Silver Mining & Smelting Cerro Gordo Ore - Exploring an Abandoned Silver Mine & Refining Rich Ore

ounce bar I'm going to try with the

silver

that we have cooling in the conical mold right now, but I'm going to try melting one of these bars, maybe I could cut it in half and pour some of these ingots in here and see how they go, well , I don't know if you can see down there, but I just dropped one of our ingots into that hot crucible that we just poured or a crust of

silver

ed zinc from there are our ingot molds. I just measured the temperature in them. It's about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, the lead is molten down there, so let's see if we can pour that lead into that ingot, okay, let's give it a good try, let's see what worked here, hey, that's cool, look at that, okay, still It's hot. do another one oh I like it it's fun I really don't know how long you have to wait it's been maybe 20 seconds oh yeah okay let's see what we have here this will be our silver alien which is mainly a small silver button , here goes 70. grams so hopefully a lot of that silver we are going to put in the oven cup we are going to put our button and the oven here in this cucal and that will oxidize all the lead and zinc that is left there and I will leave this with pure silver, take a quick look at our silver here, oh, it's very close, very close, see that kind of rainbow of colors there, it means it's almost done right.

I'm going to try pouring the silver directly into that ingot. may be a big mistake, we will find out that the steak is a mistake. What happened there? I'm not sure what happened there. I had my balls warmed up and everything. Let's see what happened here now. I guess I didn't have it hot enough. eh, well, I'll try something different, okay, new plan. I have my ingot mold here, except around 1100 degrees, which is very hot. I'm going to take my silver and melt it in this melting dish and then take out the ingot. mold, pour that in there and see if I can do it all at once, okay, how do I do this?

I need to get that thing out of the oven. Foreigner, well, here we go, foreigner, yeah, wow, that was a little trick. I guess it was good for the first time, huh. I'll show you my bullion production here, well, here's the moment of truth, let's see if our silver turned out, it's hot and then we have a little bar there, huh, huh, well, let me see if I can get. get it out of there, well let me try to grab the neck here, hey, let's look at that ugly little Cerro Gordo silver bar that looks like some borax fell into the mold with it, which is unfortunate.

I really like these. the lead, but I don't really like them because of the silver. I think the silver is too hot, so let's try something else now. What I'm going to do is take my money. I'm going to re-melt it in my melting dish and I've got another little bar mold here with my propane torch. I'm going to heat it up, get it really hot and then pour the silver into these little bars and see how. that works almost 50 came out great this one didn't turn out so well so I'm going to report it let me get this out of here come on let's do it again that's going to take a little practice but I like the concept it works pretty well ok there are 54 grams of silver in three little bars of Cerro Gordo silver   alright guys here's the final count I have 46 bars I think it's a lead that I poured   and I have our 54 grams of silver up here so what I'm going to do now is take some hits and hit each one of them with a unique number and then we will pack them all and ship them.

Give them back to Brent and let's see what he wants to do with it, see if we can make this work. I've got these little dings and I'm going to drill the bottom of the ingots. Here it will say CG for Cerro. Gordo and then I'm going to number them starting with zero one and then it's going to be Mt for Mount Baker so let's see how this goes make sure you put them in the right order here's C G zero so far all right one um tea here we go . Our first numbered bar will be the most valuable one I have now.

I have 45 more left and there they are. I stamped them from cg01mt to CG 46 Mt and was very proud. I for one didn't miss any stamps except the second to last one there, oh I messed up the T and the m so it says cg44tm instead of Mt. Oh man it made me so mad but that's the outlier , but everything else. It turned out really very nice now let's go to the silver, well, we have our silver bars. I'm a little tempted to run them along the bottom of the numbers, but it's a nice flat surface that I think will work better if I hit the numbers. at the top, let me know if there is a conventional way to drill bars.

Should I label them at the bottom or at the top? I'm going to label them at the top, but let me know if there's a conventional way to do this, okay? let's see how this works they are much harder than the silver alien, oh boy, much harder, and I have to hit it again twice, here we go, oh, that top is a little rounded, so it doesn't take the hit very good. There's a c, let's see if we can get a g in there. I might have to punch it in the foreign background, so I'm going to do these c g a g for silver and a G again AG zero one, there we go, an ugly looking cgag01 that's not bad for our first bar, I guess we'll try another one and there they are, there are three bars stamped with numbers, alright guys, okay, here is our finished product, we have all our bars stamped, they are numbered, they are ready to go back to Brent, so I wait.

You guys enjoyed this video be sure to check out Brent's Channel Ghost Town who lives to learn a lot more of the history of Cerro Gordo and uh he does a lot of

mining

exploration stuff which is really cool so be sure to check it out and be Pay attention because I have another trip. I'm going there in the next few months so make sure to subscribe if you want to see more collaborations from mbmm Cerro Gordo, so thanks again for watching and we'll see in the next video.