I Turned 50 Pounds of Silver Ore Into Priceless Coins!

Hello, right now I am 500 feet underground in the Union Mine of Sarog Goro and this ore that you see behind me is Galina which is a

silver

and lead ore and this is a pure

silver

coin that they used to use in the mine here and in this video. we will go from this raw ore to this pure coin using the same methods they used in the 19th century and for some context, behind me is the old mining town of sarog Gordo and back in the 19th century sarog Gordo It was Silver Boom Town, there were thousands of residents crawling all over these hills and the main mineral they mined was Galina, that thing we just saw in the mine and I moved here four years ago in March 2020 trying to bring life back to this place.

You know, fully understand the history here and if you're going to understand the history of a mining town, it's very important to understand the history and the process of mining, so here we are and this. The video will have three main parts: number one, we are going to mine silver, number two, we are going to refine that silver and number three, we are going to punch and stamp that silver into

coins

the same way they did in the past. 1800 and all this currency. The obsession began with a historic find that occurred right behind this house a couple of years ago.

We were back here trenching a waterline and Trevor, this guy who used to work here, just yelled, Hey Brent, I found something and what I found a coin, so we found a cool old coin from the Saho store, yeah, it was 122 cents, so the best thing you found here so far, definitely, yeah, they pulled it out of the metal detector almost right after, oh yeah. Company store and this is a coin that on the front says Sor store Keeler California and on the back it says good for 12.5 cents in commerce and this is a great find because in all the literature over the 80 years that this is a mine there is never any mention of that. they produced company currency, you know, company script, but this has a very important history, so this company script or money is basically a credit that employers would extend to their workers.

You know this type of currency was very popular in the mining camps in the logging towns and you know. like Kentucky, North Dakota, things like that where access to regular stores, housing and all that is very difficult and very far away, so what these companies would do is basically set up the entire city and in those places that the company owns, already You know, the main operations, whether it's logging or mining, they own the home, they own the general store that I'm sitting in right now, and because they own everything, they can basically keep track of all the workers and the script It originally came about as almost like a payday advance, so imagine you get paid, you know, $4 a day or whatever and you say, hey, I need you to know an extra 10 bucks this week for the grocery company, sure.

What do you know, take these chips in Li, Mark it and you'll be fine, but what happened was that these workers never caught up. You know, they'll never be able to pay off their debt, so the script would almost become the currency of the town and that really causes problems. because when you want to leave the city you know you want to exchange this token basically for US currency, no one in the city is going to do it one by one, so all the money in the city would just stay in the city and that's why the company He basically had a monopoly.

What are you going to do? Walking the 40 miles to the other town to buy your groceries and then no one got really rich, you know? Except the company. It was a way for the company to control everything to keep things in order. city ​​to basically create a monopoly, so the script is actually a form of debt bondage, you know, it's very predatory, but it's banned in 1938 in the United States, you know, at the same time, cars are becoming more predominant and therefore workers can travel a little further than the company city to get their supplies, but finding this currency was really important.

You know, it was a piece of History. It shed a different light on the town than I think it had before and made me think this is the union mine here in s y. most, if not all, of the half a billion dollars worth of minerals that were extracted from these hills came directly from this Min shaft behind me. Miners in the 19th century worked 12-hour shifts there and were paid less than $4 a day. grind $3 a day on the surface, so to get into that miner mentality and get enough silver to make these

coins

, I did a little 12 hour shift at the union mine, we're doing the night shift, I'm going up. to the Hoist we are going to go down to the mine we are going to do a 12 hour shift like they used to do in the past we are going to see how much Galena we can get we will have some fun we will explore a little when Jason and I analyze the material before the ore usually goes from $2,000 per ton to $4,000 per ton, if the value is between $2 and $2 per pound, we should be able to know by the end of the night.

