Gold Plated Pins 10 POUNDS!

Welcome back to my channel. Three tips here and what we're going to do is some

gold

plated

pins

and I think it says there's 10

pounds

in there and the yield should be about uh almost an ounce of pure

gold

. I'm going to order these. I'm going to give a thousand dollars. I'm going to order these and we'll find out exactly how much gold comes from this 10 pound lot of gold

plated

pins

. I received my box of pins today, let's go ahead and open these up, take a look. 10

pounds

will be approximately 4500 grams, let's see what we have here 4674 so the weight looks good.

I'm going to start with this as it is a procedure for any scrap metal. material, I'm adding about a liter of distilled water. I'm adding some of the leftover pins to a melting dish. We're going to burn them here, so I think they're pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and throw them out. these now in the water these things have excellent corrosion resistance now they're starting to discolor a little bit when I kept the flame in there a little longer just very clean pins. I'm thinking this whole batch is probably I'm going to grab about two of these bottles of nitric acid to keep track of.

I'll label this one as number one and the other as number two. I'm just going to add a little bit of nitric to the speaker to get this started since it's cold out. We're just getting started, what I think I'll do here is add another dose of nitric just to get things going. I don't want to put too much in at the beginning because it could create a boiling situation this first time. The group is boiling well, I went ahead and burned the rest of these pins. Now we're going to place this on the hotplate. I'm going to add some nitric acid from bottle number one.

I had to split this up because there is too much. a lot of material for just one of my glasses now what we're going to do is this one is going pretty well. I'm going to try adding some nitric acid here and see how it goes. I don't want it to overflow. to a heat and we have a lot of metal in there so I'm going to add it very slowly here let's just see what happens that's as far as I'm going to go about uh maybe 25 milliliters of nitric. add a little more nitric here, uh, you have to remember that this is the first time I'm making these pins and I'm making it up as I go.

Well, I have about 70 milliliters or so. The nitric additions are quite tame. Turn on the heat in this glass here and what we will do is add another injection of nitric acid to the one on the left, which is 100 milliliters, if I can put it all in at once or not add it very slowly. sometimes the nitric acid activates in your delayed reaction if you put too much in there, okay, that's about half of what I measured. I'm going to add the rest of the nitric here now it seems to be working well, it's not too reactive. and I'm starting to see just a few gold flakes floating on top of the solution down there, so we're definitely dissolving the copper base metal of these pins.

I'm almost three hours into the reaction now and I'm starting to I see some gold flakes floating on top here and judging by what I'm feeling here, we probably have another six eight hours and a ton more nitric. I have about 150 milliliters of distilled water. I'm adding about 50 milliliters of nitric. acid and now we're going to add that to our reaction to rehydrate it here we go we can definitely see some gold sheets floating on top of the reaction now that this one hasn't been on for so long I'm going to reach over here and give this a stir look what we're going through here and I can see some gold foil on this glass too, so we're making progress.

I've been sitting here all night adding doses of nitric acid to each of these glasses. There's a little bit left at the bottom of this bottle. Here you can see that there is a lot of metal left that must be dissolved to release those gold sheets. The gold sheets are beginning to float on top of the foam. We start this at 3 p.m. m., it is currently almost 10 p.m. m. so it took us almost seven hours to get this first 2.5 liter bottle of nitric number one on top of those gold pins and what we're going to do now is start on bottle number two.

There is some type of precipitate forming in that larger glass. back there not sure what that is at the bottom of the glass too oh yeah it doesn't look good here so I'm going to add a little water now a little more nitric acid we'll move on I would advise against it a new refiner from uh, I'm trying to pick this as a place to start. I'm seeing gold foil in the solution, uh, but this won't be an easy process. I can tell you that right now I will have to rely heavily on my experience to try to achieve this, this might require a lot more nitric acid than I anticipated and this may have been something that would process better in a sulfuric acid extraction cell.

I don't expect any precious metals in this solution. we're going to put some on a piece of filter paper here we're going to do a Stannis test just to make sure and I don't see any kind of color change all we have in solution is copper we have the dreaded blue precipitate down there that will have tendency to clump together and hide our gold sheets. For now, what I'm going to do is take this scrap copper and add it directly to my scrap treatment bucket, so it's day two, 3 p.m. It's been 24 hours since I started this project.

