So a stainless steel bowl might work? Gold cell

Why not using a high purity gold cathode. Less Titanium contamination. Or even using a gold bowl, needs maybe 1kg of Gold, depending the size. Doesn't have to look pretty, just thight and stable. Casting or asking your goldsmith friends👍🏻

Wear that baby asa necklace. 🎉

I think having the anode closer to the cathode would speed it up

Same to you, thank you!

All good suggestions. Especially titanium sleeve with anode in the center. I believe that the excessive distance between anode and cathode in my experiment slowed the process considerably.

Good point

Yes, and the physical motion might slightly inhibit the rate of plating as well. I'd love to see an empirical comparison of the yield rate with stirring vs no stirring.

Thank you!

The book is a little dated. It says you can use a fan by the window to handle the fumes but thus just won’t due. Also says to flush the drain with plenty of water to protect the pipes.

It's what plants need

Maybe a stainless steel anvil would be better to forge Gold to keep it cleaner.

Strongly agree

Where?

Yes where?

​@@JoelHirtleI got two hits right away by a simple online search. One at big _A_ (not going to name it) for just over $50, and there is an American company that supplies mining products, which has the softback for $25. Legend.

eBay

eBay

Thank you!

The anode must be fairly high purity to begin with. But I may inquart some karat gold, part with nitric, then melt the recovered inquarted gold into an anode (should be about 990 parts per thousand). Then use that as the anode in the gold cell.

I added numerous doses of hydrochloric acid to the cell to keep it hydrated. HCl improves conductivity

Working with gold and silver has changed our lives for sure. And for that, I’m grateful!

Excellent, thank you

That’s a good idea. I may follow through with that.

Will do Arne, God bless you and your family.

Thank you Sir 🌺🔥

The real challenge is finding the material for refining. My wife is a yard-sale fanatic. She finds most of the metals for me to refine. Without her I’d be punching in at Home Depot for work this morning. Instead I’m working on a new and interesting video for my KZfaq channel. All because or her. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me!

Right now, the masses are still clueless about gold. Their faith in paper remains high despite the fact that paper is collapsing in value. Very few understand that hoarding stacks of paper is foolish (insanity). Holding savings in gold (and silver) is for the wise. But this is slowly changing. We used to find hand fulls of scrap gold every weekend just ten years ago. But it’s getting harder to find as folks begin to wake up to the scam of the money printers. You can’t measure anything’s true value in paper dollars because they can, and do, print “without limit”. Therefore, measuring value in dollars is insanity. It all boils down to this: money printing is insanity. The only way to protect your savings is to hold savings in real money, gold and silver.

The reason I use titanium for the cathode is because it doesn’t react with the gold chloride electrolyte.

That would be awesome. Only problem is; somebody would find a way to counterfeit it. My best shot at authenticity is to publish a video of the gold. The pour lines and features on each piece is like a finger print that can’t be duplicated.

Gold became money by default. Nobody voted or got together and said let’s make gold and silver money. It just happened thousands of years ago. And it’s still money today, that hasn’t changed. Just think of it this way: long after Amazon, Apple, bitcoin, and the dollar are gone and forgotten, gold and silver will still be here. And they will still be valuable

@@sreetips I’ve never heard something so true. lol

Yes, that could present a problem.

This is my hobby. I don’t know if I’d want to do it for a living.

There is no frequency in the electricity, it is DC.

I plan on doing another using different anode material. Maybe a can get a closeup of it then.

@@sreetips That would be great! Thank you for sharing your hobby with us. Your videos are always a joy to watch.

The sole purpose of the electrolyte is to enable the gold ions to travel from the anode to the cathode. But some of the gold from the electrolyte does get deposited as sort of collateral damage.

Yes!

Nothing inherently wrong with those bars, they were just needed for this video, which resulted in higher purity gold (at least .9999 instead of .999).

​@@apveening is 4 9s fine worth more than 3 9s fine?

@@bigpoppa4005 Marginally.

He was mostly doing it for the show.

Three nines is industry standard. The fourth nines is totally unnecessary unless needed for some specific purpose.

I’ll try another refining soon with a different anode bar and revised configuration

I like it too

Insoluble impurities fall to the bottom of the cell. Soluble purities won’t deposit and get left in the electrolyte.

It was offered on gesswein.com, a jewelry supply site, for about $65. But after I recommended the book in one of my videos, and were to get it (gesswein.com), they sold out and it’s no longer available there.

Well, yes. The gold from the anode goes into solution. Gold from the solution is deposited onto the cathode.

Most of the gold comes from the 10 ounce anode bar as it dissolves from the current flow. But some of the gold from the 90.2g in the electrolyte will get deposited on the cathode. The gold in the electrolyte becomes slowly depleted as the cell operates.

@@sreetips I'm curious about that. Theoretically (in my mind) it should be a one-for-one molecular exchange and no depletion of the solution should occur. Your yield recovery mass of the chloroauric should be exactly what you dissolved into it initially - hopefully we will see in Part 3.

The gold in the electrolyte, and the gold coming off the anode are identical. The cathode can’t discriminate which is which. So invariably, some of the gold from the solution will get deposited as the cell operates. Sort of like collateral damage. I’d guess that about 20 grams of gold on that cathode came from the electrolyte.

@@sreetips But in theory at least every electron coming off the anode knocks loose one atom of gold into solution, while one atom of gold is plated onto the cathode from solution. I don't doubt that there are losses but I would expect them to be negligible, in the sub-gram range. Very interested to see what you recover when you precipitate out the solution, and how the final mass balances between the anode, cathode, and solution.

I toss em

I don’t think it would be very satisfying. SloMo is best for real high speed stuff like bullets.

No

I have in the past.

Cleanly but with difficulty 😅 check his previous gold-elctrolysis video 😊

@@olsim1730 He could pop it off instantly by reversing the electrode polarities. I'm looking forward to seeing Part 3.

Thank you!

Cathode 😊

@@olsim1730 lolol yeah I seen it after I posted lolol missed a few letters

Yes, boiling nitric will put a little gold in solution. But it’s usually just a trace and not worth trying to recover. If there’s gold in solution with silver then I just cement it out on copper with the silver. Melt the cement silver (with the small amount of gold in it) and run it through my silver cell. In the cell, the gold will get trapped in the anode filter because it’s insoluble. Then I recover the gold when I process the anode filters for the precious metals that they contain.

Metals have a crystalline structure, and I assume gold is no different. Cooling it quickly produces smaller crystals, and doing it slowly would produce larger. Would love a close-up of the surface.

Imagine a zillion invisible gnomes, each of which has a spoon that can pick exactly one atom of gold off the bar and send it into the solution. And that's what all 1 zillion of them doing, over and over again at random, repeating the "scoop an atom from a random spot" operation at a rate that boggles the mind. Since it's random, there's no telling (other than the generalization "it'll be one that's directly in contact with the electrolyte") where the next atom might be grabbed from. As more and more atoms get grabbed from random places, it will eventually average out to "everyplace has been hit" if run long enough, but while it's running, there's no telling what the surface texture is at any given moment, but it's *HIGHLY* unlikely that "smooth" (which is required for "shiny") would be an accurate description. Presto - There's your textured surface. To have it be smooth would require atoms to be plucked out in an orderly fashion to preserve the smoothness.

@@Ferd414 Oh,.... you mean turbulence. Interesting theory.

I’ll try using a small microscope on it in part three.