As a chemist, seeing 96% yield of 99% purity from a process by someone who calls themself a non-chemist is mind-boggling. Smithing is definitely chemistry imo, and I have some serious respect for you for doing something like this so flawlessly. 10/10.
It doesn't seem like it takes as much knowledge as it does patience. Anybody can do it you just have to focus and make sure you do it right and repeat repeatable processes and double check to make sure your ready to move on. Sounds like basic chemistry to me and I took two years of chemistry
@@michialphelps2339 That is mostly what the goal is in a lot of reactions. The problem for inexperienced folks in chemistry is that it's not so easy to repeat a process that generally does not go off of set times but off of visual queues and identifying the stages as they complete and guaging your success based off of the outcome, yield, and the understanding of what that should look like or be.. In most cases, a simple change of color, type of physical reaction (bubbling, gassing, simmer, etc) can mean so much to the observer who knows what they are doing and could be an indication to make necessary changes either in the moment or later as needed because of this, it is amazing that somebody who would be so unsure about the exact details and not have any way to determine if the information he is getting is for sure the best source of information if he's researching it online and taking whatever information he can get ahold of, maybe he got a book but what if that's outdated information, there is so much to this than just patience and repeating a couple of steps when it comes to getting a high yield and purity of an end product in whatever recipe you follow for any reaction you are trying to accomplish in chemistry whether it be a reduction, extraction, or reaction. I am not even a trained chemist myself but have lots of at home experience as a teen and young adult doing experiments and I am very impressed at how confident he seems and the fact he just has all this shit at his disposal and isn't substituting with some type of kitchen / shop technique haha as well as the fact he is performing this on something that isn't necessarily even his, so he says.
As a kid I played around with a torch, melting metals just for fun, never really knowing what I was doing. You're having a very good time creating beauty, which is a pleasure to watch.
There is really no other gold refining video of this quality of content, or even the amount of gold being refined. It's always small collections where this is SOOO satisfying to see the huge yield at the end
The craziest part to me is knowing the generations of Alchemists who tried to create gold which also lead to the discovery of so many interesting reactions in chemistry.
@@foxmulder7616 In the very end their successors did succeed. We can turn lead to gold now, it only requires a particle accelerator and so much energy and equipment and work that it's not even close to worth it to do.
First time I watched this process was NileRed refining a viewers gold. It’s cool to see a gold smith do it just using some research. The yield was very high I was surprised. In the original block there was a huge section of dirt and other metals and I thought that would bring the yield down a lot from the initial estimate. Great video!
the yield is not really that high considering lots of losses during the process. the estimated weight was based on an inaccurate measurement of a non representative sample
@@kelvinluk9121 I suspect you are right, but we don’t really know the lose, since we (as you say) don’t really know if his original measurement of purity was representative. He should have melter the blob and then measured the purity.
I am 100% sure that if children at school watched this video in a chemistry class there would be a huge increase in interest in that subject, good job on the process and on filming it well (y)
Wow I never thought of that. So you are saying that subjects and information can be taught in a school? And not only that whatever the students are exposed to will increase an interest in that subject due to becoming aware of it ? My mind is blown right now omg . I’m certain (no need for percentage because any less that 100% wouldn’t be certain would it ?) that you may have just stumble upon why school exists. Anything you show or bring to the awareness of curious learning minds is going to generate further interest it doesn’t matter what the subject is. So I’ll call your comment with a similar bet. I’m 100% (certain) that if you handed out money to people on the street some of them would take it and spend it. (Fulfilling its purpose)
@@itzl2124 yeah true , I watched Rambo as a kid so I was interested in obtaining ptsd and feeling bastardised by society to the point that violence which was I learned from society can be used against the society for noble purposes. They never had the classes at school for it though so I just did the next best similar thing which was baking and food decorating . Good thing about kids is they are naturally interested in things it’s doesn’t matter what you choose to expose them to, the curiosity will always prevail. Furthermore school is designed to create effective and obedient workforce to build economic wealth and nothing more. It’s up the individual or parent expose their own beliefs and ideas interests onto their kids because society is already doing that with their subjects that essentially say “learn this to get money and have less adversity via currency” opposed to “learn whatever you are passionate about and innovate it and use it to make our world better “
I used to work at Heraeus and what he did we use to call it extraction of precious metal, using about the same method he's doing in this video just that we were dealing with huge reactors.. one question, what if you were to use ferrous sulfate to drop the gold? That's what we used in some solutions for dropping gold beginning the cool down process.. Im just wondering . ❤❤
The thought of how people figured this all out is just amazing. Theres so many steps that need to be done in an exact certain way that i can only wonder the frustrations people had in the past to figure this all out.
While being prosecuted by the church in the process. Having to do it underground had to make it a thousand times harder to share information between alchemist.
Generations upon generations of applied sciences, culminating to what we have today. It's likely the result of100 smaller experiments for different reasons, that gave way to the knowledge needed for the process.
@ericknabenshue5689 bs ,ure 🤡, this thing came from Egypt, this knowledge is not even from humans but annunaki and different kind of aliens that also build piramids
Fun fact: (kinda) We humans have been fascinated with gold since around 5,000 BC. If today, we were to take the entire world supply of gold, collected since 5,000 BC and we melted it all into one giant cube... (rough calculation only, as gold supply is always expanding each year by 1% > 2%) That giant golden cube would be roughly 22m * 22m * 22m (22m^3 or 10,648 cubic meters) and would easily fit under the first level of the Eiffel Tower. Imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool, that's as deep as it is wide and is long: 25m * 25m * 25m The world's gold would fit in that and still have 3m on each side before even being close to being filled. I can't find the source, but I once read that this 'gold cube' grows at the rate of about 1cm to 2 cm per year.
@alansmith5267 the reson al the gold dissapir3d from prev civiliazations is annunaki that took that gold,they still do from time to time coming back and taking all the gold
Given that even that little disc of gold is worth almost $13,000 (U.S.) as of the day I'm writing this, the amount of work invested into this process is absolutely worth a goldsmith's time. As for me, I was just completely mesmerized by the chemistry. Great video!
These are the kind of science experiments i wished they conducted in high school. Never thought of watching someone turn a piece of blob into pure Gold. You sir are definitely the Modern Goldsmith.
It's all fun and games, until you take a sip of the forbidden orange juice and puff some of that orange Nitrogen Dioxide gas to see if it will get you high (warning, don't do this!).
I love the respect you have for the metal, it was amazing to watch what looked like crumble turn into beautiful gold, I look forward to watching more of your work
Very good and well described video. I am a retired metallurgist who worked for many years in the gold mining industry in Western Australia. I managed laboratories where we not only conducted our own assays on bullion by traditional fire assay methods - we also produced our own 99.9% "proof" gold to use as standards in the fire assaying processes. Our method of producing "proof" gold was very similar to what you have shown here, except that after the aqua regia digestion, we filtered out any remaining solids (silver chloride) and took the solution up in hydrochloric acid / reduced over heat and re-filtered a couple of times before finally taking up in distilled water giving us about 5 litres of a very clear, but still acidic solution containing the gold. We then slowly added caustic soda to this clear solution while gently stirring - the metallic gold precipitating out of the solution looked like "gold rain" falling to the bottom of the beaker. Precipitate was then washed in distilled water a number of times before drying. We then weighed out one gram lots of this dry precipitate into small china / porcelain crucibles and put into a dedicated furnace to melt down / anneal into small gold buttons or "prills". These were then put through manual "bullion rolls"and rolled out into long strips, which were stored and cut up when required to make "proof" standards to compare routine assay results against. You could also purchase certified "proof" gold ribbon and solutions from the Perth Mint for use in making your own "standards" but these were very expensive. As a result, we only very rarely purchased these standards and used them to confirm / validate our own site-produced standards - usually when conducting assays for other clients / joint venture partners etc.
