Turning a BLOB into PURE GOLD!

banana to scale, this is a huge mass of metal that my client inherited from a family member and, without knowing what it was, the mass was almost thrown away, fortunately it was brought to my store. Can I discover your secrets? Is it real

gold

and if it is? How much

gold

is really there? It weighs a lot, 533.3 grams. Now the first step in my research is to cut a small sliver of this dough. I am going to use my gold tester to find out exactly what it is made of using an acid solution, this machine will tell me if the metal is not 10 karat, 14 karat, 18 etc gold.

Dipping the splinter into the acid well, I can see that it reads very clearly 10 carats, but just to make sure, I want to verify my solution with this. Bingo 18K Gold Ring 10K gold has a purity of 41.7 percent, in other words, 41.7 percent of this drop is

pure

gold, which means 58.3 percent is not They are other metals and who knows what else. The mission extracts

pure

gold using chemistry, literal gold refining, but there's just one problem. I'm not a chemist, in fact, I've never taken a chemistry class. Math tells me that I should be able to extract 222 grams of pure gold, so I think 222 grams is the best case scenario.

I was expecting a lot less than that, in fact it seems like the dough maybe wasn't even completely melted. You can see it was a bit fragmented here, the way it's folded back on itself just looks weird, so I'm really interested to see what the final total is. So let's go ahead and melt this down and start refining to get off to a great start. My largest crucible and the dough doesn't even fit inside, nothing a little fire can fix. The mass has imploded. in The Crucible and it takes an extreme amount of heat to bring it to a liquid state.

You can see how much mud and flow has accumulated around this beautiful golden sun. I tried pouring some of The Crucible and it didn't turn out very well. Well, it's already incredibly satisfying to see how much rubbish has been separated from the gold. Next I'll do some water casting. Now some jewelers use this method to create some really cool looking organic shapes. Basically, all you have to do is liquefy the metal and pour it. over the water. I didn't know it at the time, but I was actually making a mistake. You will see. I don't want this beautiful mountain that looks like an erupting volcano.

I actually wanted a lot of little individual pieces and there. There is definitely some in there but most of the gold stuck mainly due to the fact that the glass was too small, there wasn't enough time for the gold to cool properly before it just stuck to itself, it really was just a rookie mistake. I mean, it looks cool I guess I don't know, let's turn it around and see this, oh god, The Blob has a face, this is the face of the bubble, this is The Blob's personality manifesting, he's alive and now he's dead. but it never died, it just melted into a new form, it disappeared, but I never forgot it.

I tried the water release again this time in a five gallon bucket. Yes, these were the flakes I was looking for. This is much better and you can actually see a lot of the darker flow. I also parted with gold, which makes me very happy. I then took all my gold nuggets and boiled them in distilled water using a stirring rod. I really wanted to separate the flux, dirt, and whatever else was in there. that was not part of the original alloy itself, you can see how dirty this glass is. I also used this filter that has a filter paper inside and it did a perfect job of capturing a lot of that junk, but there's also a lot of gold in there so I don't want to throw it away.

I want to rinse my filter and filter paper. I'm going to keep this in a separate beaker and it's really fun to see how much the gold is being cleaned. up, I'll deal with this dirtier glass later. I have a plan for how I'm going to get that gold out of there by pouring the cleaner gold into a filter. There are still some larger black pieces that I need to hand pick, but the biggest problem is this dirty glass that has a lot of really small gold pieces in it. I was really hoping that this black stuff would be soluble in water and dissolve on its own, but I was being pretty stubborn, so I came up with the idea of ​​just pouring in this filter paper, folding it, I'm going to put it in my crucible, melt everything. and separating the gold that way, oh, and it worked perfectly.

I'm super happy that I took the time to get every little bit of gold that was left over because when you add it all up it's 17 and a half grams a lot worth it I'm going to add this little guy back to the group and look how clean it looks I'm already I'm so happy it's starting to look like gold, which is really fun. I want to throw this on the scale just to see how much junk we got rid of and how much metal is left so we're at 514.6 grams. The Blob has already lost weight. for 18.7 grams and we are left with this beautiful flake ready to dissolve, it's time for the chemical warning.

This video contains methods and procedures that are extremely dangerous. I will handle acids that are incredibly corrosive. There are toxic fumes present that can kill you. and that's bad, please don't try this at home, laughs. I start by adding three parts hydrochloric acid to my metal, then comes one part nitric acid and the reaction is rapid, this is aquarium, a liquid so corrosive that it can literally dissolve gold, copper, silver, zinc. The reaction is giving off some beautiful orange fumes and these are definitely the ones I don't want to inhale, which is why I'm doing this entire project under a fully ventilated fume hood.

