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what I have here is borax regular household borax
I bought it from ebay, but you can get it in
a local hardware store. then I have here some quartz
rock that I washed it's nice and clean
I washed it in boiling HCL. here's the gold;
I still have some water in there makes it easier to get out.
Then I have spectracide stump remover that's an easy source of
potassium nitrate. so that's gonna be a flux
use just a tiny little bit of it to be an oxidizer
then when all of this stuff is melting, if there are any base metals that are still
left it will help
make an oxide out of them and they will absorb into the glass, the borax
and quartz glass Ok, I'm going to put the gold into my graphite
crucible. It's tiny, but there's very little gold
so i won't need much space. Although, I am worried about it overflowing
so i will contain it within this larger crucible
I'm worried because the borax and stuff tends to foam up.
I'm going to put it down in there like that. I will start with my quartz.
I probably won't even use all that. I'm going to get a scoop of the borax,
and then the gold I'm just going to take my crucible back out
of here for now. Oh, I almost forgot,
the potassium nitrate... just a little bit of that.
now we scoop the gold out of here I have the water in there, makes it easier
for me to get the gold out. I scoop it out wet.
That helps it stick to the inside of the crucible and it's less likely to blow out that way
my flux and stuff Ok, I'm definitely not going to be able to
do this holding the camera, but you get the idea, the gold goes from the
pot to the crucible I'm just adding a few pinches
of this stuff my flux stuff
water and all water actually helps absorb microwaves
at the beginning. From what I understand, it's a long haul from
the time the water is gone until the glass is like red hot.
because it's hard to absorb microwaves. Alright, so this is all loaded up.
These are just some insulating panels of very light material that will not absorb too
many microwaves I've also cut as much of that away as i possibly
can There's a nice little seat down there for
my crucible. The lid goes on top.
now some people... that's what it looks like on the outside
some people will modify the microwave ovens with extra vents
i will try to get past the heat problem, over-heating the microwave by uh...
switching from one microwave to the other and then letting one cool...
between. ...and that folks,
and this is how you make gold. You be careful,
because you don't want to be rich too much work.
I'm going to put it in for thirty three minutes.
So, how long did we set the first one for? ummmm, three minutes
thirty minutes thirty minutes
and we'll probably check it in about ten And this one we only set for fifteen, because
as it heats up and gets hotter, we'll have to swap them more rapidly.