As a metal detectorist, many years ago, I found a similar yet much smaller blob. It had silver and gold melted together. A local historian (Southern Missouri) showed me photos of recovered items from local bandits. Among the items were 'cobs' that were the stolen booty that the bandits had melted and then distributed to the gang. Apparently this practice was commonplace during and after the civil war for that region. (Quantrill raiders)
In a chapter of metallurgy i studied fully different process 😮 But it was auriferrous rock After concentration of ore 1. Mac-aurthur forest process also called cyanide process 2. Cupellation 3. Amalgamation 4.conc h2so4 with heat to remove silver followed by water called parting 5. Electrorefining in aqueous aucl3 Finish getting pure gold
PART 2: SILVER REFINING: ua-cam.com/video/b76SJfgiZIM/v-deo.html WOW. The comments! I'm happy so many of you enjoyed this video. Makes all the hours worth it. Please subscribe and tell 50 of your closest family and friends. haha. As mentioned in my video description, I owe a debt of gratitude to NileRed and Sreetips for their videos, which helped me tremendously.
Nice video overall, although I'd call out that when you add your nitric, you want to add it a little bit at a time; both to make sure to not let the reaction boil over, and so your end product has only a little bit of free nitric. i.e. go stoichoiometric and estimate the max amount of nitric you would possibly need, so you don't waste a lot of time (and materials) doing the de-nox step after. Sreetips does a lot of great videos showing that method.
Your experiment was entertaining - but oh boy did you do it the hard way! Sreetips goes into great detail on this process. You were probably better off going inquarted, just nitric boils, then aqua regia. You had iron, copper, silver, who knows what else in there...nitric acid dissolves everything but the gold at a low enough enrichments (25% gold) so that you could dodge all that silver-chloride. Silver chloride is a bear to filter. All that said, for a first-timer, you did great!
I’m a chemist and work with aqua regia frequently- you did a fantastic job, but I am wondering how you handled the aqua regia waste. If left unneutralized in a plastic waste container, it can eat at the plastic and spill everywhere! love you channel and have been watching for a while :)
You're not going to mention that Büchner funnels are not meant to be used for gravity filtration? A lot of the finer particles he tried to filter out likely made their way under the filter paper because there was no vacuum holding it firmly against the funnel.
@@alfredoprime5495 Yeah I was cringing a tad when I saw him fill this funnel so full knowing full well some of the liquid was passing unfiltered right under the paper.
A regular chemist wouldn't struggle with the chemical-related part, but would struggle with the actual goldsmith-related part, so seeing a goldsmith who didn't struggle with the gold smithing part, but with the chemical part, is truly an interesting change in roles. Also *3:29* RIP blob 2023-2023. He will be missed ;~;
Can confirm Was a chemist for a while and holy fuck I'd be fine with the chemical side (though I really have to give him due respect for handling stuff like Aqua Regia; it's impressive imo) Like yeah I could do the casting part but that hardly counts comparatively to his work haahaha We used something similar (designed to get organic T A R) off the beakers Pirahna solution is evil shit; a mate got a tiny tiny on his arm and washed it immeditately (was in the fume hood) Still got a really nasty blister/chemical burn
The orange fumes were mostly nitrogen dioxide and you were correct about not wanting to breathe those. They were also an indication there was a fair amount of silver mixed with the gold which was the main reason there was so much metal left after the first try at dissolving it. Silver doesn't dissolve well in aqua regia so it took several repeats. The gold you get when you precipitate it is incredibly fine. There's not enough surface on any given particle to really reflect light so it looks like clumpy brown flour. Just going by appearance, that button is 99%+ pure. The initial blob didn't look to be a very consistent alloy so you got a really good yield. Given that you hadn't done it before you did a great job.
Great video. Will be interested to watch you make it into something usable for "jewelry" ... alloying back to 18/14/10 kt stock; don't forget the Zinc or you'll have "air bubbles" in your ingots.
I love this video Not only is it fun to see a non-chemist try something like this - and for it to succeed so well (seriously your yield is astonishing) This video also has story to it, *The Blob* is a lovely little character and im happy to see him looking purer and healthier than he's ever been Thank you for this
It’s clear from other chemist videos, people love watching broken up old jewelry, or in this case dirty hunks of impure gold, being turned into pure clean 23-24 karat gold, so I would definitely consider continuing to make videos like this. Who knows your videos could be worth their weight (or more) in GOLD!
Just wondering how the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs etc treated their gold when making the beautiful artefacts discovered. Did they somehow process it this way or use found pure gold nuggets and dust?
This is awesome!! It’s so cool to see people appreciate chemistry as it applies to their fields. As a chemist, I have one tip: add a very small amount of sulfuric acid (like a few drops worth) to your reaction before adding the sodium metabisulfite. This will keep lead in solution as the gold precipitates. That should ensure purity for jewelry making because even small amounts of lead will ruin the gold’s malleability. If you really want to get extremely pure, you can run it several times. Then, eventually precipitate the gold with oxalic acid instead of sodium metabisulfite (but this might require you to adjust the pH in order to precipitate the gold).
I remember coming across this gem of a video back in the beginning of this 2023 year when you first uploaded it. Now, it's less than a week until Thanksgiving as of this writing, and I'm STILL amazed by the whole gold refining process you blessed us with! Keep up the greatness!
@moderngoldsmith Definitely, Sir! It's now a full year later in late January 2024, and I STILL come back to watch this amazing display of sciences you put into this amazing video! 👏
Hi What an amazing video, its very captivating. Am wondering, did you have to lower the ph of the Aqua Regia to 5 before adding the Sodium Metabisufite to drop the gold ? Or its okay to add it without lowering the pH ? Many thanks in advance for getting back to me
9:00 - I'm just a little puzzled - where did the silver chloride come from? HNO3 (nitric acid), HCl (hydrochloric acid and Au (gold). No mention of Ag (silver) in there. Were the other 'impurities' in the original blob actually silver?
I recently just bought my first gold bar that is only 1 gram and it was pretty expensive. The fact that this turned out to be 213 grams is pretty wild. To put that in perspective, that blob of gold is worth $14K+ right now.
@@spacenoodles5570 My brother in online entertainment.... Are you high? 213g is 7.513oz 1oz of gold as of 2023/02/05 is $1,864.30 USD per oz according to Kitco. So 7.513 oz of gold is; $14,006.49
Jordan this is crazy! Your talent and passion go so much further than surface level jewelry. Your depth of appreciation for your craft is one of the reasons I cherish my engagement ring (other than the man who gave it to me of course haha). It is an honor to have had something handmade by someone who truly is a master at the craft
Excellent job for a first time! As others said, with lower purity gold it’s much easier to use hot nitric acid to remove impurities. Luckily, gold chemistry tends to be pretty much quantitative because it’s so easy to precipitate it and test the solution for gold. It also makes such a bright yellow solution that it’s easy to see when you’ve washed it off of filter papers and glassware.
