See more about gold and silver
Refining gold in the manner shown here requires the use of some strong acids. So make sure you have everything ready before proceeding. You will need plenty of space and either do this outdoors or in a well ventilated room.
Safety equipment:
Rubber gloves
Safety Goggles
Rubber apron
Mixing vessels and Equipment:
Plastic buckets
Stirring rods (wood or plastic)
Filter
Chemicals:
Nitric acid
Storm gold precipitant
Urea
Aqua ammonia
Precious metal detection liquid
Water
1. To start with your container needs to big enough. You can work the volume out with the calculation 1 ounce of gold needs a volume of 300 millilitres. So for 2 ounces of gold = 600 millilitres of volume and so on.
You have 2 oz of Gold? Wow!
Next for every ounce of gold you need to add 30 millilitres of Nitric acid. This needs to sit at rest for 30 minutes minimum.
2. When this time is up its time to add some hydrochloric or muriatic acid to the mix. For every ounce of gold in the receptacle you should add 120 ml of the acid. The mix in place will eventually change to a brown colour and become very hot.
You should wait at least an hour before filtering the acid. On the other hand you could just leave this overnight for the process to work.
3. Using your filter pour the mix into another container. The acid should turn to a clear green colour. If it appears to go cloudy you should filter the mixture again.
4. Boil a quart of water and add 1lb of urea and slowly add this water to the acid.
Urea is used to adjust the pH level and will cause the acid to expand as foam.
If you add this too quickly it will overflow the container and take some of your gold with it.
When the acid stops foaming it will have reached the correct pH balance to stop the nitric acid but leaves the hydrochloric acid in place.
5. taking another quart of boiled water this time add an ounce of storm precipitant.
For each ounce of gold in the container add 1 oz storm precipitant. This should be done slowly to prevent overflow.
The acid will begin to change back to a muddy colour and small particles of gold should be starting to form. You should wait another 30 minutes before adding precious metal detection liquid. This will detect if there is any undisolved gold left in the water.
6. Filter this into another container you will find that the grotty mud left at the base is the refined gold you have been after. Remove the acid and then add water to the gold.
The gold should be rinsed at least 3 times.
Finally pour aqua ammonia over the rinsed gold. This will cause some whitish vapour to appear rinse this once more and allow the now complete refined gold to dry.