How many dollars could I get? You know, let's see if I can improve. Hey, at least $100. The 12 hour shift underground seemed really long to me. You know, I started going down the shaft just after 6:00 p.m. m. After an already long enough day with the goal of getting Galina out as much as I could, this is a shoot we're going to get into. I have this cube, so what we are doing now is going between Level 400 and Level 550, so we get to the first landing. Now I have to go down this one, which is a square or, let's go down this last shot and then we're mining, so we're trying to go down right now just to Shoot, but I have to take this cube with me, no, on a scale of 1 to 10, how predictable it is.

I'm going to say a 10. I knew it was going to happen, I was being lazy anyway, we still have probably 11 hours left. oh boy, okay, look, shining city, that's what we're looking for, friends, let's turn on this light, it's not easy to make this rock move. I tried chiselling it with a rock drill and then tried pounding the rock until it broke. off the wall, I mean, look at that very high quality stuff too, this is what we have so far, you see, maybe it's light, it's very bright and very pretty, there are really good things left there.

I want to take out this whole wall. Tonight from there, look. On those amazing pieces, the bucket approach isn't going to work. I've carried smaller loads with my backpack instead of trying to carry that bucket by the bucket. It's too cumbersome, too narrow, too heavy, it's not a rest and when you finally return to the cage. I was always amazed at how little I got out of Galina from all the work, the final guesses of how much Galina ran first at 49.2

pounds

and almost 50

pounds

and now as the night went on I tried a bunch of different things to break the monotony, you know?

I read parts of my book to see how they sounded out loud. Pre-orders mean everything in the world of books, so if you can, if you can pre-order this one, any of their books sell out, it's on Barnes of Noble, it's on Amazon. It is in millions of books, it is in independent publishing, it is in book soup. or whatever, it shows all the independent retailers almost everywhere, there's an audible version we're releasing that's narrated by me, but a pre-order means a lot to me, so if you have time, check it out . I played different card games, what excuse would I use to not be a judge?

I live in an abandoned mining town. I've used that excuse for several Zoom calls that she didn't want to be on, sorry she's not there. Alright, I live in a ghost, soon we will have internet up to level N of M and I was generally just trying to stay awake and with every trip back to the stairs I would go down the stairs back to the wall hammering maralina. I went up the stairs and back to the hoist. I was getting closer, you know, closer to completing this first step in the coin making process. Okay, we got a pretty good haul, but we got, oh, I don't know, maybe it's worth bringing 20 to 30 pounds. total up to maybe around 75, maybe a little more, this thing is great, but look at some of these specimens, they are just stunning, some of those beautiful pieces we still have.

I think this hle is definitely prettier aesthetically than the previous one. one, so that's something and by 6:00 a. m. I had already eaten everything I was going to get and began my journey back to the surface. I'm excited, I can't believe how excited I am to get out of mine, um, and so, I can only imagine what it was like for these guys in the past to work this day in and day out, you know, 12 hours, 12 hours, 12 hours, 12 hours hunched over a miserable job and I started my trip back to the surface very ready to rest and very grateful for all the shifts those miners used to do, as you can see, since I dug up all our Galina from below at the union mine, it has snowed , so I need to clean this up. probably build a ledge so we can refine what we need because now is the time in the process of going from this, which is raw ore, to pure silver, this is potentially the most difficult part of the entire process, since Galina is a mixture of silver, lead, sulfur, silica and maybe some other things and you need to get all of that out to get to pure silver through a process called smelting and smelting is something they've been doing to Galina for 6,000 years and the foundry The process I'm going to use is very similar to the process they used here at Cog Gordo in the 19th century.