In a time and environment where you don't have access to modern chemicals and aqua regia, how did you purify the gold? Repeat the water casting over and over (literally rinse and repeat)?
As a Chemical Engineer, I must say that you did an amazing job. Especially if you've had no formal Chemistry training. You should be incredibly proud of what you've acomplished here. Well done!
16:58 the weight with all the flux removed was 514.6, going with 10k again, the estimate would be 514.6*0.417 = 214.6, so your actually extraction losses are about 1.4g or a yield of 99.34%. not too shabby!
This is seriously one of the best videos I’ve seen in at least the last year or two! Outstanding work and your diligence is impressive! Thanks for doing this!
if you like this kind of content a channel called Nile Red does quite a bit of chemistry stuff similar to this and in a similar format as well, you should check em out.
This was byfar one of the best videos I have ever seen. You didn't go too heavily into the chemistry and kept it at a low high school level that was easy to understand. I can't wait to see you do the same for turning silver back into the pure ore. When you make the rings or whatever out of these blobs, please make it a bit of a retrospective of the whole process.
Well don't take this video as how it's done. He should have started the chemical process with straight nitric acid-->filter> rinse and theeen start with AquaRegia
I would be super interested in a video where you cut this in two, used chemistry to purify one half, and cupelling(melting with lead in a cement crucible) the other half, and comparing the results.
Let me just clarify something. Just because the sliver of gold that was tested came back as 41.7% pure gold doesn't mean that the entire chunk was only 41.7%. It most likely was higher and lower in different parts and I suspect it was higher throughout the entire piece and that this process might have wasted a lot of gold. All the same, you did excellently and now it makes me wonder how much is in my 5-gallon pail I need to refine. It will take a fume hood, metabisulfite as well as crucibles and a filter system before I can get started after making my own nitric acid. You have inspired me!
Many years ago I did refining I have forgotten all finer points but the bulk of the operation was combining with copper about 5 to one then about 2 weeks in Hno 3 Then burning off oxides and resulting pure gold button.
Probably the last subject I expected to be watching but certainly a pleasantly surprising process for this layman. This could have been a boring process but your production made this quite interesting. Well done! Thanks for sharing.
A good tip to deal with black crud like you had at the start is to add some hydrogen peroxide. Most likely the black stuff is carbon, which isn't water soluble. Hydrogen peroxide will break it down and give off simple carbon dioxide. It's also quite safe to use really.
It's amazing to witness the transformation of raw materials into something so valuable and precious. Your dedication and hard work have truly paid off!
This was extremely cool!!! I really love your channel because you, unlike other channels aren't a 'ultra luxe' channel showing off but you're actually interested in gold and your skills as a smith and in teaching us. ❤️ Will you do something with silver or titanium next?
Excellent video. Thanks. I’m goldsmith myself and I recently started gold recovery from electronics. I had lot of problems separating other metals in the filtering process. Now I’m better at it but really enjoyed this video.
when you said you werent a chemist and have never done gold refinery like that before i was skeptical but u did a very thorough job and turned out a great yield well done, that gold looks amazing, never gets old looking at that shiny 24k blob
I figured oh I'll just check this out for a few minutes, and Boom I was hooked. I know nothing of chemistry or smithing but this is absolutely riveting! To me taking something from it's raw state to a Beautiful finished property is nothing short of Astounding. I'm so glad you posted this vid, I'll be looking for more from you.......🎸♥️
I really loved the length and time you took to explain this amazing process. That was SO cool that the guy inherited that “blob”! And he took the time to find a goldsmith willing to take the time to extract the gold from it. Remarkable and well done!!
If you look closely this was an ice Age artwork featuring mammoths in a natural landscape from varying perspectives. It's unfortunately no one seems to notice this. Look for trunks and eyes and focus on the individual colored things that look like they're just nothing... They're actually images of mammoths as if you're looking at them from a satellite view, or maybe from an airplane.
Beautiful. After watching cody's lab and many others do this on a much smaller scale (and having lots and lots of lost gold) I expected you'd have maybe 150g at the end. Your result is amazing, well done
Sreetips would have inquarted (6k gold) the blob and corn flaked the metal then leached the silver and copper out with dilute nitric acid boils. I usually takes 5 or 6 boils. The residual gold can then be dissolved in aqua regia and then filtered and precipitated several times to get gold that can be melted and cast. The silver can be recovered by cementing on copper or the lye and sugar method.
There’s about $13,200 at 23k and almost $14,000 at 24k. What a beautiful process. I love chemistry and always wanted to get into it. Such valuable information to learn. Thanks for taking the time to make the video it was really well made. 👍👍👍
When the paper test came back clear and the dropper showed no reaction I actually gasped. I figured an 'amateur' would struggle to dissolve it entirely. But chemistry is consistent and if you follow the procedure diligently, it stands to reason you'd achieve your goal! So cool! Thanks for the video.
I'm wondering if the gold (or at least gold-colored) metal that you had at the 6:00 mark was pure enough to be salable, without messing around with dangerous acids. How pure do you think the metal was at that point?
7:06 correction Aqua regia doesn't dissolve silver And after dissolving impure gold into aqua regia add some urea to neutralise the solution then proceed to next step
Hi buddy. Wouldn’t it have been better to neutralize the nitric acid by adding urea before adding the metabisulfite, to ensure that some of the gold doesn’t dissolve back into the solution?
Indeed! Facetiously, I was thinking to myself that the cost of purchasing those reagents in non-industrial quantities might exceed the value of recovered gold! (Not to mention the market value of all that labor 😂🤣.)
@@willong1000 he recovered more than 12 thousand USD worth of gold tbh. as for the cost of the reagents, well he probably still didn't exceed the value of gold but he can also use the remaining reagents for other projects too
@@Octavian999 Thanks, I get it, which is why I made comment "Facetiously." Presumably, anyone watching the video has access to the Internet. Therefore, they can easily research the cost of the chemicals in laboratory concentrations and quantities, which is quite a different prospect from the cost of industrial-size lots that a commercial refinery would purchase. The video was not an inexpensive demonstration to produce. However, approaching five million views in merely a month, it has been quite lucrative even if the refining process was provided free-of-charge to the gold's owner; and I am not suggesting such was the case.
Very cool video. Thanks for sharing what you did. I love this stuff. What you should do next time is "enquart" your blob with copper or silver to make 6 carat gold. Then boiling in nitric acid only first would have pulled the base metals out of the shot pieces you made and left the 99.99% pure gold sponge behind as a solid. Then processing that with aquaregia would put only gold into solution which would precipitate out super clean with no other base metals. You end up with "3 nines fine" gold.
The ball magnet in the center needs to be smaller that way it will float better or increase the mass of the copper sphere around it. Super cool man.!!!!
Absolutely agree it was really cool to see the process. However, the blob wasn't an ore, it was a chunk of metal alloy with gold, silver and lots of impurities.
With unlimited resources and unlimited time, this is the kind of thing I would love to mess around with. Refining things not out of necessity or greed, but out of sheer joy of the process of creation.
Most of the 9 grams you lost off your estimate were probably in the HCL wash you gave the gold at the end. I nearly passed out! You have to do that HCL wash cold, and even then some of the gold will still seep into solution so you have to work fast.
