Can’t get a lot past you can I, John Burgess? I defer to your
memory which is obviously sharper than mine- Ferrous it is, not
Ferric as I posted. FeSO4,no? Ferric would be Fe2SO4, right? It
has been awhile since I used this procedure, these days we’re
using mostly the salt/cyanide type of setups for refining. What
with the price of gold, it is better not to lose any at all if
you can help it and certainly not to some refiner. Too hard to
tell if you’re getting a straight shake from them in my opinion,
although there are some honest ones around. I would compute the
amounts involved and add pure gold to bring the content up to
something I could use and forget the refiners. I used to solder
gold to silver day in, day out. The trick is to heat the silver
and keep the flame off of the gold which retains heat and heats
faster than silver and also always when soldering some other
metal to silver- use silver solder, no matter what the other
metal is and you shouldn’t go wrong. We had this problem a
couple of years back making the nautical cable bracelets with
gold ends. Stainless steel cable wouldn’t solder with gold
solder, we used silver and with wonderful results. By the way,
have you seen the black flux over in NZ? It’s for higher heat
soldering, like for stainless which will burn the white borax
type fluxes causing the solder not to run but to ball up instead
like if you don’t have enough heat. One keeps heating and it gets
worse. The flux turns to a glass and it is useless at this point
and generally has to be scraped off as it is even impervious to
pickle for the most part. This black flux solves this problem as
it can withstand the higher temperatures of brazing stainless
which retains heat and heats more rapidly than most non ferrous
metals. When you see stainless start to turn red, your borax flux
is burnt and silver solder will never stick to it. I sometimes
use it for silver also, which will do the same thing to the borax
fluxes if heated too much- it works great and comes off with
steam or water instead of having to pickle to get it off. It is
sold at welding suppliers here in the States. I have found no
jewelry suppliers who have it. Yes, I remember Bunker Hunt, et
al. Those where the days, $40.00/oz silver and $700.00/ oz gold!
Sure made it hard for the working jeweler to work. God help us
that that doesn’t come around again! Can’t figure those Hunts out
sometimes. H.L. Hunt made a fortune in oil in Texas and
immediately sunk millions into land and mineral rights, oil
leases, etc. Mostly bought the land outright. My in-laws bought
some land from him in the late 1970’s- they found gas on it last
year! Guess they missed on that one also. Makes you wonder what
else they missed. :~) Cheers-