I know this because I found an article from 1870 that described exactly what they were doing here, literally here because this is the At the site of one of the foundries back in the day, they would take Galina, grind it up into egg-sized pieces, add a little of silver quartz to the mixture, they basically heated it on a lead mat and let this pour out. the soil and cool it, then break it up, take five parts of the matte mixture, add one part Galina, one part raw Silver Rock, one more part Galina with iron oxide and one part calcium carbonate, and the iron oxide and calcium carbonate would act as a flux and a flux and the casting is something that is introduced to promote fluidity, you know, kind of like its liquid nature and it also draws out some of those impurities that you want to get out, you know, and after they had all this mixture, they would put it. in the furnace with about 40 pounds of coal and as the article says, the molten lead carries with it all the other precious minerals and basically the heavy stuff, you know, the lead, the silver, everything else would be derived to this area and Eventually you will be left with only the lead and silver at the bottom and at the top you will have a small crust, perhaps this amount that would be called slag that you could break off and this would contain all the impurities that would not.

I didn't want to, so all this dross was broken up and separated and what we were left with was just lead and silver, and the lead and silver were scooped out and put into these 88 pound bars that they called pigs here and that were producing. just many hundreds of these pigs every day and they shipped them like that for a few reasons, you know, the first reason, if you were shipping 88 pound pure silver bars from COG Gordo, you would get robbed over and over again, and the second. The reason is that the final part of the process to get the silver out of the lead is a very difficult process and one that they just didn't want to do here, so with that let me show you exactly how to do all of these different steps. so we take your glans out of the mine, we grind this up and we're going to add what's called flux.

The flux will take out anything that is not Le in silver. In this case, we will use sodium carbonate to add. a little bit of iron in the mix, in this case I'm just using some old cloves and I take them into the oven and we heat this up to about 16 to 1800°, so as you can see, we have the mortant Galina plus flux. In the cone mold all the heavy metals should sink to the bottom of this. We had this cool for a long time, as you can see it's still smoking and then we're going to turn it over, it's going to be a cone that We're going to break off the bottom part that should hold everything that's not lead in silver and then we're going to continue from there now. , if we did this right, the top will be lead and silver, so that's going to be difficult, it's going to be malleable, you know, like imagine hitting lead and we're going to keep doing this process over and over again until we get all the Galina to these cones and then we will take it all. all the way to Silver, so this should contain anything other than lead in silver and this malleable part here that is the lead and silver, so that's what we're going to set aside and save for further refining. late, oh yeah, this is this. okay, we had our slag pile, we got there one, two, three with the three initial pores, we had three cones of Le and silver ready for further processing, so we are in a couple of days and we have our lead pyramids and silver and today is It's time to move from this to pure silver and we will do it by doing something called The Parks process and the Parks process will be a situation where we will reheat this and then we will introduce zinc. and zinc has 3000 times moremore likely to bond with silver than lead, so we'll add a little bit of zinc once it's molten so that it bonds with the silver, brings it to the surface, and has a little film of zinc and silver on the surface again on That point I'm going to scrape off the zinc and the silver, we're going to put that in what's known as a cup and once it's in the cup, the zinc will oxidize and we'll be left with the silver right at the bottom of This is fine and now we're going to add the zinc so I made a little mistake every time you entered stuff.

In that hot molten lava you need to warm up a little bit and I dropped cold zinc nuggets into the molten material and I didn't like that very much but now we have our mix there, so I'm going to heat it up again. then we're going to start scraping it off to get this zinc and silver that you get from the silver, which was a fun little explosion, so this is all the bark and the thing about these three was the crumbly thing that I pulled out first. I think that there is still a lot of dross in it and this was the last material that I took off and I think it could have more silver, so in the end we will see how big the silver count is in each of them.

We heat this up and that will get us to just pure silver, then we'll combine them all together so that's our six beads 1 2 3 4 5, wait six, so once this cools down, I'll condense them all into one and remake it so that All together a silver beat cools down between refinement sessions. I've been building a workshop attached to the Hoist house. We have a post to enter the workshop. Pour some concrete on those today. Let them settle. You know, then put on the small one. outbound the next day, then we should have a safe tent since I was starting outbound.