As a chemist, it hurts so much seeing you use the Erlenmeyer flask with the Buchner filter, and the vacuum flask as an Erlenmeyer. For anyone wondering, the Buchner goes with the vacuum flask joined with a rubber seal, and u connect vacuum on that tube on the side so it filters faster. The erlenmeyer flask has that shape (that kinda cone form) so it reduces the fumes of the solution you have inside. But I honestly have to admit, you did an excellent job!
@@alternatingcurrents3506 It could perfectly be, if I remember correcly jesse used to cook on a volumetric flask or something and walter gets mad. A volumetric flask is made so that the volume is exact, but warming it could affect its preciseness.
I LOVED this video style ! I've been really into chemistry and seeing you upload this was a really nice surprise. Plus the close up slo mo was majestic✨ That's nearly 12.500€ !! Good thing they didn't throw it away 😅
So satisfying! Thank you for taking the time to share this. I have always been super curious how gold goes from those earth chunks to the pure stuff. :D This was discovery channel worthy content.
My 2nd time around watching this. Still very well done and still satisfying to watch. Your well written script helps, and to film while doing all the multiple acid dissolving, my head is spinning. Congrats! 😀
You should have added sterling silver to your 14c gold (i forget the percentage), melted it together, dropped that into a bucket of water, and then get the inquarted gold, add nitric acid to get rid of all other metals to leave just the gold, adding silver helps remove other metals in the nitric stage, and Then use aqua regia on the remains, dont add too much nitric, only enough to put the gold into solution, add a few drops of sulphuric acid to get rid of any lead, desolve everything, filter it, then use sodium metabisolfite to extract the gold, rince off with distilled water, then aqua regia again, couple more drops of sulphuric, remember to add just drops of nitric in the aqua regia so you dont have excess nitric, cool the solution, add the sodium metabisulfite again (if you have excess nitric acid it puts the gold right back into solution here), let settle, pour off the fluids, rince with boiling distilled water, you can do a quick hydrochloric acid boil before rinsing if you like, once all acids have been washed off, dry the powder slowly so theres no steam explosion, then melt it! THEN you will have close to 5 9's pure 24k gold! Where on earth did you get this crazy refining process? Its all wrong and back to front, you lose gold.
So the reason the process took so much metabisulfite and it took so long was too much nitric acid? That actually makes sense. It sounded like the procedure he was using called for very small amounts of metabisulfite, and the obvious need for more was throwing him off, so it makes sense he overdid it with the nitric acid. With the lack of silver, I feel like he just wanted to keep his costs down, maybe? Isn't silver expensive? I have to say, I wouldn't have minded seeing a small steam explosion! Thanks for taking the time to provide a chemist's viewpoint on this one.
I watch a lot of Sreetips. When you said it should yield 220g I was like !! that's a crapload of gold! And I was not disappointed by your belt buckle sized blob at the end.
For those of you wondering, the gold is worth about $18,749.30 USD as of November 4, 2024.
:O
Per 10g.
thats a lotta cheddar
Was gonna be my next Q
@@SK.solutions no
As a chemist, seeing 96% yield of 99% purity from a process by someone who calls themself a non-chemist is mind-boggling. Smithing is definitely chemistry imo, and I have some serious respect for you for doing something like this so flawlessly. 10/10.
It doesn't seem like it takes as much knowledge as it does patience. Anybody can do it you just have to focus and make sure you do it right and repeat repeatable processes and double check to make sure your ready to move on. Sounds like basic chemistry to me and I took two years of chemistry
@@michialphelps2339 That is mostly what the goal is in a lot of reactions. The problem for inexperienced folks in chemistry is that it's not so easy to repeat a process that generally does not go off of set times but off of visual queues and identifying the stages as they complete and guaging your success based off of the outcome, yield, and the understanding of what that should look like or be.. In most cases, a simple change of color, type of physical reaction (bubbling, gassing, simmer, etc) can mean so much to the observer who knows what they are doing and could be an indication to make necessary changes either in the moment or later as needed because of this, it is amazing that somebody who would be so unsure about the exact details and not have any way to determine if the information he is getting is for sure the best source of information if he's researching it online and taking whatever information he can get ahold of, maybe he got a book but what if that's outdated information, there is so much to this than just patience and repeating a couple of steps when it comes to getting a high yield and purity of an end product in whatever recipe you follow for any reaction you are trying to accomplish in chemistry whether it be a reduction, extraction, or reaction. I am not even a trained chemist myself but have lots of at home experience as a teen and young adult doing experiments and I am very impressed at how confident he seems and the fact he just has all this shit at his disposal and isn't substituting with some type of kitchen / shop technique haha as well as the fact he is performing this on something that isn't necessarily even his, so he says.
You're not a chemist 😂
@@emilymayer5926and your proof to back this claim up is...?
You really only have to follow a guide and buy the right tools/materials from the looks of it.
As a kid I played around with a torch, melting metals just for fun, never really knowing what I was doing. You're having a very good time creating beauty, which is a pleasure to watch.
Yay!
There is really no other gold refining video of this quality of content, or even the amount of gold being refined. It's always small collections where this is SOOO satisfying to see the huge yield at the end
NileRed. He goes through in much better detail and explains how it works.
@@JK50with10 his yield was a few times smaller iirc
The craziest part to me is knowing the generations of Alchemists who tried to create gold which also lead to the discovery of so many interesting reactions in chemistry.
Good thing they didn't succeed or gold would be worthless. Lol
@@foxmulder7616 but if they had succeeded then gold would be plentiful and we could use it more often in things like electronics and machines
@@foxmulder7616 In the very end their successors did succeed. We can turn lead to gold now, it only requires a particle accelerator and so much energy and equipment and work that it's not even close to worth it to do.
*lead*
@@nicfab1 Cool, I learned something!
First time I watched this process was NileRed refining a viewers gold. It’s cool to see a gold smith do it just using some research. The yield was very high I was surprised. In the original block there was a huge section of dirt and other metals and I thought that would bring the yield down a lot from the initial estimate. Great video!
the yield is not really that high considering lots of losses during the process.
the estimated weight was based on an inaccurate measurement of a non representative sample
@@kelvinluk9121 I suspect you are right, but we don’t really know the lose, since we (as you say) don’t really know if his original measurement of purity was representative. He should have melter the blob and then measured the purity.
I am 100% sure that if children at school watched this video in a chemistry class there would be a huge increase in interest in that subject, good job on the process and on filming it well (y)
school is for general knowledge not practical knowledge,
If the kids watch Breaking Bad for sure they’ll be interested in chemistry class, however that show has some mature topics and scenes
@@itzl2124 so what?
Wow I never thought of that. So you are saying that subjects and information can be taught in a school? And not only that whatever the students are exposed to will increase an interest in that subject due to becoming aware of it ? My mind is blown right now omg .
I’m certain (no need for percentage because any less that 100% wouldn’t be certain would it ?) that you may have just stumble upon why school exists. Anything you show or bring to the awareness of curious learning minds is going to generate further interest it doesn’t matter what the subject is. So I’ll call your comment with a similar bet.
I’m 100% (certain) that if you handed out money to people on the street some of them would take it and spend it. (Fulfilling its purpose)
@@itzl2124 yeah true , I watched Rambo as a kid so I was interested in obtaining ptsd and feeling bastardised by society to the point that violence which was I learned from society can be used against the society for noble purposes. They never had the classes at school for it though so I just did the next best similar thing which was baking and food decorating .
