I have been reading the thread on rolling mills and find them quite
interesting. Perhaps that is something I will pick up in the future
as far as texturing my metals. I see that many of you reuse your
metals and put them through the rolling mill. I am thinking that I
do not have the other equipment (besides the mill) to do this in my
studio without going though great expense. Am I correct? Do most of
you just turn in your metal scraps for more sheets or wire? Checking
with Rio Grande, they only give me 60% of its worth, so I have just
held onto it until I can think of something better to do with it.
You don’t say what your metal is but you should send it to a
refiner/producer like Hoover and Strong who will pay out all but
their refining charges (which are quite reasonable), or to a refiner
who should pay you at least 90 % of market.
2.Melt it in a crucible and throw it onto a flat surface, creating an
interesting splash
3." " " " " " " into a shallow can
of rock salt
4 " " " " " drop it into a deeper can of
water. Nice effects.
5 " " " " " drop it into a deep can
containing a bundle of wet broom straws or thick pine needles.
(broom casting) and wet the straw before unwrapping it to extract the
resulting silver pattern
melt it, pour it into an ingot mold, roll it out and re-use it. Dee
I re-use my scrap metal after I reconstitute them.Silver and gold are
basicly precleaned before I melt them down to proceed with cleaning a
proces of melting with some powder (mixture of glass,sucker,salt
etc…) and auropurifax.After the reconstitution of it,it’s again a
very ductile and plyable metal as it was before.I do not like to use
the word “refinning”,since in my understanding,this is not exactly
what I’m doing.For me,this is worth wile doing it by myself,because
the German refinning factory asked tomuch labor to do so.
Another reason for not dealing with the refinning proces is that here
in Germany,it’s very difficult to get a hold on chemicals like “royal
water” or nitric acid and others.To be totally honnest with you,I’ve
read about how to perform this refinning proces,but I know much to
less to deal with these chemicals.I know that fellow members of this
forum have the knowledge and skills to tell you more about it,but
since my limitation of this kind of knowledge,this is how far I can
go.
All You need is a charcoal block to melt your scrap into an ingot
that you can roll through the mill.
Of course you need a torch. I’m sorry, but it is not always that easy
to just remelt your scrap. A small amount of iron could be a nightmare
making your metal brittle and I don’t even speak of lead.Look what
iron can do to platinum just by heating it up while making contact
with it.What if you overheated your silver and creating copperoxides!
If you do not treat your scrap accordingly,then don’t wonder if you
have cracks and pits in your metal.You’re supposed to add 50% new
metal to your “CLEAN” scrap in order to re-use it without the use of a
cleaning proces.
If it was that easy,then refinning factory’s shouldn’t have thatmuch
to do and the pricing on labor would be dramaticly low giving them a
hard time to survive.
I take lots of precautions to keep my metal seperated,but it takes
time and work to come up with a nice reconstitute metal of the same
color and the same consistency.However,it’s worth while for me doing
it by myself instead of turning it in to a refinning factory.
Usually, we clean and melt our scrap and reuse it and we are very
careful about the way we work and how we clean our drawers and store
the scrap. To insure a proper karat value and a clean and workable
alloy, we never remelt scrap from a given stock more than 3 times. we
then send it to a refining company and get back with 999 pure gold. One
thing we do when remelting scrap, we add to the remelt an amount of
25 to 50 % in weight of new alloy (76% gold 24% silver & Copper) With
this 76% gold we insure a final alloy of no less than 75%.
All clean non processed material, cut offs from sheet, the bit’s of
wire I have no use for, go into jars marked by quality. None of it’s
been melted or soldered. I add this, at about 50%, to casting grain.
Dirty scrap, doubtful bits (was that a piece of solder or a piece of
18ct yellow?) filings, bench sweepings, already soldered, filings from
mixed metal jobs and rejected bits (like jump rings, settings from
scrap that I’m not sure are gold or silver and so forth) go into gold
or silver jars marked “Au mix” and “Ag mix.” These get sent on to the
refiner with different instructions. It’s a lot cheaper to have the
"Ag mix" sent in just for silver recovery but it’s a mistake to allow
too much gold to get mixed in with it.
Every so often I’ll send in the filters from the dust collectors, the
carpet and the slurry from the settlement tank in.