color when it dissolves if it's pure silver. And that was 49's fine uh XRF tested. So um all the color contribution there is is copper and copper alone.

[00:09:15]So that was 20.

[00:09:19]Let's get another 10 in if we can do so.

[00:09:31]That's four.

[00:09:44]That's eight.

[00:09:49]and we'll call that 11.

[00:09:54]So, we're up to 131 milliliters of red fuming nitric acid at this point.

[00:10:03]All right, we're good to go. We got a nice nitric boil going on. And all that's happening down there right now, it it's a lot, but it's pretty basic.

[00:10:11]gets the nitric acid is eating the uh dissolving the silver and dissolving the copper as well and it's just going to leave us behind some uh very uh brownish blackish almost looking nuggets when it's all said and done.

[00:10:27]All right, we're a couple hours into the reaction. And I haven't been highly highly attentive of this yet. But I forgot to mention earlier that really looking at about [music] 228 ml of nitric acid to match the weight of the silver I put in there.

[00:10:47]And piping it in is going to be painfully slow. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add 50 mls into this little beaker of distilled water, which I'm doing right now.

[00:10:59]And then I'm going to add an equal amount of red fuming nitric acid. And then I'll just feather it in. And I'm doing that for two reasons. Is number one, I need to deliver nitric acid to this. And I also need to deliver hydration to it. So I'll do this and I'll be here for the next half hour just watching it. And if I feel it's safe to do so, not risking a boil over, then I will do it again.

[00:11:34]And after that, I should be able to start piping it cuz I'm at 130 already.

[00:11:40]So, this is going to take me at 180.

[00:11:51]We'll do We'll stop right there.

[00:12:00]Wait for the reaction.

[00:12:02]This is a very, very dark green, but this is telling me that we need hydration.

[00:12:08]And at the moment, there's not much going on. And there is no way that all that silver is dissolved at that point.

[00:12:13]There's just no way.

[00:12:22]Okay. There's some fumage happening, but there we go. All right. So, what I'll do now is um I'm going to start piping it in from from here.

[00:12:35]And then I think what I'll do is I will just put in some uh 100 ml of uh distilled water.

[00:12:44]And then I'll feel confident that we have hydration and we have enough acid to keep working.

[00:13:03]I think I really should have put the water in the hydration in first, but I can pipe that in too cuz I don't want to I don't want to remove the watch class and let all those fumes escape.

[00:13:23]There we go. You see that reaction is kickstarting.

[00:13:27]And just for a matter of the record, I don't see any silver chloride in here.

[00:13:32]I'm pretty convinced that's what I saw in the beginning because I didn't uh I only gave it one big rin the I only gave the gold shot one big rinse of uh distilled water and I I really should have done it three or four times.

[00:13:49]But in my experience, there's probably silver chloride sitting down at the very very bottom.

[00:13:58]Well, that's beautiful. I love I just love this part of the the job.

[00:14:06]Just a nice little display of reaction going on.

[00:14:12]All right, everything's going smooth.

[00:14:15]All right, starting a good ramp up now. I'm I'm shooting this acid and dilute dilute acid and water to the back of the beaker against the glass wall so it doesn't all come down in one place.

[00:15:04]All right, there we go. I think this pipe is about spent.

[00:15:10]Okay, cool beans. Let's uh let's put 100 mls of distilled in there. So, now we'll have added 150 uh mls of distilled water and 50 mls of red fuming nitric acid.

[00:15:26]So, I'll just record. I have my notes going on. I always have notes going on so I know how much it cost me to do the job and I can plan for the future that way.

[00:15:44]This may initially slow down the reaction.

[00:15:49]I don't have to put it all in at once, but if we don't have hydration, we will we will cease the reaction.

[00:16:06]It's about five uh 4 mls at a time.

[00:16:17]I've got this whole thing running on a very low heat. It's on a a low medium at best.

[00:16:25]All right. See, this is already slowing the reaction down.

[00:16:40]All right, give ourselves a brief pause.

[00:17:01]>> [snorts] >> All right, that slowed the reaction down, but that's a good thing. Give me a chance to show you a little bit better how this happens.

[00:17:14]All that is just silver and copper going into solution and the gold is remaining behind.

[00:17:21]All right, it's been pretty slow going since I add that distilled water in.

[00:17:24]It's uh just was very cold water. sits on a cold concrete slab. So, let's see if we can pick up the pace.