Good thing about kids is they are naturally interested in things it’s doesn’t matter what you choose to expose them to, the curiosity will always prevail.
Furthermore school is designed to create effective and obedient workforce to build economic wealth and nothing more. It’s up the individual or parent expose their own beliefs and ideas interests onto their kids because society is already doing that with their subjects that essentially say “learn this to get money and have less adversity via currency” opposed to “learn whatever you are passionate about and innovate it and use it to make our world better “
I used to work at Heraeus and what he did we use to call it extraction of precious metal, using about the same method he's doing in this video just that we were dealing with huge reactors.. one question, what if you were to use ferrous sulfate to drop the gold? That's what we used in some solutions for dropping gold beginning the cool down process.. Im just wondering . ❤❤
The thought of how people figured this all out is just amazing. Theres so many steps that need to be done in an exact certain way that i can only wonder the frustrations people had in the past to figure this all out.
While being prosecuted by the church in the process. Having to do it underground had to make it a thousand times harder to share information between alchemist.
Generations upon generations of applied sciences, culminating to what we have today. It's likely the result of100 smaller experiments for different reasons, that gave way to the knowledge needed for the process.
@ericknabenshue5689 bs ,ure 🤡, this thing came from Egypt, this knowledge is not even from humans but annunaki and different kind of aliens that also build piramids
Fun fact: (kinda)
We humans have been fascinated with gold since around 5,000 BC.
If today, we were to take the entire world supply of gold, collected since 5,000 BC and we melted it all into one giant cube...
(rough calculation only, as gold supply is always expanding each year by 1% > 2%)
That giant golden cube would be roughly 22m * 22m * 22m (22m^3 or 10,648 cubic meters)
and would easily fit under the first level of the Eiffel Tower.
Imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool, that's as deep as it is wide and is long:
25m * 25m * 25m
The world's gold would fit in that and still have 3m on each side before even being close to being filled.
I can't find the source, but I once read that this 'gold cube' grows at the rate of about 1cm to 2 cm per year.
@alansmith5267 the reson al the gold dissapir3d from prev civiliazations is annunaki that took that gold,they still do from time to time coming back and taking all the gold
Given that even that little disc of gold is worth almost $13,000 (U.S.) as of the day I'm writing this, the amount of work invested into this process is absolutely worth a goldsmith's time. As for me, I was just completely mesmerized by the chemistry. Great video!
me to
me tree
pretty basic stuff, nothing to be amazed about.
@@BurkenProductionsdude ._.
@@BurkenProductions ofc minecraft guy, like duuhh just use an iron pickaxe and smelt the ore right??
These are the kind of science experiments i wished they conducted in high school. Never thought of watching someone turn a piece of blob into pure Gold. You sir are definitely the Modern Goldsmith.
Way too expensive and way too dangerous as well. Not a good idea at all.
that's $13,000 in gold, something tells me it might be a little outside the budget of a school :D
It's all fun and games, until you take a sip of the forbidden orange juice and puff some of that orange Nitrogen Dioxide gas to see if it will get you high (warning, don't do this!).
Im 😁
Why would you let school kids near fucking aqua regia??? Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I love the respect you have for the metal, it was amazing to watch what looked like crumble turn into beautiful gold, I look forward to watching more of your work
This is easily one of the best, well documented videos I've ever seen on UA-cam. Amazing watch. Totally captivated the entire time.
Literally I didn’t even get bored for a second 😂
This was a very nice video, but this is just the tip of the iceberg for the quality of many youtube videos out there.
Apparently Matt's only seen 100 videos on YT. Can't wait to see what his next year will be like.
Now give the gold to me... you are already rich ... but i am poor... give it to me.
a creature got killed in this video lol
Very good and well described video. I am a retired metallurgist who worked for many years in the gold mining industry in Western Australia. I managed laboratories where we not only conducted our own assays on bullion by traditional fire assay methods - we also produced our own 99.9% "proof" gold to use as standards in the fire assaying processes. Our method of producing "proof" gold was very similar to what you have shown here, except that after the aqua regia digestion, we filtered out any remaining solids (silver chloride) and took the solution up in hydrochloric acid / reduced over heat and re-filtered a couple of times before finally taking up in distilled water giving us about 5 litres of a very clear, but still acidic solution containing the gold. We then slowly added caustic soda to this clear solution while gently stirring - the metallic gold precipitating out of the solution looked like "gold rain" falling to the bottom of the beaker. Precipitate was then washed in distilled water a number of times before drying. We then weighed out one gram lots of this dry precipitate into small china / porcelain crucibles and put into a dedicated furnace to melt down / anneal into small gold buttons or "prills". These were then put through manual "bullion rolls"and rolled out into long strips, which were stored and cut up when required to make "proof" standards to compare routine assay results against.
You could also purchase certified "proof" gold ribbon and solutions from the Perth Mint for use in making your own "standards" but these were very expensive. As a result, we only very rarely purchased these standards and used them to confirm / validate our own site-produced standards - usually when conducting assays for other clients / joint venture partners etc.
So you are in Gold Rush in Bendigo?
@@karenwallace462 probably less time than it took you to read it, given your apparent lack of anything much between the ears.
This was really interesting. Thanks for taking the time.
As a metal detectorist, many years ago, I found a similar yet much smaller blob. It had silver and gold melted together. A local historian (Southern Missouri) showed me photos of recovered items from local bandits. Among the items were 'cobs' that were the stolen booty that the bandits had melted and then distributed to the gang. Apparently this practice was commonplace during and after the civil war for that region. (Quantrill raiders)
If you find a melted blob like this and you can tell it is metal, what is the next step to finding out what kinds of metal it is?
@@cheriehomebody9454 Find someone with an XRF machine, and then get them to do a report for you. Shouldnt do anything and is non-distructive.
@@cheriehomebody9454 throw it and catch it is it denser then steel
Man thats awesome
@@DesertTuna It´s ndenser than lead
In a chapter of metallurgy i studied fully different process 😮
But it was auriferrous rock
After concentration of ore
1. Mac-aurthur forest process also called cyanide process
2. Cupellation
3. Amalgamation
4.conc h2so4 with heat to remove silver followed by water called parting
5. Electrorefining in aqueous aucl3
Finish getting pure gold
PART 2: SILVER REFINING: ua-cam.com/video/b76SJfgiZIM/v-deo.html
WOW. The comments! I'm happy so many of you enjoyed this video. Makes all the hours worth it. Please subscribe and tell 50 of your closest family and friends. haha.
As mentioned in my video description, I owe a debt of gratitude to NileRed and Sreetips for their videos, which helped me tremendously.
Nice video overall, although I'd call out that when you add your nitric, you want to add it a little bit at a time; both to make sure to not let the reaction boil over, and so your end product has only a little bit of free nitric. i.e. go stoichoiometric and estimate the max amount of nitric you would possibly need, so you don't waste a lot of time (and materials) doing the de-nox step after.
Sreetips does a lot of great videos showing that method.
@@chouseification love Streetips
Your experiment was entertaining - but oh boy did you do it the hard way! Sreetips goes into great detail on this process. You were probably better off going inquarted, just nitric boils, then aqua regia. You had iron, copper, silver, who knows what else in there...nitric acid dissolves everything but the gold at a low enough enrichments (25% gold) so that you could dodge all that silver-chloride. Silver chloride is a bear to filter.