Nick Martinelli called me and Nick is the guy that once he has made the silver he will come with all the tools to make the coins like they did in the past. That day, so let's call Nick again and see if we can come up with a game plan together. I met Nick last year at a conference in San Francisco and he's just a general fabricator, he knows how to do almost everything and yet he dropped the idea. I said hey would you ever want to make some Cog Gordo related coins and I said yes and with that we're off to the PL races, this Nick comes with a fly press so imagine a giant thing to press things towards down, so what we're going to do is press some silver down, we're going to spread it out, we're going to punch it out with the circle punching press and then we're going to stamp it like they used to do. on the day and we're going to try to recreate the Serogo coin, we'll just do a few of them and we'll keep an eye out because eventually there might be a way to get a couple of these things.

The ledge now has a tar paper roof and a sheet. Metal and ready for more casting as well as a wall to keep the snow out and as the storm is rolling in a wall on the side which looks pretty good, this will keep the snow from getting into the tent, already feels pretty good not here. I'll come back here. I would say that during the day it looks very good. Oh what a difference a day can make. This open concept could use a rethink, maybe some removable doors because hopefully this was an area to continue working on during snow storms and I thought maybe. this would stop it, but it's coming from different directions and we still have half a bucket of snow and slag that needs to be refined, so I'm going to break that and we'll continue melting this and we'll get to Le and Silver, as long as it's not windy, I can leave, but there's Gordo in the snow, so I'm going to get some of that out.

I think I have too much, in fact, let's reduce it. put it in a conical mold, lower it into silver lead. Okay, it looks like all the metal recovered from the lower sagoro slag is ready to pour. I'm going to pour it into one of the old molds that they used to use for the bars here at sagoro then we'll cut it again and go all the way to Silver so we're kind of paying homage to the past right now and it's going to look pretty cool let's Baja all of this and you are left with 10 silver beads, then we combine them and finally get the exact count of how much silver is left.

We're approaching the shop I spent all that time building, it's in Hoist and between me. and the hoist up there there's a couple feet of snow on the ground up there so I don't think Nick can get up there with his rental truck that has the fly press in the back. which means I have to get my foundry stuff and bring it here to make some changes on the fly, which is always something in s Gordo, but we'll probably move the shop near the church that way, hopefully then we can smell it . Eventually we can find a way to get from there to the store, but that whole store building is free, so we move to the church and all the silver I've been refining for the last few months is down there, melted up there, which we're going to put in this and that's going to create a long thing that's going to go into the mill so we can make it a little bit thinner, but right now, the last two or three months of work is there, so we'll measure it after it's done. pour here to find out exactly how much we ended up getting right.

This is the moment of truce. 2 months, 12 hours in the mine, six tanks of propane and probably 40 or 50 hours there. Until this, how much money do we win in the end? Take your guesses now because we have the little remains there. 10.3 come on so at the current price I think Sil costs around 23 dollars and around $230 with the silver it probably costs around that in propane uh plus the time to make it but this is pure serogo silver and from here this it's going to break in half and we're going to stamp it, press it, punch it, make some coins, so this is it. that the above things were adding up, I realized that this is just regular ounces, so let's try to go to grams, which is 290 G right now.

I know troy ounces are different, so really if we're making troy ounces, that's about 9.3 troy ounces of silver, um, just because that's a distinction we'll never forget often, but 9.3 troy ounces is a little less than we wanted, but I was going with regular ounces, so I think we're there and after all that. refining now that we have some sweet silver from Saro Goro, it's time to make some coins and I'm going to make coins the same way they have done since the 16th century, that is, with a screw press, and the Screw has been around for much longer. that in the 16th century, you know, in Roman times and 2000 years ago, they used screw presses for the production of white and things like that, but in the 16th century some Italians realized that we can use a similar device for stamping and press these coins we want to make before the screw press, if you're making coins, you're making them with one of these, a hammer and some dyes, and that's called hammer coining and I would basically work all day, which obviously would be very slow, difficult and not as effective as they did before, that would be called casting, so essentially create a mold for your coins, heat the liquid metal, pour it into the mold and boom, you got your coins, but none of these ways it was as good as a screw press, so the fly press was huge in coins, which lets you know that the London Mint started using it in the 1600s and it's what we used pretty much until the 20th century to make coins.