[00:17:36]Let's see. Try try another 30. I mean, the reaction is still going. It's just slow. So slow.

[00:17:51]All right. I also just turned the heat up a little while back, too, just to so it would recoup.

[00:18:02]It's about six.

[00:18:07]It's about 10.

[00:18:16]Oh, we'll call that 14.

[00:18:28]19.

[00:18:30]Let's call that 20.

[00:18:32]Just give it a quick look. See what it's doing.

[00:18:37]Everything's good there. There's nothing strange that should be happening here.

[00:18:40]It's I've been keeping it at a slow slow roll.

[00:18:46]Nothing good happens fast in refining.

[00:18:53]All right.

[00:18:57]Well, 25.

[00:19:00]Let's see.

[00:19:03]Okay, that should be roughly 30.

[00:19:12]All right, perfect.

[00:19:15]It's nice and smooth. No rush.

[00:19:22]All right, just watch that for a little bit.

[00:19:36]Look at that beautiful site. I do believe that we are close close [music] to the end of it. Uh I boiled off what nitric was there. uh let it boil and wanted to see if this solution would clean up or clear up rather and indicate to me that there's still room for growth uh or transfer of copper and silver ions into it and being clean it is. So, I'm not convinced yet that all the copper and silver has been pulled out. So, I'm going to give it oh probably no more than 10 milliliters and just see if we get a reaction. And if we do get a reaction, then I'll just slowly dose it in until it's done done. Uh if I don't get a reaction within half an hour, uh then I shouldn't have to wait that long. But uh it's just warming back up again. Uh then if I if I don't get a reaction, then we're we're ready. So here we go. Okay, it looks like this nitric boil is done. Done. And I say that because the only bubbles there are boiling bubbles. just gas bubbles made by boiling and uh no dissolving action going whatsoever. And it looks like it's supposed to. So, I'm turning this off right now.

[00:20:49]And we'll let this cool down and all the steam vent out. And uh once it cools down, I think as far as we're going to get tonight is probably decanting and filtering this because this blue solution is uh well there's about seven maybe 7 and 12 ounces of of my silver in it. So we'll have to get that out at a later date, but I'm going to convert it to the same thing this is which is silver chloride and process it at a future date. But we are well on our way to uh getting our first hot water boil followed by a hydrochloric acid boil in the cleaning phase of this process uh started.

[00:21:33]Okay, it's time to move some material into a smaller beaker for easier handling.

[00:21:41]Let's see.

[00:21:53]All right. See what we got. Oh, look at that.

[00:21:59]That's what we were looking for.

[00:22:03]Beautiful.

[00:22:05]These are ready for some hot water boils, followed by some hydrochloric acid boils and some thorough cleaning before we put them into Aquaria.

[00:22:14]But I'm going to leave those there and probably for the night. And I'm going to do a quick conversion of this to um silver chloride.

[00:22:27]Let's see.

[00:22:34]Be right back. Okay, I've got my concentrated hydrochloric acid. This is not going to be enough just for demonstration purposes, but I am going to drop this out of solution and uh get it ready to be converted back to metallic silver. It will be quite some time before I I get there. But there should be over 7 ounces in here. So, this is going to gain some serious volume.

[00:23:01]It's already very very thick. I I really could have used a bigger container for this, but I'm not going to stress because it's here. I can I can set it off to the side anywhere and come back to it. Oh, yeah. That's chunky.

[00:23:16]All right.

[00:23:21]All right.

[00:23:26]Let it settle a little bit. Let's make some more.

[00:23:37]And I'm going to do this kind of repeatedly off and on for the rest of my evening.

[00:23:42]Look at that's that's so chunky. It's just Oh, it's perfect. I love it. Okay, I'm going to finish the rest off camera. Uh I'm probably going to have to transfer this to a a larger beaker, but this was not to bring it to completion as far as silver chloride. It was just for demonstration purposes.

[00:24:00]Okay, I went ahead and did a bunch of swapping around. And here are our unrinsed gold remnants here. And so I'm going to start decanting this stuff off and get it ready for its first hot water boil.

[00:24:16]But I'm going to use a bunch of hot water from the coffee pot and clean this up a little bit first. Decant it off and then actually get up on a hot plate.

[00:24:25]Nice aggressive hot water boil. and then I I will stop for tonight because I I'm tired and being tired, you know, uh just leads to mistakes.