All that said, for a first-timer, you did great!
Aaaaaaaand now I feel like a loser, because I don’t have 50 close friends/family.
I kid
Streetips will take hours of your day away and you will LOVE IT lol
I’m a chemist and work with aqua regia frequently- you did a fantastic job, but I am wondering how you handled the aqua regia waste. If left unneutralized in a plastic waste container, it can eat at the plastic and spill everywhere! love you channel and have been watching for a while :)
You're not going to mention that Büchner funnels are not meant to be used for gravity filtration? A lot of the finer particles he tried to filter out likely made their way under the filter paper because there was no vacuum holding it firmly against the funnel.
@@alfredoprime5495 yeah i'd be more happy if he plugged air suction haha
He probably didn't do the stoichiometry, would have gave him the quantities needed for all the reactions
His method is very old school.
@@alfredoprime5495 Yeah I was cringing a tad when I saw him fill this funnel so full knowing full well some of the liquid was passing unfiltered right under the paper.
A regular chemist wouldn't struggle with the chemical-related part, but would struggle with the actual goldsmith-related part, so seeing a goldsmith who didn't struggle with the gold smithing part, but with the chemical part, is truly an interesting change in roles.
Also *3:29* RIP blob 2023-2023. He will be missed ;~;
Blob is not dead but was born again into a new blob body! Lol
Can confirm
Was a chemist for a while and holy fuck I'd be fine with the chemical side (though I really have to give him due respect for handling stuff like Aqua Regia; it's impressive imo)
Like yeah I could do the casting part
but that hardly counts comparatively to his work haahaha
We used something similar (designed to get organic T A R) off the beakers
Pirahna solution is evil shit; a mate got a tiny tiny on his arm and washed it immeditately (was in the fume hood)
Still got a really nasty blister/chemical burn
@@johnmcwick1 blob reincarnation
u didnt watch Nilered
the blob was a family thing so it was probably born a long time before that
I am proud to have come along on your journey and I am honoured to have watched this video
That's a very nice thing to say
How lonely are you?
The orange fumes were mostly nitrogen dioxide and you were correct about not wanting to breathe those. They were also an indication there was a fair amount of silver mixed with the gold which was the main reason there was so much metal left after the first try at dissolving it. Silver doesn't dissolve well in aqua regia so it took several repeats. The gold you get when you precipitate it is incredibly fine. There's not enough surface on any given particle to really reflect light so it looks like clumpy brown flour. Just going by appearance, that button is 99%+ pure. The initial blob didn't look to be a very consistent alloy so you got a really good yield. Given that you hadn't done it before you did a great job.
That was so satisfying to watch! Glad you had the patience to go through the whole process!🎉
Glad you enjoyed!! Was def a test of patience haha
@@moderngoldsmith Banana
@@moderngoldsmith orange juice...
How much to buy the forbidden orange juice?
Great video. Will be interested to watch you make it into something usable for "jewelry" ... alloying back to 18/14/10 kt stock; don't forget the Zinc or you'll have "air bubbles" in your ingots.
This is the first of a 3 part series
This is definitely not your average jeweller channel 😍 i’ve always loved your videos, and this turn you’ve taken makes you even more awesome
Thanks! Though I might be done with gold refining for awhile....
@@moderngoldsmith awww 🤗 it looks insanely complicated and dangerous, but you’re still a badass for having done it
@@moderngoldsmith 12:07 mmm what a tasty orange juice...wanna drink
I love this video
Not only is it fun to see a non-chemist try something like this - and for it to succeed so well (seriously your yield is astonishing)
This video also has story to it, *The Blob* is a lovely little character and im happy to see him looking purer and healthier than he's ever been
Thank you for this
It’s clear from other chemist videos, people love watching broken up old jewelry, or in this case dirty hunks of impure gold, being turned into pure clean 23-24 karat gold, so I would definitely consider continuing to make videos like this. Who knows your videos could be worth their weight (or more) in GOLD!
What's taking them so long to come forward? They waiting to go to work on canoes? Then they will come
Just wondering how the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs etc treated their gold when making the beautiful artefacts discovered.
Did they somehow process it this way or use found pure gold nuggets and dust?
This is awesome!! It’s so cool to see people appreciate chemistry as it applies to their fields. As a chemist, I have one tip: add a very small amount of sulfuric acid (like a few drops worth) to your reaction before adding the sodium metabisulfite. This will keep lead in solution as the gold precipitates. That should ensure purity for jewelry making because even small amounts of lead will ruin the gold’s malleability. If you really want to get extremely pure, you can run it several times. Then, eventually precipitate the gold with oxalic acid instead of sodium metabisulfite (but this might require you to adjust the pH in order to precipitate the gold).
I really enjoyed the process for the gold refinement. It helps me understand all of the gold miners excitements of finding flakes of gold.
I remember coming across this gem of a video back in the beginning of this 2023 year when you first uploaded it. Now, it's less than a week until Thanksgiving as of this writing, and I'm STILL amazed by the whole gold refining process you blessed us with! Keep up the greatness!
Ahhh thank you so much! Appreciate you coming back for more
@moderngoldsmith Definitely, Sir! It's now a full year later in late January 2024, and I STILL come back to watch this amazing display of sciences you put into this amazing video! 👏
Hi
What an amazing video, its very captivating.
Am wondering, did you have to lower the ph of the Aqua Regia to 5 before adding the Sodium Metabisufite to drop the gold ? Or its okay to add it without lowering the pH ?
Many thanks in advance for getting back to me
9:00 - I'm just a little puzzled - where did the silver chloride come from? HNO3 (nitric acid), HCl (hydrochloric acid and Au (gold). No mention of Ag (silver) in there. Were the other 'impurities' in the original blob actually silver?
I recently just bought my first gold bar that is only 1 gram and it was pretty expensive. The fact that this turned out to be 213 grams is pretty wild. To put that in perspective, that blob of gold is worth $14K+ right now.
idk where you got that number, it's under 2k
@@spacenoodles5570per ounce.
@@spacenoodles5570 its definitely not under 2k
@@spacenoodles5570 its around 12.5k worth of gold since its 24 karat
@@spacenoodles5570 My brother in online entertainment.... Are you high?
213g is 7.513oz
1oz of gold as of 2023/02/05 is $1,864.30 USD per oz according to Kitco.
So 7.513 oz of gold is; $14,006.49
Jordan this is crazy! Your talent and passion go so much further than surface level jewelry. Your depth of appreciation for your craft is one of the reasons I cherish my engagement ring (other than the man who gave it to me of course haha). It is an honor to have had something handmade by someone who truly is a master at the craft
Excellent job for a first time! As others said, with lower purity gold it’s much easier to use hot nitric acid to remove impurities. Luckily, gold chemistry tends to be pretty much quantitative because it’s so easy to precipitate it and test the solution for gold. It also makes such a bright yellow solution that it’s easy to see when you’ve washed it off of filter papers and glassware.
In a time and environment where you don't have access to modern chemicals and aqua regia, how did you purify the gold?
Repeat the water casting over and over (literally rinse and repeat)?
As a Chemical Engineer, I must say that you did an amazing job.
Especially if you've had no formal Chemistry training.
You should be incredibly proud of what you've acomplished here.
Well done!
