Thread: Phil Coggan
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Old 04-03-2009, 04:37 PM
jjdon jjdon is offline
Steel
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 21
Default Re: Phil Coggan

I'll add first that Phil's work is incredible!!

As far as "refining" gold, I could elaborate on that. I suspect that Phil doesn't really want to refine gold at all, he wants to do custom alloys and the like (I suspect). Refining is recovering gold from ore, scrap or sweeps - I don't do that either. What I do is recycle my gold and alloy my own, which is easy. I work over a clean newspaper and save every little bit and clean up between each change in metal. Then I just melt it down and re-use it - I keep it meticulously clean and run a magnet through it every time. Here: http://www.artjewelrymag.com/ART/Def...px?c=a&id=1036 is a handy calculator for how much metal to use for alloying up or down (it does NOT matter if it's white or yellow, like they say). That's easy, too.
All that is easy, though it's expensive to experiment with gold alloys. The hard part is what to do next - you have a lump of gold and you need sheet, wire or what-have-you. In a real shop that would mean a rolling mill and drawplates (and a knowlege of those and annealing, too). The old fashioned way is hammer, anvil and elbow grease. I've done that, it's not so bad once or twice. You can get a gold coin and melt it with copper, which gives you a lump of rose or red gold. The thing is, what do you do with that? If one has a shop like that, it's easy, if one doesn't it's not so simple.
Again, great work and great thread, too.
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