This is our second glass. You can see that the precipitate is also forming in this solution and now I'm going to pour it into this spare glass. I'm going to start adding some solution. to these pins to get them moving I'm adding a little bit of distilled water now we're going to add a little bit of nitric acid now the reaction has calmed down a bit now we're going to set this back up with a little bit of heat now we're going to do a Stannis test on this liquid, make sure we are not putting anything in solution because I intend to discard this solution and as you can see there is no color change present which tells me that all we have in solution here is copper okay , I was trying to find a way to save face, but I figured it was best to move forward and admit mistakes as I went along.

I did some research after the fact and discovered that it takes one gallon of nitric acid to dissolve two pounds of copper. and what I have here is essentially 10 pounds of copper with only traces of gold and what I'm going to have to do is put 10 pounds of copper into a solution that will require five gallons of nitric acid and initially I said this process would take me about two bottles, two 2.5 liter bottles to complete this and after recalculating and researching after the fact that it's my fault, it will take 10 2.5 liter bottles of nitric acid to dissolve this 10 pounds of copper, some people can say 3 tips, that's excessive, you should stop the experiment right now, but we still want to know exactly how much gold those 10 pounds of pins have and the only way to do that is to spend five gallons of acid to dissolve all the copper.

So in the name of science, in the name of discovery, let's move forward. I have nitric acid to do it, so let's go ahead and complete this experiment in its entirety. I just dumped another glass full of residual copper solution. in my waste treatment bucket, so I'm going to add more pieces of angle iron here to make sure we get all of the cemented copper out of this waste solution. Here we go, we'll start with bottle number three of the nitric acid this is a bit like processing scrap metal full of gold, that's the process we're using here, the main difference is that there's a lot more copper and a lot less gold here, okay, I added too much nitrate in there and it acts like it wants to boil.

About me and I discovered that if I can catch it in time, what I have to do is just add a little bit of water and it will knock down that foam by diluting the acid. That reaction will calm down. Now I'll cover it. up and we'll put it back on the fire here. I'm going to do the same thing with the second glass back here and just pour the copper solution into this waste glass. I'm adding some distilled water here now. Let's put some nitric acid from bottle number three for this experiment. Be careful, I don't want to add too much.

This will be a waste solution in this beaker here, only now we're going to put this back in. Up in the heat in the back, back here, this nitric drip is working very well and you can see we've had this here for about half an hour and most of the acid is dripping into the reaction vessel when I finish what I did. . What I'm going to do is set up the drip and drop a little bit of acid into glass number two, so I'm going to have to manually add a little bit here to this one, this one is dripping and it's going really well, so I'm happy that now, once Since I get most of the copper out of this one, I'll probably add the two and make a batch.

This is the fourth day of the experiment. Everything has been allowed to cool and what we are going to do here is pour. Remove this copper solution, dispose of it. Here's a look at the gold sheets and we still have quite a few bits of copper that need to be dissolved. I'm adding some distilled water. This is bottle number four of our nitric. acid, it's right here, it's going to add about 500 milliliters and you're going to start to see some good results here, let's see if I can extract some of this stuff. I still have some copper that needs to be dissolved, as you can see there, but the gold.

The sheets look pretty spectacular here. This is the fifth bottle of nitric acid I have committed to this experiment so far. I'm going to add some nitric acid here. It is now the fifth day of the experiment and we are searching. pretty good here the gold sheets are starting to float on top of the solution everything is cold right now I'm going to divert it to my waste bucket here it's designated for silver refining waste it's just copper if you look here I've used five bottles this is a full one, this is the one we're going to use today, but so far I've used five bottles of nitric acid in this experiment, now we can have some space here, get rid of this hot plate that we're going to combine. material into a single beaker, so we're going to start with bottle number six of our nitric acid, we're going to continue to get the rest of the copper out of here, so we're going to keep hitting this with nitric acid until we get all those copper pins dissolved and We left only the gold sheets.