[00:24:35]Okay, so let's get started with that.

[00:24:40]A series of hot water rinses just to start the cleanup process, which is very extensive if you want to get a really nice product. We got to get rid of all this cloudiness and this copper that's still in there.

[00:25:04]And uh yes, not not just copper, but there was silver nitrate, which is why you're seeing so see I'm getting tired why you're seeing silver chloride in there.

[00:25:16]So we want to get rid of all that.

[00:25:22]Gold behaves quite well at this point.

[00:25:24]Just wants to stay there.

[00:25:27]But we want to be careful. No, no big moves.

[00:25:31]No rush.

[00:25:36]Just give it a rinse.

[00:25:41]Get it down into one part of the beaker.

[00:25:47]Decant it.

[00:25:51]All right. So far so good.

[00:26:21]And at this point in your gold processing, you should be having all of your gold decanting going into temporary waste containers that are specific for your gold.

[00:26:37]This vacuum flask here is going to be uh Oh, I'm going to dump it out and get that silver chloride into a different container and then find one of my 3 liter beers. Get it nice and cleaned up and we'll do all of our decanting into that.

[00:27:10]It's already looking nice and clear.

[00:27:35]See the little silver chlorides?

[00:27:38]Maybe I can switch this around for you a little bit.

[00:28:01]All right.

[00:28:08]The silver chloride will filter out. So, I'm looking. I can see evidence of some on there right now, but I'm not going to stress over it.

[00:28:22]We'll shake them loose, decant them out.

[00:28:28]It's a nice pile of gold.

[00:28:31]And uh for those of you who don't know, the gold at this point is actually very, very soft.

[00:28:38]Uh, if you would take one of those nuggets, you could pinch it like a grape in your hand.

[00:28:44]There we go.

[00:28:46]I want to do one more.

[00:28:51]Okay, back with my 2 L double neck flask. This is actually use it almost exclusively for making nitric acid.

[00:29:02]There's no other reason for it really or I wouldn't have it.

[00:29:13]All right, one more rinse before we set up for the one and only boil we're going to do tonight.

[00:29:20]And then Micronova Metals is going to check out.

[00:29:34]You guys see the little silver chlorides that want to come out? Let's set them down the pipe. There we go.

[00:29:55]That's good. I see a bunch of them coming down now, but no gold coming down.

[00:30:12]Okay, we're looking good.

[00:30:22]Everything you do in refining has something to do with containment coming along with it. Okay, that's good. I'm going to put some fresh distilled water into here.

[00:30:31]And then we're going to turn the heat on and we're going to boil a farfig nugan out of it.

[00:30:41]I'll probably take it up to 300 mil line. There's no reason to put any more than that in there.

[00:30:49]All right.

[00:30:52]Okay.

[00:30:55]Up onto the hot plate.

[00:30:58]Set this thing to boil.

[00:31:03]And uh we'll start with a deeper cleaning processes here tomorrow morning.

[00:31:10]All right, guys. I'm checking out for the night. I will see you. All right.

[00:31:14]Well, good morning. It's day number two.

[00:31:16]Uh around 9:45 last night. I just turned this heat back on. I'm going to turn it on right now. Set it to boil. And I just lost steam. And uh it's not the time to continue refining. But look at all that cheddar, guys. That is just beautiful.

[00:31:37]Woke up feeling grateful again that a client spotted me and decided to uh choose me to do his project. But [clears throat] anyway, so the heat's on. There's nothing else to do other than to wait for it to boil. So I will uh be back when there's something else to show you.

[00:31:53]Okay. Okay. So, from here on out, it's just going to be one big series of hot water boils and trying to maintain your gold into the bottom of the beaker and your temporary waste fluid going out.

[00:32:10]And I'm going to demonstrate a couple of nice clean rinses coming up here very, very soon in regards to hydrochloric acid boils. But we're going to be bouncing back and forth between the two. the hot water, the boiling water, and the hydrochloric acid. And uh there's no sense in taking up camera time to show you every little detail as far as that goes, or how it went rather, cuz it's just simple. You rinse and clean and then switch between the two. I mean, that's how how I do it anyway.

[00:32:47]And the hydrochloric acid is going to do a great job of releasing impurities. in the hot water is going to do a great job of moving it down the beaker and into temporary waste.

[00:32:59]That's that's the whole objective.