Orange fumes are an indicator that the reaction is still continuing. so I let this boil for several hours until the orange completely dissipated. This is the exact moment when reality began to sink in. I've been dissolving this metal for hours and look how much is left undissolved, that's when I really realized this wasn't going to work. It will be an easy project, this wasn't going to be quick and I was at it for a long time mixing a new batch of algorizia. I'm going to move my metal to a hotter burning plate. I thought that the increase in heat would make the reaction go faster and I was right, it is very necessary to ensure that the nitric acid is completely removed from the solution and this takes hours but it is something that will be imperative for a later step in this video that follows. batch of liquid metal.

I can see that the reaction was much better this time and a lot more material was dissolved, only a little bit left. I'm going to do this one last time using a stirring rod and rotating it around the glass and not having much resistance it was really a wonderful feeling, all the metal has dissolved and it's time to move on to the next step which is separating the liquid from the silver chloride and I do it by pouring everything over a filter again, as you know, I had to do that. I dissolve all of this metal in multiple attempts, so I have many different beakers filled with dissolved metal and I will pour them all individually through this filter capturing as much silver chloride as I can.

Now there is a way to save all this silver chloride and refine it. and turn it back into pure silver, but that will perhaps be for another video. In this video we're only concerned with the gold and now that all the liquid has been filtered out, it's time to add some sodium metabisulfite to this liquid and this is probably the most interesting part of the project, the sodium metabisulfite literally precipitates the solution gold. It's really amazing. It's hard to see at this step because of how dark and green the solution is, but stick around, it'll look really cool later.

This is exactly it. What we are looking for is gold, although it is not a medium of gold that I have seen or used before. After precipitating the gold from all my different glasses, I decided to combine all the gold mud in one place, which was really refreshing, honestly. Dealing with so many different beakers, I used a spray bottle just to make sure I got the last bits out. I was very happy to reach this point in the project. I had invested so many hours into it and I already felt like I was almost done. but my research told me otherwise, you see, to achieve greater purity I needed to repeat the entire process.

I really wanted to quit, but I'm so glad I didn't introduce gold refining part 2, forbidden orange juice. I'm kicking. things are fine with the ever familiar akure regia, but the reaction looks different this time, it has beautiful deep, rich orange colors and the golden mud, well, it didn't hold up to dissolve quickly and be poured over ice. I give you forbidden orange juice, you can see. Some silver chloride remained, which validates my decision to repeat this refining process. Remember the last time we added sodium metabisulfite and we couldn't see our gold precipitating very well. Look at this.

I keep adding spoonfuls as the gold accumulates at the bottom, but there's one really important thing we haven't discussed yet: how do I know if all the gold has precipitated out? There's a test for that called the Stannis test. I mixed hydrochloric acid and pure tin, which creates stannous chloride. This solution is incredibly sensitive to the presence of gold and I will show you how it works. First I take a strip of filter paper and dip it into my beaker that has the gold dissolved in it, then I'll add a drop or two of stannous chloride and watch the reaction.

If it turns black, you know there is still gold in your solution, so in this case there is and I need to keep adding sodium metabisulfite. You have to be careful not to add too much of this, so I decided to stop here for the night. Let it pool at the bottom and try again the next morning with my test. The next morning I discovered that everything had settled to the bottom. I thought all the gold must surely have come out, but let's see what the test says. There is still gold. my solution, so I went ahead and added a few more tablespoons of Hefty, turned up the heat a bit, and waited many hours for things to calm down.

It is true that now things look very clear and when I dipped my filter paper in the glass it emerged colorless, which caught me. super optimistic and Stannis' test confirmed that there was no more gold left in the solution, another happy milestone. I poured out the excess liquid and was left with my pure gold soil which I then cleaned by boiling it in distilled water. I gave the gold a few different distillates. water baths and a bath in hydrochloric acid this seemed to do a great job of purifying the gold further before melting it. I left the glass on a hot plate until all the distilled water dried up and just look at this gold, the color is absolutely incredible.

I have never really seen anything like this in all my years as a goldsmith, this gold alone is worthy of a freshly glazed new crucible, lighting my melting torch, it is time to return this gold to solid metal, extracting the gold in bar form and while it looked good it just didn't feel right this gold came to me as a drop and it only seemed right to return it to a drop a pure 24 karat drop the mission is complete I successfully mined gold but two burning questions remain to be resolved The answer first is how much it really weighs.

How close was I to my initial estimate of 222 grams? The final weight was 213.2 grams. Only 9 grams less than my initial estimate. This definitely exceeded my expectations. The second question is how pure it is. achieve 24 carats, so I sent it to a refinery and got my answer: 99 pure official gold bars has a purity stamp of 999.9 and I was really hoping to get a purity rating with at least three nines, but then I found out that this refiner is not rated that high, so although I will never know for sure, I take comfort in knowing that 23 karat gold has a purity of 95.8 and I am well above that, it is safe to say that I really mined 24 karat gold. karat this was by far the most ambitious gold project I've ever done, as well as the biggest YouTube video I've ever made.

If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to the channel if you want to see me make a gorgeous gold ring like this. You will definitely want to watch this video. Thanks for watching.