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how much work he put into this gold?
for a 12.5k$ blob it worth it :P
It's actually 17K in my currency (Canadian Dollar CAD)
@@stickman4719 its also called trudeau pesos
@@stickman4719sheesh
Well I would hope he would that blob is now worth 15 thousand dollars.
16:58 the weight with all the flux removed was 514.6, going with 10k again, the estimate would be 514.6*0.417 = 214.6, so your actually extraction losses are about 1.4g or a yield of 99.34%. not too shabby!
Would it be better to use regular acids to dissove unwanted active metals before the aqua regia?
This is seriously one of the best videos I’ve seen in at least the last year or two! Outstanding work and your diligence is impressive! Thanks for doing this!
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if you like this kind of content a channel called Nile Red does quite a bit of chemistry stuff similar to this and in a similar format as well, you should check em out.
This was byfar one of the best videos I have ever seen. You didn't go too heavily into the chemistry and kept it at a low high school level that was easy to understand. I can't wait to see you do the same for turning silver back into the pure ore. When you make the rings or whatever out of these blobs, please make it a bit of a retrospective of the whole process.
Well don't take this video as how it's done.
He should have started the chemical process with straight nitric acid-->filter> rinse and theeen start with AquaRegia
I've seen chemists do this sort of thing, but your perspective definitely makes it seem way cooler and more interesting to watch
You know you right
I would be super interested in a video where you cut this in two, used chemistry to purify one half, and cupelling(melting with lead in a cement crucible) the other half, and comparing the results.
Let me just clarify something. Just because the sliver of gold that was tested came back as 41.7% pure gold doesn't mean that the entire chunk was only 41.7%. It most likely was higher and lower in different parts and I suspect it was higher throughout the entire piece and that this process might have wasted a lot of gold. All the same, you did excellently and now it makes me wonder how much is in my 5-gallon pail I need to refine. It will take a fume hood, metabisulfite as well as crucibles and a filter system before I can get started after making my own nitric acid. You have inspired me!
It wasn't even tested at 41.7%, it was tested at OVER 41.7% (>10 K)
Many years ago I did refining I have forgotten all finer points but the bulk of the operation was combining with copper about 5 to one then about 2 weeks in Hno 3 Then burning off oxides and resulting pure gold button.
Probably the last subject I expected to be watching but certainly a pleasantly surprising process for this layman. This could have been a boring process but your production made this quite interesting. Well done! Thanks for sharing.
‘Didn’t feel right as a bar, let’s return it to a blob.’ ❤ most wholesome thought ever
A good tip to deal with black crud like you had at the start is to add some hydrogen peroxide. Most likely the black stuff is carbon, which isn't water soluble. Hydrogen peroxide will break it down and give off simple carbon dioxide. It's also quite safe to use really.
And remember to put plants near the CO2 to prevent greenhouse emmisons
Thanks!
It's amazing to witness the transformation of raw materials into something so valuable and precious. Your dedication and hard work have truly paid off!
I think he took something valuable and turned it into a raw material.
This was extremely cool!!! I really love your channel because you, unlike other channels aren't a 'ultra luxe' channel showing off but you're actually interested in gold and your skills as a smith and in teaching us. ❤️
Will you do something with silver or titanium next?
🎉beautiful! My dad was a California gold miner. This video would have tickled him pink! Thanks for the nostalgia and great job! It's GORGIOUS!❤❤❤
Excellent video. Thanks. I’m goldsmith myself and I recently started gold recovery from electronics. I had lot of problems separating other metals in the filtering process. Now I’m better at it but really enjoyed this video.
Isnt that usually a extremely small amount of gold per part?
As a chemist living in an RV on Mexico-USA border, I approve 99%. 👍
Are you cooking meth there 😂😂?
What about the 1 percent
Jesse we need to cook
@@pooja8077 Hell Yeah! Lydia. Send that Methylamine drum over.
@@MizanurRahman-mm3fp thats the purity
This is the best gold refining video I’ve seen on UA-cam! Great job! 💯💯💯
when you said you werent a chemist and have never done gold refinery like that before i was skeptical but u did a very thorough job and turned out a great yield well done, that gold looks amazing, never gets old looking at that shiny 24k blob
How captivating, that was an amazing outcome, well worth the time you invested in it, I can’t wait to see what you do next. Thanks for the upload.
WOW, WOW, WOW!!! The skill! You are a true Master! Congratulations on achieving 24k purity. I seriously had my doubts, but WOW!
I figured oh I'll just check this out for a few minutes, and Boom I was hooked. I know nothing of chemistry or smithing but this is absolutely riveting! To me taking something from it's raw state to a Beautiful finished property is nothing short of Astounding. I'm so glad you posted this vid, I'll be looking for more from you.......🎸♥️
I really loved the length and time you took to explain this amazing process. That was SO cool that the guy inherited that “blob”! And he took the time to find a goldsmith willing to take the time to extract the gold from it. Remarkable and well done!!
If you look closely this was an ice Age artwork featuring mammoths in a natural landscape from varying perspectives. It's unfortunately no one seems to notice this. Look for trunks and eyes and focus on the individual colored things that look like they're just nothing... They're actually images of mammoths as if you're looking at them from a satellite view, or maybe from an airplane.
That’s an incredibly impressive yield. Good job on the chemistry and the video.
Beautiful. After watching cody's lab and many others do this on a much smaller scale (and having lots and lots of lost gold) I expected you'd have maybe 150g at the end. Your result is amazing, well done
Sreetips would have inquarted (6k gold) the blob and corn flaked the metal then leached the silver and copper out with dilute nitric acid boils. I usually takes 5 or 6 boils. The residual gold can then be dissolved in aqua regia and then filtered and precipitated several times to get gold that can be melted and cast. The silver can be recovered by cementing on copper or the lye and sugar method.
The gold blob is much more beautiful than the initial bar-shaped casting. Good call.
There’s about $13,200 at 23k and almost $14,000 at 24k. What a beautiful process. I love chemistry and always wanted to get into it. Such valuable information to learn. Thanks for taking the time to make the video it was really well made. 👍👍👍
So that dial was/is worth 14 thousand dollars???
@@damiontaylor1121 yup roughly
pov: "When you suck out 1/5 a cup of blood onto a cup" 2:26
With the spot change, it's currently worth 15,368 USD.
Wow, was kinda wanting to know how much the final outcome was worth. Thanks
When the paper test came back clear and the dropper showed no reaction I actually gasped. I figured an 'amateur' would struggle to dissolve it entirely. But chemistry is consistent and if you follow the procedure diligently, it stands to reason you'd achieve your goal! So cool! Thanks for the video.
Titles don't offer results.
When you're melting the blob in the beginning are you using any kind of flux or just melting?
I'm wondering if the gold (or at least gold-colored) metal that you had at the 6:00 mark was pure enough to be salable, without messing around with dangerous acids. How pure do you think the metal was at that point?
Well compare the weight before and after, it was 514g in that state at 6:00 and then roughly 213 after... so it was less than 50% pure for sure.
that whole process looked beautiful. the colors, the emotions when dealing with this stuff.. that’s why i became a lab technician / chemist
Its fake dude
@@Magic-Marv420 oh thank you einstein, i was getting worried
7:06 correction
Aqua regia doesn't dissolve silver
And after dissolving impure gold into aqua regia add some urea to neutralise the solution then proceed to next step
The excess nitric in his solution will dissolve the silver.
I've handmade jewelry from sheet silver and gold, off and on, for years. This video was fantastic! many thanks for posting.