[00:33:05]All right, here's a current look of at our uh our gold thus far. I believe the incortation went very very well. And we have a dark chocolate looking uh looking nugget sitting there on the bottom. Let's give them their first hydrochloric acid boil.

[00:33:27]And all I'm going to do is just cover it up.

[00:33:30]Enough to cover up the nuggets. And maybe another 1/2 inch total.

[00:33:37]There we go.

[00:33:44]Take care of one thing at a time so I can concentrate.

[00:33:48]And then on with the heat set to boil.

[00:33:54]Get the watch glass back and we'll be rocking and rolling. We're getting there.

[00:34:02]Okay, just a quick snippet. Uh this is about 15 minutes. It's now been boiling for a few minutes only and it's creating local hot spots. You'll find with gold almost no matter what form it's in, by the time you're boiling it, um whether it's powder or it's nuggets, it it will pop. And sometimes you this this is why you have to have a watch glass cuz it will make its way out and sometimes even in the spout. So you you have to control your temperatures and that's only something experience is going to teach you.

[00:34:33]Okay, we've had ample time for this to do its work.

[00:34:37]Starting to sound like popcorn in there.

[00:34:46]There we go. Okay. I don't know if you caught that, but uh yeah, once it starts sounding like popcorn, uh don't you don't need to worry so much about that. But it's just hot. Really, really hot. So, we're going to we're going to get it down off of this hot plate and uh do our decanting right here.

[00:35:09]Now, this is chlorine gas, some chlorine gas coming off, you know, at at this moment.

[00:35:18]So, uh it's it's pretty critical that you're careful and make sure your vent hood is pulling.

[00:35:29]Mine's doing a really good job of getting rid of it. Just bring it right around that door. But I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to move it Let's go ahead and open the door.

[00:35:43]Get it right there.

[00:35:45]Be happy. Be safe.

[00:35:48]And let's grab this.

[00:35:52]This is going to be my waste container for the rest of the project. And I'm just going to do a a quick decanting.

[00:36:00]I've got to run to town and grab a uh a waste bucket for another job I've got to start today.

[00:36:09]And then we'll get back to this that full steam. Just remember to give it a little bit of tap, get that gold to settle so it doesn't slough forward. And right now what we are doing is we are rinsing off the um we are rinsing off the hydrochloric acid.

[00:36:35]And I'm pretty much going to stop right there and get this thing to safety because I have got to leave. So, let's do a quick shuffle.

[00:36:51]Get things where it belongs.

[00:36:54]and already got the hot plate turned off and I'll be back shortly.

[00:37:04]All right, let's get a couple hot water rinses done. I still haven't left yet. I decided to give this a little bit of a hot sappa before I go and at least clean the clean the chemical off of it.

[00:37:23]It's just rinse and repeat. It is literally a rinse and repeat the whole time.

[00:37:29]Sole purpose of the hot water is to get the chemicals out to make it easy for it to send it down the pipe here.

[00:37:39]I can even still see silver chloride that was clinging on to the gold is releasing super easy. Our gold is starting to turn color a little bit.

[00:37:52]It's no longer a dark chocolate. It's more of a oh, a light chocolate. Not quite a caramel yet, but we will get there.

[00:38:07]You really only need enough to cover the gold. I got a little zealous those last two.

[00:38:13]Swirl it around.

[00:38:21]get back onto the bottom and decant.

[00:38:30]By the way, this is one of my newer beers here. It's a one liter Stony Lab.

[00:38:35]And I am not a brand snob, but there's something I really like about this beaker, and uh it's the design of the spout.

[00:38:46]I mean, it's when I when I decant, it doesn't matter what angle, it goes where I want it to go instead of going down the glass in my hand and onto the onto my workspace. So, shout out to those guys. They uh did a great design. One thing I can't find from them, however, is a a 2 L. I can't find a a a 2 L uh beaker. I don't know why they skipped the size.

[00:39:12]I just I just haven't found it.

[00:39:17]go.

[00:39:21]And uh the other thing I want to say about this step here, when you have finished the incortation, the more time you spend between uh the end of the incortation and going into ocaria, the more time you spend in that space cleaning and being thorough, uh the better your product is going to be.

[00:39:50]And I I thoroughly believe that it's uh I mean I've given it a hot water boil.

[00:39:58]I've given it this hydrochloric acid boil and I'm doing this very thorough rinsing here and I I mean I could go to Aquaria right now. It it will work. Uh will it give me my best result? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

[00:40:15]I'm not even counting the rinses. I I don't necessarily go by the number of rinses at this point. There's nothing in here.

