Found Dreaming

Electric Furnace

Used half of the element from a space heater. Plugged it into the wall... It gets REAL HOT.

I've not done a melt yet as I have only one tiny crucible and I'm going to use that for gold only.

Electric furnaces are a little spooky to me. Where is the element? Buried in the cement?

Wish I had enough gold to be saving a crucible for... my kind of problems

yeah, you can see it poking out in one spot on the left.

It's spooky to me too It gets SPOOKY hot...

Get paper anywhere near the opening and it goes up!

The gold is from old circuit boards. Maybe got a few grams by now. Tiny crucible

Hey GT,
Lookin' good, a couple of us rigged a "burnout oven" using secondhand heating coils and fire bricks with a sheet metal surround to hold it all togeather. It had two different coils each with it's own plug. When we tried it out using one coil,it seemed to be taking too long soooooo we plugged in the second coil and waited a respectable length of time (actually we could hear things popping and streching) and unplugged them. Upon opening found not only the wax melted but the mold container( which was a short length of new exhaust pipe) and the investment was all over the insides,LOL. Leson learned NEVER test with a actual pattern (who knew?). Never tried melting gold (can't melt what ya ain't got)but did plenty of silver 'cause was working in a photo studio at the time and we reclaimed silver from our hypo solutions (some of which found itself becoming finger rings which made the wives happy).
Good luck with that Little beauty.
Don/BP

Looking good
What type of old circuit boards have gold on them? I hve a lot of old computers, and can get a lot more..... am I on the right track.

Most circuit boards have a little, and I mean little bit of gold on them. The older they get, the more gold. Or, the closer to military spec they get, the more gold.

So police radios, expensive communication equipment that is more than 5 years old.

As far as easy to get, anything with a lot of connections... picture yourself cutting off all the little pins that are inside of an AGP slot... it's not glamorous.

Modems and cell phones are good... ISA cards are good, you just cut off the fingers of the connection part.

Some boards have actual gold foil instead of copper... you have to use some hot (not boiling) lye water to strip the green coating off, then it's super shiny gold! about .00001 thick or something...

Then you dissolve them and then you filter, then dissolve some more and filter some more... then you take the stuff in the filter and guess what... dissolve it

Then you do some more filtering and dissolving believe it or not.

I'll let you know how the melt goes should be within a couple days now.

It sounds like a lot of work for a little, but with the price of gold it only takes a little to make a lot.

bingo :\

and it's not like dissolving takes much effort :p nor filtering, but it's not open a computer and chip off the gold with a pic and melt it down

And the last dissolve step is for purification... to get to .9995

so after all the man hours of clipping crushing collecting and filtering and dissolving, cost of equipment, and chemicals do you figure your wages are per hour

We'll see after this melt... but the thing is.. the price of gold went up today... a lot... it will go up most days from now on...