Let's Talk Smelting--Heat Source Equipment, Furnaces? Torches? Backyard Foundry? Options

[CP]

Another topic suggested for discussions.
Questions and answers.......Let's hear it everyone. ^_^

CP

[gold_tutor]

Hi, EMac, I'm not in a position to hold in person instructional set. However, I can still answer questions.

The small, Microwave furnace technique taught by Dr. John Milewski is a gooder. Bought my cheap microwave at a local department store...Fred Meyers. Set me back a $50 bill. And then the fire brick are extra, so are the tongs, gloves, crucibles, mold's etc.

There are also pretty cute small round furnaces powered by one or two MAPP gas torches, which hold potential for you to consider. The drawback on these is that you can only use a small, dense, carbide crucible in this unit. That's a limitation I don't like. Some smelts require the smelt to "borrow" silica from the commercially manufactured fire-clay crucibles. The metallic carbide ones don't have any silica in them, so there's nothing to borrow, and that contributes to smelt failures right and left.

And I still think the brick and angle Iron model I posted, or at least think I posted up above, work really really well. They and the Microwave furnace will both use standard clay crucibles. And for the record, I prefer to buy my clay crucibles from the good folks in Sandy OR, aka Action Mining. She and Mike go through hundreds of these per year themselves, and have learned which ones are the best buy, and ship them in in quantity. Nancy prefers Australian Sheepbone sourced crucibles, and I just don't buy mine anywhere else. I can get an average of 3 separate smelts per crucible because my fluxes are balanced and don't make "bad"rings inside the crucible (ringing) which weaken the walls of the crucibles, making you discard them after each smelt instead of getting the more normal multiple smelts per crucible, which keeps the costs down for the hobbyist.


Then too, there is the well-known, highly respected Charles Butler Torch scorification technique which is well documented and quite "learnable." No crucibles at all...just his method, the torch he recommends, and some scorifying dishes and the tool to hold one while you are working. Pretty straight forward.

Of course, everything depends upon amounts you are working with in your smelt batches.

As far as Fluxing goes? I wouldn't use the Chapman flux if you paid me. Adding another metal as a contaminent to the fluxing ingredients just doesn't make sense to me. And Chapman's has such a metallic flux ingredient. YIKES. In fact, there have been so very many screw ups and majorly disappointed home smelters who have used Chapman's, that I created a special flux charge just to UNDO their mess ups, using Chapman's totally imbalanced flux "recipe."

I'm kinda handicapped right now as far as doing any smelting at all, even for myself, which is why I've got time to answer questions if I can. I can still smelt in the much smaller more portable units like I described above, but my larger, multi-crucible unit is out of reach at the moment.. You see, we had 44" of snow...all at once in the lower Treasure Valley of Eastern Oregon into SW Idaho since Dec 5th this year. The snow has melted, but now I have a collapsed roof to repair and can't even get into my outbuilding yet as the doorway is blocked. So, that's going to take some re-do to do it, it's so soggy and dangerous, so there's that.

Let me know if I can help. I'll swing back by and see if you've replied. If I can, I'll try to keep you out of trouble.

Oh, and yes, I do have a 4 fluxes sample kit with Teaching CD available (Windows Op Sys only.) Full color, step by step How-To and Why with my own photos. The fluxes are available in quantity after initial purchase of the teaching kit, and hand packaged by yours truly. It can be found on my website. It's been so long since I was here on this forum, I don't know what the current rules are for mentioning how to locate that specific information, and would hope Dan or Denise or one of the other moderators would let me know what's approved and what isn't before I go and break some rules with link or anything about the fluxing and smelting how-to for gold smelting in particular.

The 4 fluxes I can generally tell you about do the following:
1) Mixed together gold/mags/and non mags black sand smelt flux
2) Mixed together gold and magnetics combined blacksand smelt flux
3) Standard Assay Smelt Flux
4) The fix the screwed up results from either not following my directions, or using imbalanced fluxes like Chapman's mentioned above. (Can get 2 fixs per sample bag of this #4 flux)

Hope this helps.