[00:40:23]I mean, I I would be able to smell when I can't smell the hydrochloric acid anymore.

[00:40:29]Um, which is hard for me to do anyway cuz you guys know I have science problems if you listen to me enough. It gets annoying.

[00:40:37]But, um, then it's, you know, I feel like it's done a good job.

[00:40:45]And even at that, it's about to get another hot water boil.

[00:40:57]We go.

[00:40:59]I'm going to take it away for a second.

[00:41:02]Yeah, I don't smell any hydrochloric acid on the vapors. And and just as a side note, guys and gals, [singing] don't do that. I mean, that's that's crazy.

[00:41:14]Probably shouldn't even mention that we just had like a sudden change in color of the rinse water.

[00:41:30]Okay, that sudden change in the rinse water is purplish and that makes me feel like I am rinsing off collodial gold.

[00:41:44]That's what that's making me feel like I'm doing here.

[00:41:53]I got to give that a think. I really got to think about that. I'm going to decant off this part.

[00:42:02]Take a look at the nuggets.

[00:42:12]Yeah, they've taken on a slightly slightly purple hue. And this is uh No, I'm sorry. That's not That's just the water. But anyway, look at the look at the rinse water. It's purple.

[00:42:25]For those of you that do know out there, back me up or tell me that I'm wrong. I believe that's collodial gold cuz the smallest form of gold visible is purple.

[00:42:37]You'll see it in all kinds of examples if you watch videos like this. So, I'm going to stop right there and uh run my errands and I'll be back.

[00:42:46]Okay, so this has had a very uh thorough soak and boil. And this is hydrochloric acid. There is zero discoloration, which means we have some very very um clean gold right now. So, I'm going to turn off the heat. Uh probably not even going to wait. I'm going to dawn on my heat resistant gloves and get to uh decanting this.

[00:43:09]I'm going to get this started, but I'm not going to uh put too much camera time into this. You just saw me do it anyway. I'm going to get this decanted off and I'm going to get off as much as I can.

[00:43:25]But at this point, this is incredibly clean.

[00:43:28]So, uh, and remember Aquaria is three parts hydrochloric acid, which is what I'm rinsing off right now, and one part nitric. And I mentioned that because there's no harm uh, if there's a little hydrochloric acid left. I I wouldn't even bother except for the fact that this even though we can't see any coloration of impurities there, there are impurities that we are most certainly rinsing off right now.

[00:43:57]The first hydrochloric acid bath started off with a yellow tint of whatever was in that um copper uh maybe some other things that I'm not aware of.

[00:44:12]But this this boil was totally clean at least to the visible eye the naked eye. Okay.

[00:44:23]Do that a couple more times.

[00:44:26]off camera and we'll get into uh Ocaria and we're going to be happy. It's exciting.

[00:44:34]Here is the result of our hard work uh refining this to this point and uh a nice beautiful caramel color in there and uh we're about to dissolve this. So, I'm I'm pretty giddy and this has been exciting. I'm I am still stoked and just trying to contain it.

[00:44:57]Well, here we are finally at the point we're going to create some aquaria. Uh it is true that is a threepart hydrochloric acid and one part nitric acid. However, it's very very foolish to go for the exact mixture in one fell swoop. U this is going to take need some room to grow. So I'm going to go ahead and just take us right up to Well, I want to go at least 300.

[00:45:28]And this in my mind, I'm thinking with this much gold, you know what? Let's go to the 400ml line.

[00:45:36]That's a good starting point. We won't have to worry about uh being rehydrated anytime soon.

[00:45:45]And let's just go ahead and transfer it up to the heat. get it to its safe home.

[00:45:51]I just reactivated the the hot plate off camera.

[00:45:56]I'm going to orient the spout so it's facing me so I can dose nitric acid into it as we go along. And speaking of nitric acid, back to my red fuming uh nitric.

[00:46:13]And I think I'll go ahead put the watch glass right on it. Just slide it backwards a little bit.

[00:46:21]Grab a nice clean pipette.

[00:46:24]And let's see. We got uh 400. So I am going to just start dosing it in. And when I have a good reaction going, I'm going to slow down here.

[00:46:40]I don't know if you can see that, but when the hydrochloric acid is clear like that, the acid sinks right to the bottom. You can see it.