I'm adding a little bit of distilled water and now we're going to put this on the heat and continue to dissolve the copper. I'm adding dilute nitric acid here it is. 150 milliliters of distilled water with 50 milliliters of nitric acid and I add it slowly little by little and now I notice that there is very little smoke production. Obtaining pure gold from any source is never quick or easy. This fact, along with its scarcity and the characteristics of pure gold, is what makes it such a valuable metal. If you look at this chart, up here there are only two elements that are suitable to be used as a store of value or monetary metals, everything else will corrode and explode. escape like a gas or kill you, gold and silver are the only two metals that are suitable to be used as monetary metals.

I'm going to take this out of the heat smoke production has ceased and what we're going to do is add some distillate. water to cool this down and dilute it, so now what I'm going to do is pour this into this spare beaker. There may have been some gold flakes that were poured in, but most of it settled to the bottom, but uh my experience with this stuff is that it seems like there's a ton of it when it's in the glass and then we'll take it out to dissolve it and precipitate it. It's going to be a totally different story, okay, it comes here for the people who like it.

To say I should have done this or I should have done that, you have to remember I'm making this up as I go here, here's a look at the gold foils rinsing the remaining copper pins here and trying to get all the gold. The sheets were rinsed off those pegs and placed in this filter. Rinsing the rest of the copper sheets and pins in this one-liter beaker makes them easier to handle. I found the best way to do this is to fill the jar with water. and then take my tweezers right down here and take the copper pins and just rinse off the gold foils and then remove them.

Keep doing that over and over again. Almost all the gold is left a little clean on the copper pins. Still, the recovery process is complete, here are our recovered gold sheets, here is the copper that was left over, it has a little gold, but I didn't feel like spending another two bottles of nitrate for all that to dissolve, so that now What we are going to do, the recovery process is complete. Now we will begin the refining process. We will begin the refining process by adding our recovered gold sheets to this glass. Carefully, let's notice that there is nothing left in the funnel.

Let me place these sheets in the glass. I'm adding hydrochloric acid. I'm going to add a little sulfuric acid to precipitate any lead that may be present. I'm going to turn on the stir bar, add a little bit of heat and now I'm going to inject some nitric acid in here and we're going to start dissolving these gold sheets.with a little aqua regia. The sheets are very thin and should dissolve fairly quickly. Let's take this off the heat now and we'll reach over here and we'll get a little bit of this solution on a piece of filter paper, we're going to test this with stannous chloride, just check that we have gold in the solution, there you see, that dark spot means we have a lot of gold in the solution.

I'm going to add some ice cubes to cool the solution down a bit, so while I was waiting for the gold to pass through the filter, I separated the rest of the copper pins from the remaining gold sheets. It seems like a lot, but there's probably only less than a tenth of it. gram of gold there I'm going to take the filtered gold solution now and transfer it to a beaker I'm going to precipitate the pure gold now here we go here goes the first tablespoon of sodium metabisulfite to precipitate the pure gold here we go we go the second spoon and the third number four and number five this should be enough to make all the gold come out of the solution now put a little bit of the solution on a piece of filter paper, let's do a Stannis test, let's make sure we have all the gold precipitated As you can see by the lack of stain on that piece of filter paper all the gold has precipitated out we're almost there I'm going to dump this waste solution here is our gold down here it's a respectable amount pour this waste solution Now get rid of it , I like what I'm seeing here.

Seems like a pretty decent amount of gold here, not bad for all the work we did and I'm not too worried about it. High purity here, what I'm going to do is collect the gold now on a filter and we'll put it on a melting plate so we can get a yield. Here's our gold dust and what we'll do next. is to place it on this melting plate, now we will take it here to the melting table and start a quick melt to get a yield, okay, remove the flux with this dilute sulfuric acid solution, okay, this turned out to be a beauty, let's rinse it here, quick, very nice, a little piece of pure gold.

I got a good finish. It turned out much better than I expected. Well, five days and five bottles of nitric acid later, we have a nice chunk. of pure gold turned out much better than I thought. These are the remaining sheets I got from those pins. It's probably about a tenth of a gram here, so let's see what weight we have on this thing. 22.5 grams of pure gold. better than I expected, well this will conclude the gold plated pin recovery and refining video, thanks for watching