You know, it's very likely that this coin we found here. this one that says Soro Store was made using a fly press somewhere in the area, which is cool, but unfortunately I don't have a fly press or know how to use one, but I'm lucky Nick was able to. Locating a fly press that is actually from somewhere between 1908 and 19 12 is what we determined and that was perfect. You know, it's pretty much exactly when these coins were made here at Cog Gordo, but again, this fly press is very powerful, very convenient in comparison. to hammer things but very heavy, that's why we sent the fly press to Nick's store in Sacramento.

He has a nice work area outside where he can sand it down, restore it a little, and prepare it to bring it here. a Cog Gordo well, I think the moment is here. I think Nick came with the press, it's from 1908 to 1912 from Chicago and now he lives in Soro and this is what we're going to use to get the coins out and stamp them when Nick arrived it was an exciting time you know after dealing with the storm of snow for so long, it was nice to have his team of experience and help here to try to make these coins so that the silver you know melts into this, which is thanks to Pepe's tools are the ones that provided this, as well as the mill so the silver is going to be poured into the W ignant this way as this is going to be transferred here and then it's going to be ruled over here and it's going to elongate once it's the thickness that we need this is coming to this put it in here this is the die here you see this is the reverse this the 122 cents the front Soro then press that down again and then we'll have a coin that we're going to try to remove this paracity here so we get a nice clean ingot and then we can run it through the mill and then having a nice surface to cut the coin flashes, so making coins is difficult, that's the first thing that caught my attention as I really started to get into the rhythm, it's another thing that I carry in my pocket every day and I I take it for granted, so I felt very lucky that Nick showed up with a team.

This is Pepe's tool rolling meal. We're going to cast this Soro Silver Ingot, all we have to do is feed it this way, let the crank adjust a little more each time. Yeah, they're not too tight, it's a pretty strong mill, but we just don't want to put pressure on it. you know, a couple more and then we'll kneel again and watch it curve down starting to harden, okay this silver now goes in with the other silver ready, the longest part of the whole coin making scheme is the process of analysis, this is where you have to heat the metal to change its crystalline structure and make it softer and be able to work it a little more.

You know, first when we used the rolling mill to flatten the silver, we had to stop reheating the silver bright red, cool it down, start rolling it again and pretty much every few millimeters we had to do it again and knead it to make it soft enough to roll it and then before you can press the dye into the coin to get your design, you have to anneal it. again, so it must have been lunchtime, our ovens stayed on all day, as we had different strips of metal rolled, kneaded, stamped, knelt, knelt and finally finished, we're on point, now we're going to be making some coin blanks, we're going to use this machine, not really a machine, it's a die press, we're going to stick this silver in here until we can see that it will cover the entire area of ​​the coin, there's a blank there. now it becomes a coin, here we go, there are five 1 2 3 4 five blank spaces that you reuse this for the next step.

We're going to stamp them with what we need, but we're getting there, we have all the coins. now that we have the blanks, these are the Ds, so this is the bottom one 12, this is the top one, go to the store, so this can go on the bottom, so this will go on the top part, so it will be a good coin, okay. one there is one, me more, one 100 purer, so here are the first 10 purely serogo silver coins and they are beautiful handmade on site, all good, the first day the co-manufacturing has come to an end and great things , we have the fly press in place.

We have our silver line tomorrow, so these strips will start to flatten out there so we can keep rocking and rolling. A, it's a pretty good day, it's been a day, so here's the coin creation that Nick made and now. We'll look at the original coin which is pretty good, pretty good, they're not BU in AR but they're pretty much identical, flip them over, give it the full test, woo, pretty good from just one picture, yeah that's really good. I'm here next to the new hotel and if you look at the hillside, there are still some charred remains of the old hotel, like the fire that destroyed it and there are some pipes and some cables, so what we're going to do is cut a bunch of these cables.