[00:46:48]All right.

[00:46:55]So, that's eight.

[00:47:07]Here is 12.

[00:47:21]16.

[00:47:23]I could stop there.

[00:47:30]I mean, we are talking about there.

[00:47:31]There's over 2 ounces of gold. It was 72 or three grams I think total all said and done. See how reaction it started already.

[00:47:44]Um, yeah, that's a lot. I'm just going to go ahead and put in a total of 20 right now. And this this makes the 20.

[00:47:57]And from this point on, it will be truly incremental dosing. I won't be guessing anything. It'll be, you know, 3 4 milliliters at time at the most. And the closer we get to being finished, the less we're going to the less we're going to be putting in at any given time.

[00:48:15]And there it goes.

[00:48:18]All right.

[00:48:21]I will check in when there's something to talk about.

[00:48:37]All right. Well, what do we have here?

[00:48:39]Uh, that was much quicker than I thought. It's been an hour and 10 minutes. Uh, an hour and 11 minutes to be specific. And let's see.

[00:48:56]Oh. Oh, I almost forgot myself.

[00:49:04]The fumes do contain gold.

[00:49:09]What do we have here? Now, let me get my hot gloves.

[00:49:16]I mean, it looks like we've had a complete dissolve.

[00:49:21]And we have.

[00:49:23]Well, that's amazing. That means uh we're very well on our way. We can let it cool down. I'm going to cover it to protect [music] it from contaminants.

[00:49:33]and we'll be doing an SMB drop here pretty soon.

[00:49:38]Okay, so we are now at the part that I both absolutely fear and dread.

[00:49:45]And this is roughly $10,000 worth of somebody else's gold in liquid form. And I do see on the top there is something floating there.

[00:50:00]So, I mean, it will come out in filtering and I'm getting going to get some distilled water frozen. So, on the next round of refining, I can get out any, you know, preip out any silver that might be in there and give it a uh dose of sulfuric acid to preip out any potential lead. So, uh and that could it could be that. Um but, uh it's nice and hot right now. It's a great time to deoxx it because there was excess excess nitric in it. And I need to get rid of that.

[00:50:42]And this is the reaction that we have going on.

[00:50:45]See if I can catch it a little quicker next time.

[00:50:51]And for sulfamic acid to be effective, it has to be quite hot to do so. And when that fizzing stops, that means the deoxxing is done.

[00:51:07]But if I were to filter this and put it uh the SMB to it to drop the gold, the gold would drop and immediately redesolve. So that's that's not going to happen.

[00:51:23]Not by doing this.

[00:51:29]It's calming down quite a bit.

[00:51:36]Don't want to overdo it simply because it can leave crystals on the bottom.

[00:51:46]All right.

[00:51:48]See what that does for us. It does have to be agitated a little bit for this to work completely.

[00:52:06]Okay, it's done. No more no more fizzing, no more reaction. So, all I have left to do at this point is let it cool down, which I'm going to do.

[00:52:21]And I could drop in some ice cubes that I have in from my own freezer, but it's going to make chlorides and I I don't want that yet. I'd rather just find an ice cube dish and and freeze up some distilled water and and know that I am going to be good.

[00:52:41]We will do that.

[00:52:43]Okay. And I'm going to walk away while this cools down.

[00:52:48]All right. Let's check this here. We're down to oh 106°. That's more than safe.

[00:52:56]The the threshold is to just not make sure your your filter um gets destroyed by hot water. So, I've sterilized and cleaned all this and put very hot near boiling distilled water through it. I've got a a new filter, cleaned out the funnel, [singing] did all the protocols.

[00:53:16]So, I am going to not talk my way through this. I'm just going to let the camera roll uh for a brief amount of time and probably end up doing at least two filtrations.

[00:53:38]All right. So, we have some silver chloride present. That's what's making it cloudy. Uh it will it will come out.

[00:53:45]>> Okay. So, round one is done of filtration.

[00:53:50]And uh look at everything that came out.

[00:53:54]So I mean it's not not unusual. Um I did not expect to see that much silver chloride, but then again just before we went into when we first uh got our gold nuggets out of the nitric boil, I was having some difficulty getting the loose silver chloride out and thought for the most part it was gone. But I also forgot that the the uh the gold nuggets at that point are full of holes that have been eaten out by the acids and they were probably housing that that silver in it.

