In this video, Jason teams up with Harry of @mineoperator to process a huge batch of gold-filled jewelry all the way down to refined gold and silver. What starts as buckets of de-ironed scrap turns into a long refining experiment using incineration, nitric acid boils, filtration, silver cementing, smelting, cornflaking, inquarting, XRF testing, and a lot of trial and error.
The goal was to remove copper, zinc, nickel, iron, tin, bismuth, solder, and other base metals while saving both the gold and the silver. Many refiners pay only for the gold in gold-filled material, but this experiment also focuses on recovering the silver that ends up dissolved in the nitric solution. Along the way, the team deals with slow filters, colloidal gold, unexpected karat gold, magnetic clasps, copper contamination, messy slag, and the important lesson that shortcuts do not always work.
The process starts with incinerating the jewelry to burn off oils, organic matter, and contamination before the acid work begins. From there, the gold fill goes through repeated nitric acid boils to dissolve the base metals and leave behind gold foils, karat gold pieces, and fine gold mud. The leftover blue nitrate solution is then treated with copper to cement out the silver, while the gold-bearing material is smelted, tested, reworked, and eventually inquarted with silver so the remaining base metals can be removed.
After multiple failed attempts, remelts, nitric boils, silver recovery steps, and XRF checks, the final gold sponge is melted into a clean button that tests at 99.7% pure gold. The recovered silver also comes out over 99% pure. When the finished metal is returned to RB at Bellingham Coin Shop, the final result is a major surprise: more than 46 grams of high-purity gold plus a separate silver button from 1,092 grams of gold-filled jewelry and related scrap.
This is a real-world gold fill refining experiment showing what worked, what failed, and what it takes to turn difficult scrap jewelry into precious metal. It is not a perfect lab demonstration — it is a hands-on look at wet chemistry, furnace work, mistakes, recovery methods, and the surprising value that can be hiding in ordinary-looking gold-filled jewelry.
Music used in this video:
MAY THE BRIDGES I BURN LIGHT THE WAY by Soularflare – released under CC-BY 4.0. https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soularflare/. Adapted to fit video length.
Check out Bellingham Coin Shop at https://bellinghamcoinshop.com/ and on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@bellinghamcoinshop7193
Thanks to @sreetips! videos at: https://www.youtube.com/@mineoperator
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