Re: Phil Coggan
Hello Phil,
Refining gold involve's a lot of chemicals with cianide as most lethal one.
I do know a goldsmith how refine's his own filings and scrap metal but he get's a lot of filing and buy's scrap gold. So every tme whenn he has about a kilo or more he spends three day'w refining it. It is a poisonous event I prefer to leave to specialist's. I believe there are some movie's on Utube on the subject.
Making the alloys is easyer. Oppi Untracht's book on concept's and technologie has a lot of different recipie's for coloured alloy's.
Pure gold and the standard coulour's we can get here in Holland but green gold (14 or 18kt is gold with only silver as mix metal giving the yellow gold a greenish heu) we have to make ourselve's.
White gold can be a bit tricky because when done wrong you wil end up with a very brittle unworkable piece of metal.
My employer is a bit of a Scrooge and he has me alloying gold coins down to 18kt yellow. So their's an option to.
But even though it's fun to do it take's some experience and doing it regularly for good result's. (but that count's for everything)
Allso best done in somewhat larger quantity's. I prefer 30 to 100 gram's when using an open flame. The smaller the weight the better your scale's have to be and harder to remake the exact same colour.
Hope this help's a bit.
Daniel
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