[00:54:25]So, um I'm of two minds right now. I could I think I'm going to replace that filter cuz I don't want it finding its way in somehow. I'm going to also give this a very clean uh very good cleaning right now. All right, let's dismantle this precarious setup I got here. My vacuum pump died and uh I don't know if they repaired or if I have to replace it, but I uh we'll go old school if I have to, which is what I'm doing for now.

[00:55:01]Both the Buckner funnel and this one liter lab beaker have been thoroughly cleaned.

[00:55:11]All of our solutions going back into here.

[00:55:18]Oh, some some made it through the bottom, too. Yeah, I really don't like that. That means our filter must have upended itself.

[00:55:29]All right. Well, we're going to have to deal with it.

[00:55:34]No sense in getting frustrated.

[00:55:54]All right.

[00:56:01]Think I got a little bit of yellow down the there, too.

[00:56:06]Okay.

[00:56:11]All right. Well, I've got to I've got to get this vacuum flask here cleaned up real nice, too. And try to figure out why my filter curled up the way that it did. I'm glad I caught it because it just it curled up and it let the the silver chlorides go right through. All right. Uh little things that you have to deal with, right? All right. Well, here we go with round two. Uh I'm not going to do this one on camera. I just really need to concentrate on what I'm doing.

[00:56:39]Okay, we're done with this portion of it. I just took a minute to let the vacuum decompress and uh all the chlorides got trapped in the filter. I realized what had happened. I had decompressed the uh the vacuum device and it it caused it uh the vacuum had to go somewhere. It couldn't come out here. So just push that up and let all those chlorides go through. But no harm done. We have to troubleshoot in this industry. So but all the chlorides got caught right there. And I gave the uh filter itself a nice rinsing with the uh rinse bottle. So this is also clean now.

[00:57:26]So back in we go. And we're preparing for an SMD drop.

[00:57:37]getting to the point where I can start putting my heart back in my chest.

[00:57:42]One day maybe this won't cause me so many anxieties, but the way the price of gold is and the high level of accountability that I hold myself to, I' something ever happened, I have to I give up my own medals. You know, that's what I'd have to do. And uh they're hard one for me just like they are everybody else.

[00:58:04]Okay, but moving on.

[00:58:12]Okay, I'm going to give that a pause and finish doing this and I'm going to set up for the SMP drop. Okay, this is the result of the third filtration. For whatever reason, when I transferred the second one, which was I thought as clear as that one into here, a bunch of chlorides formed. So, um I got to check everything at this point.

[00:58:35]My rinse bottles, just everything because that that should not be happening. But regardless, this is nice and clean. I'm not going to do the SMB drop in that. Yeah. Uh, but I'm going to go get this uh just scrubbed as good as I can. Change out my gloves and everything. All right, let's get this transferred into its home.

[00:59:01]Test the bottom cuz I put that on the heat. And uh I have thoroughly cleaned this thing.

[00:59:08]And uh hopefully the whole chlorides for me was just a flu cuz that drive me baddy. Just doesn't appear to be an issue right now.

[00:59:28]It's actually quite quite beautiful.

[00:59:33]We're about maxing out the uh the capacity of the speaker, but it's okay.

[00:59:38]It's an SMB drop, so we're not going to gain any volume.

[00:59:43]All the volume is going to be gained by doing a thorough rinse of this vacuum flask.

[01:00:02]Let's see. I really want to get everything here.

[01:00:11]So, what I'm not going to do in this video is a second refining. I'm going to turn that into a second video because this is getting to be long enough. But, I will put the end results in here.

[01:00:25]U I'll do the um initial cleaning of the gold mud, all that jazz. And as a matter of fact, I'm not even going to do a Stannis test on this. I know that's best practice, but if this isn't gold, what is it? You know, I mean, come on now.

[01:00:44]I will do a status test when it comes to the time where the SMB is supposed to have done its job.

[01:00:53]And oh, sorry, I can't chew gum and walk here. When the SMB is supposed to have done its job and verify that there's no longer gold in solution, that's that's when I will do a stand test. So, let's get set up for that.

[01:01:12]All right, I have my respirator on because for those of you that don't know, SMB right here is one heck of a treat when it off gases and it's about the off gas.

[01:01:26]I also been a chronic asthmatic my whole life and this stuff will send me running for the the nebulizer.

[01:01:33]Um, technically for every ounce of gold, it's an equal weight in in SMB, but we're going to do it. And uh here we go.