For a non-chemist, you did a really good job. I'm super impressed!
Titles don't offer results. Research followed by work do.
Second time I've seen a UA-camr extract gold out of an unknown/impure source, and just as cool the second time as it was the first. Brilliantly done
nilered
The patience you showed is commendable, great job.
Could you use differences in density to separate the contaminants from the gold?
This was so cool!!! The whole process was so fascinating to watch!!
Wow! That was an awesome video. Thanks for taking us along on your learning journey😊
I must say this is your best video yet simply because you showcased how cool chemistry can be 😊
Keep up the good work Jordan ✨💕
Hi buddy. Wouldn’t it have been better to neutralize the nitric acid by adding urea before adding the metabisulfite, to ensure that some of the gold doesn’t dissolve back into the solution?
From a locksmith. To a goldsmith. That's my next goal. Perfect execution of explaining the breakdown process. Under 20 mins. UA-cam GOLD!
'From a locksmith. To a goldsmith. That's my next goal.'
Are you planning on robbing this nice man?!
@@catcherinthesky stupid af. Idiot.
It would be interesting to have additional stats like total amount and cost of materials used to separate this gold vs its total value.
Indeed! Facetiously, I was thinking to myself that the cost of purchasing those reagents in non-industrial quantities might exceed the value of recovered gold! (Not to mention the market value of all that labor 😂🤣.)
@@willong1000 he recovered more than 12 thousand USD worth of gold tbh. as for the cost of the reagents, well he probably still didn't exceed the value of gold but he can also use the remaining reagents for other projects too
@@Octavian999 Thanks, I get it, which is why I made comment "Facetiously."
Presumably, anyone watching the video has access to the Internet. Therefore, they can easily research the cost of the chemicals in laboratory concentrations and quantities, which is quite a different prospect from the cost of industrial-size lots that a commercial refinery would purchase.
The video was not an inexpensive demonstration to produce. However, approaching five million views in merely a month, it has been quite lucrative even if the refining process was provided free-of-charge to the gold's owner; and I am not suggesting such was the case.
Very cool video. Thanks for sharing what you did. I love this stuff. What you should do next time is "enquart" your blob with copper or silver to make 6 carat gold. Then boiling in nitric acid only first would have pulled the base metals out of the shot pieces you made and left the 99.99% pure gold sponge behind as a solid. Then processing that with aquaregia would put only gold into solution which would precipitate out super clean with no other base metals. You end up with "3 nines fine" gold.
The ball magnet in the center needs to be smaller that way it will float better or increase the mass of the copper sphere around it. Super cool man.!!!!
This was so cool and educational. Seeing the whole process of gold extraction from an ore is mesmerizing, and way more complex than I imagined
Absolutely agree it was really cool to see the process. However, the blob wasn't an ore, it was a chunk of metal alloy with gold, silver and lots of impurities.
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0:03 i legit thought this was a drone shot of a rocky desert or something
Same
Same, when I realized it wasn’t that I was like “OMG THAT WOULD BE SO COOL FOR A MOVIE TERRAIN SHOT”
😂
With unlimited resources and unlimited time, this is the kind of thing I would love to mess around with. Refining things not out of necessity or greed, but out of sheer joy of the process of creation.
Ah yes a video 18 min about refining gold definitely what I want to watch before finals.
14:55 - I absolutely love the 'clumpy yellowish brown dirt' look.
Brown gravy powder before you boil it
I hope you make more explorative videos on your channel because I'm sure I'm not the only one who found this fascinating! Love your channel!
Most of the 9 grams you lost off your estimate were probably in the HCL wash you gave the gold at the end. I nearly passed out! You have to do that HCL wash cold, and even then some of the gold will still seep into solution so you have to work fast.
Why not put some borax to clean when melting ? Would that help ?
As a chemist, it hurts so much seeing you use the Erlenmeyer flask with the Buchner filter, and the vacuum flask as an Erlenmeyer. For anyone wondering, the Buchner goes with the vacuum flask joined with a rubber seal, and u connect vacuum on that tube on the side so it filters faster. The erlenmeyer flask has that shape (that kinda cone form) so it reduces the fumes of the solution you have inside. But I honestly have to admit, you did an excellent job!
As a human being, it hurts so much to see you saying this to a person who is CLEARLY NOT A CHEMIST because they don’t have your level of knowledge.
@NickiGames did you type this while hugging your stuffed animal.
I feel like this is a Breaking Bad reference
Didn’t he say he’s not a chemist? Then why the hate?
@@alternatingcurrents3506 It could perfectly be, if I remember correcly jesse used to cook on a volumetric flask or something and walter gets mad. A volumetric flask is made so that the volume is exact, but warming it could affect its preciseness.
I LOVED this video style ! I've been really into chemistry and seeing you upload this was a really nice surprise. Plus the close up slo mo was majestic✨ That's nearly 12.500€ !! Good thing they didn't throw it away 😅
So satisfying! Thank you for taking the time to share this. I have always been super curious how gold goes from those earth chunks to the pure stuff. :D This was discovery channel worthy content.
As a chemist, this was so satisfying to watch. Awesome job! Thanks for posting!
Man, just watching you went trough the entire process was fascinating, great job and keep up the good work!
My 2nd time around watching this. Still very well done and still satisfying to watch. Your well written script helps, and to film while doing all the multiple acid dissolving, my head is spinning. Congrats! 😀
I’ve never watched a single video of yours until I saw this one. What a wonderfully displayed craft. 99/100 would recommend
Why 99 instead of 100
Could you extract the gold and silver from using electrolysis?
You should have added sterling silver to your 14c gold (i forget the percentage), melted it together, dropped that into a bucket of water, and then get the inquarted gold, add nitric acid to get rid of all other metals to leave just the gold, adding silver helps remove other metals in the nitric stage, and Then use aqua regia on the remains, dont add too much nitric, only enough to put the gold into solution, add a few drops of sulphuric acid to get rid of any lead, desolve everything, filter it, then use sodium metabisolfite to extract the gold, rince off with distilled water, then aqua regia again, couple more drops of sulphuric, remember to add just drops of nitric in the aqua regia so you dont have excess nitric, cool the solution, add the sodium metabisulfite again (if you have excess nitric acid it puts the gold right back into solution here), let settle, pour off the fluids, rince with boiling distilled water, you can do a quick hydrochloric acid boil before rinsing if you like, once all acids have been washed off, dry the powder slowly so theres no steam explosion, then melt it! THEN you will have close to 5 9's pure 24k gold!
Where on earth did you get this crazy refining process? Its all wrong and back to front, you lose gold.
This is the comment I was looking for. The video is honestly a little hard to watch.
So the reason the process took so much metabisulfite and it took so long was too much nitric acid? That actually makes sense. It sounded like the procedure he was using called for very small amounts of metabisulfite, and the obvious need for more was throwing him off, so it makes sense he overdid it with the nitric acid.
With the lack of silver, I feel like he just wanted to keep his costs down, maybe? Isn't silver expensive?
I have to say, I wouldn't have minded seeing a small steam explosion! Thanks for taking the time to provide a chemist's viewpoint on this one.
I watch a lot of Sreetips. When you said it should yield 220g I was like !! that's a crapload of gold! And I was not disappointed by your belt buckle sized blob at the end.
Sreetips is the bomb.
The GOAT of this shit.