[Jewelry making - Article 00374] - Re: [Orchid] Recycling Polish Dust...Take 2

[Peter W . Rowe]

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>     but when we sent them our polish dust, they refused to process it
>     as is. Thus my conundrum! Any other ideas? 

    I would expect someone at that refiner would be able to tell you
    what sort of preprocessing they might need.  One common initial step
    is to burn away the organic material.  This can be done in a burnout
    type kiln, though it's perhaps better to reserve one especially for
    that.  At the most basic level, one can do this just in a frypan, if
    you can heat it enough to burn off the organic matter such as the wax
    and grease binders in the polishing dust.  Kinda messy and smokey to
    do, though. 

    I'd suggest getting a copy of Hoke's "refining precious metal
    wastes", for proper descriptions of how to do this sort of thing most
    efficiently. 

    The next step, after burning off the organics, if I remember it
    right, is to mix the result with refining fluxes, in a graphite
    crucible, put it in a melting furnace, and let it go.  the mass
    melts, the metal eventually collects at the bottom,  you pour it into
    an ingot mold, and send the ingot to the refiners. but the details of
    that flux mix, and the rest of it, I don't recall...  I tried it
    once, about 25 years ago.  Whatta mess.  I suspect I wasn't doing it
    correctly... 

cheers
Peter


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