[01:01:56]Oh, beautiful. I think I'm going to put this right down here.

[01:02:01]You guys can see the reaction. We're not done yet.

[01:02:15]Gorgeous.

[01:02:27]Give it a little shake.

[01:02:31]A little one.

[01:02:43]We have a very very heavy gold solution here.

[01:02:54]All right, grab one of my glass stirring sticks.

[01:02:59]Get a little motion to the ocean there.

[01:03:02]All right, let's give this a bit of a stir.

[01:03:19]And now we're going to do a stannis test.

[01:03:24]I'm not convinced that we're done yet.

[01:03:28]All right, status test incoming.

[01:03:43]and it is showing a negative.

[01:03:47]That's good. So, our gold is dropped.

[01:03:55]All right, we are going to speed bait this thing and get it up on some heat.

[01:04:04]and get to the business of uh preparing to clean some gold. But that's uh 15 20 minutes into the future. Yep.

[01:04:13]>> Super quick fun fact. Uh the heat, a reasonable amount of heat will make this drop much much quicker and settle much much quicker. And that's what we're doing here. There's lots of floaties which you can see. Uh, but those those will settle when it reaches whatever the magic temperature is. All right, time to get this off the heat.

[01:04:40]Doesn't look too bad. Uh, going to let it settle and we'll be back to do some decanting.

[01:04:48]All right, here's our settled gold after an hour. Uh, I've got the occasional floaty here.

[01:04:54]broken surface tension on top with some spritz. Uh but anyway, uh from this point on, I've got to try to make this as uh streamlined as possible. I'm not going to video decanting and all all that jazz. It's just [music] this is long enough. Real quick, this is just after rinsing out the SMB. I'm now going to do a hydrochloric acid bath and you'll see that this is going to change substantially and become much more manageable. Okay, now this is a first for me. Uh, this was a mudshaped layer of gold and it's making balls.

[01:05:31]Good times.

[01:05:33]All right, we are on our second refine right now. And that's the second dose of nitric acid I put in it. From the first refine, I put in way too much and I only put 20 in. Uh, right now this is the second dose of about uh 4 milliliters.

[01:05:50]So, we're up to a total of eight.

[01:05:53]All right. I'm going to take this opportunity to dose in [clears throat] just a few mls of concentrated sulfuric acid. If there is any lead left in there, this will preip it out.

[01:06:08]It doesn't take much. This is only Well, that's probably 1 ml. I might I might put some more in there.

[01:06:18]and at least double that.

[01:06:29]All right, there we go. Okay, awesome.

[01:06:32]We're well on our way. Okay, we are set up for our second filtration. I'm not going to get any of it on camera because I need to go and uh it's getting late and I need to get this ready to send off tomorrow. Okay, quick peek at the first and what's going to be the I hope the only filtration.

[01:06:50]Uh, I'm going to lose my little puppy mind if I put this into here and it does something weird again. But, uh, anyway, let's go do that. And, uh, I'm going to be ready for an SMB drop. Okay, it's about 10:00 at night. It's been a long two days, a good couple of days at that.

[01:07:09]And I think I'm going to perform the obligatory stainless test. All right, here we go. Stand test coming up.

[01:07:20]This is just for funsies.

[01:07:27]Super super black stain.

[01:07:30]I I mean I almost consider it a waste of gold. But anyway, we'll do it one more time to verify that we've dropped everything out of solution.

[01:07:39]Here we go.

[01:07:52]Absolute beauty.

[01:08:08]Let's do some more here.

[01:08:24]That's what I wanted to see right there.

[01:08:29]One more just in case.

[01:08:34]Going to give it a stir.

[01:08:56]All right. Now, let's let's give it another stand test.

[01:09:03]All right. Incoming.

[01:09:19]Okay, we have a negative status test.

[01:09:24]Perfect. So, back up onto the hot plate we go.

[01:09:37]Got the heat up set a little bit above uh medium. It's enough to put it on a slow boil and uh I'll give it whatever time it needs and uh turn it off and let it settle for the rest of the night. All right. Well, the uh solution has really cleaned itself up really well and very very different texture this time. Instead of it being a very tightly packed uh silt almost, now it's a uh like a sponge, which is going to be way easier for me to clean up. I'm I'm very relieved. And I will catch you guys tomorrow. Fourth hydrochloric acid boil.