Copper is then melted down and

turned

into some coins, so the remains of the old hotel will also help finance the new one, so let's move forward as much as we can to give us more material. and then re-stamping some coins, it's old copper, get this out of here too, turn it into coins for the second day, we were running a little low on Sero Gordo silver, so we added a little more into the mix we had all found . on the production line and I really hit the ground running as the day went on, the stack of coins grew and with each new batch we learned something, you know, we were making adjustments to the process and I feel like I really got the process right, which is something that I couldn't.

I did it by myself, so I was very grateful and you know, it's fun to have other guys there too, back with a three,They were trying to finish the 100 silver coins and we are also going to make some copper. the ones we made with the hotel cable, so about to roll Rocket is our Copper Hall from the old hotel, let's wait to see what we have, we have 37.4 Oz, so we have more points, that's the hotel . to our Crucible with something new, okay, we have the copper here, this is from the hotel, so we are going to drill this now in some blank spaces so we can stamp it more, but we polished it, the material looks very good and in little time we had our stack of 100 silver and 29 copper coins that we refused to focus on, so we have the final product 100 beautiful Cog Goro silver coins and listen, you guys have been watching until now.

I want to do something fun that I'm going to give away. One of the 100 someone watching what I'm going to do is put it inside this book, which is my new book Ghost Town Living. I'm going to put this in a Ziploc and hide it outside of Soro's property. It won't be on this property so don't come and look around, but I think that's appropriate you know you've seen this far you know the whole process you know how much goes into these things these things are collector's items this book is a book for those who want to live a life of adventure you I know you want to DARE boldly, you just want to find your purpose and lean into life, so I feel like it's an appropriate book to put this coin in, so I'm going to put this in a Ziploc, get on my dirt bike, pay attention, maybe.

I'll be taking some alternate routes to get to where this will be, but it'll be fun if you find this, tag me on Instagram. I'm at Brent W Underwood there. I'd love to see who ends up with this, but I feel like it's only appropriate that one person watching gets one of these for free, so watch this and that's it. I really hope one of you comes here, grabs this book and the coin if you tag me on Instagram. I'll do a little post about whoever finds it and if you're out there and you're like, "Hey, I'm really far away." I would still love the chance to get one of those coins.

There are two more ways I will do. come in in a moment, um, but first, if you're there, I really hope you take a moment to read the book. You know, if you love the story of Fat Sarog, the adventures have been happening here for the last few months, some years. Even you know that if you feel that call to adventure, that bold life, this book is for you, it's available everywhere books are sold, it's called living in Ghost Town and I just poured my heart and soul into this , That's the best I can do. I think I've ever created and I really hope you see that and now let's get back to the coins, there are 99 left from the main event and 98 of them we will sell to raise money for the American Hotel.

Each coin, as you saw, was made with a lot of heart but each coin will come with a certificate and each of these certificates is valid for one night at the American Hotel. I cannot guarantee when this hotel will be finished. I can't guarantee when the certificate will be usable, but I will say. that's what each of these coins will be used for, you know, in the past, these were good for exchange, they will be good for exchange once again for one night at the American Hotel, so if you're there and if you want to be among be the first to stay at the American hotel, see the link in the description below.

It will have all the information on how to get one of these 98 for yourself and for the last one, number 100. I'm coming. To give away with a classic giveaway below, there will be another free link to enter and we will give away one more to some lucky person because I think the great feeling of this whole video is just gratitude and thank you, you know? Thanks to Nick for helping me do all this and his friends, but thanks to everyone who saw this. Without you, there will be no channel, there will be no book and I feel a great debt of gratitude to each person who watches this video. so if you take nothing else away from this, thank you so much for giving me four incredible years.

I'm excited for some of you to have it in your own home and I'm excited for everyone else to do so. come and see Soro one day you know we are open every day from 9: to 5 free of charge check it out but that's it thank you all so much for watching this video and I can't wait to see you next. time