BASIC 6″ SMALL GAS METAL MELTING KILN

What you see is the little KK6 and this is kind of a little different process than what we usually do but I thought I’d show you how it can be done. Right here we have some silver ore; it comes from Idaho property up there that we have and silver ore right here is extremely high grade but it is a silver sulphide ore and there’s a little pyrite and a little Arsenopyrite and a little zinc, a little manganese. So anyhow that ore right there runs eight hundred nine hundred ounces of silver to the ton and then over here we have a cannon crusher that I get from Make your own gold bars. This is their largest crusher it’s a fourteen inch in diameter and at any rate you run these crushers dry and they’re pretty dusty but I kind of overcame that. Rock goes in there and comes out of the bottom and I built a little table here for it and then what I do is I come over into a little bucket in the bucket right here, I put a vacuum cleaner bag on it. So in other words you put your rocks in there and the air and everything in your ore comes down in your bucket which is got a rubber seal on it and a vacuum cleaner bag lets you air get up, it keeps the dust in there and it takes rock; let’s say you can put three inch rock in it. I never put in anything over an inch but it takes it from big rocks to literally powder; like face powder. So that takes care of the crushing part of it and then once I’ve got it crushed and I want to concentrate it; I want to get rid of all the blacksands and as much as the other materials that I can. And so we go over here and use a little RP4 table here. It’s a little black scorpion flying gold table and in fact right now there are some gold sitting on before I cleaned up out of some black sand. I would at any rate I take the crushed ore and I put it on this little table here and run the water real slow and run all the courts off of it and all the other gang materials off.

And then once I have my concentrated ore then I roast it and by roasting it I’m putting it in a metal pan and putting heat to it and I’m driving the sulphur off. So in other words we have a silver sulphide ore and the other materials that are in there. There’s a little bit of gold in there and pyrite but I roast it and I drive the sulphur off and when you drive the sulphur off the sulphur atom gets replaced with an oxygen molecule and what we can do once it’s in an oxidize state is with our clay graphite crucibles here; the graphite tries to burn and the only way that the graphite can burn is if there is an oxygen source when it’s in the kiln. So what it does is it literally steals the oxygen molecule away from the silver oxide and since it’s above the melting temperature of silver it becomes metallic silver and it pours out into a little ingot. Right here is some of the ore that I roasted; that’s all ready to go into crucible with some flux and then we’ll heat that up and we’ll melt it and we’ll pour into the conical shape mould because I’m working with an ore concentrate. The conical shape mould allows everything to go down into a little cone shape and it captures everything out of the flux.

So eventually I’ll do a video using the crusher and I’ll also do video using the little RP4 table for concentrating your ore. Then I’ll show you how to roast it and then obviously I’ll show you how we burn it and pour it into a little ingot. So having said that this is a little bit more complex than just melting plaster gold but it’s still a lot of fun and it’s pretty cool in itself to be able to take silver ore; silver rock here just looks like a whole heck of a lot. Well it really doesn’t it show up very good in the camera, I don’t know if you can see this or not this is some really high grade silver sulphide ore but eventually I will teach you how to go through the process, crushing your ore, concentrating it on a little RP4 table or whatever, roasting it and then fluxing it with a little KK6. Add the flux to the roasted material and pouring an ingot out of it. So right now I’ll sign off here and once I get set up and get the furnace go on the side I’ll get back to you and you can watch the process smelted down.