Making a Small Ignot

Making a Small Ingot

   Generally, when you think of the term ingot, you might think of a reasonably sized, nicely made rectilinear solid, of some kind of metal.  The following is the process of making a small ingot of gold from some scrap earrings and such that I was given by a customer.  In this instance, the customer(that would be Ms. Shelton) had a couple of rings that needed to go up about 2 sizes.  In order to save money, I often ask the client to bring some jewelry they don't wear anymore or, as is often the case, an earring that has lost its mate. In the following I'm using gold but you can do silver and other metals.  If you want to do silver, it's not a bad idea to add some refined casting grain. Silver has a tendency to get slightly porous and harder to work if it's heated a lot, so adding a bit of pure silver is a good idea.

Generally, the process is:

1.  Cut up your scrap metal into small pieces.

2.  Cut a shape(it can be any shape) into some sort of refractory material or charcoal.

3.  Put the cut up scrap into the shape you cut out of the refractory material or charcoal.

4.  Sprinkle some liquid or dry flux onto the scrap metal.

5.  Heat it up with a torch.

6. Just as the metal starts to melt and flow you carefully set something  dry, and non burnable on top of the melted metal.  You have to be 'kinda careful here.  If you leave the torch on too long it will just puddle into a small ball. You also don't want to slam something down on the melted metal hard enough to break the mold or force hot liquid metal all over the place. 

7. Put the small shape/ingot into the pickle for 5 minutes or so, to clean up the crud.

8. Then, depending upon your application, you pound, hammer, carve, put in rolling mill, or other wise cajole the piece of metal into the shape you want!

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   As I mentioned above, in this instance, a customer gave me some scrap gold, consisting of earrings,. One missing it's mate and the others were broken and the customer did not want to wear them anymore.

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   Here, I'm cutting up the earrings into small bits.  It's a pretty crude process.  Just chop/twist them up into small pieces so as to make the melting a bit easier.

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   Here's a picture of the dismembered and chopped apart earrings.   It's 'kinda nice gold(and other metals) can be melted down and recycled so easy.  I read some where most of the gold we actually use/wear is melted down scrap.

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   Here I'm using a screwdriver to carve a small rectangle into a block of charcoal. The ruler is just to keep the line somewhat straight. I'm using charcoal because it wants to burn which makes the oxygen in the air go into the charcoal as opposed to the metal I'm trying to melt, which keeps the metal less porous, more pure and ultimately, easier to work. I'm creating, in a crude way, a reducing atmosphere. 

   You can carve any shape. A good way of using up scrap is to carve a ring blank and then when your done just bend it around your ring mandrel and solder it up. It's makes a relatively crude casting, but very usable as long as you keep the limitations of the process in mind.

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   Here is a picture of the completed slot that I'm going to melt metal into.  It's a certain shape, size, and thickness because I'm making this particular tiny ingot  into a piece of sheet metal to add to a ring to increase it's size.  The ring I'm needing a piece for is somewhat rectangular in this instance, but if you need a more 1/2 round shape or any other kind of shape, you can certainly scrape that shape in also.

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   Here you can see the crudely cut up and mangled  scrap  laying in the slot I cut in the charcoal.  Add some flux and your ready to go. 

   In the pictures above  I'm using a plain, acetylene only, torch in this example, but you could use any kind of torch, as long as it generates enough heat for melting.  Before I use the torch I put some flux on the scrap. You can use either liquid or powdered, whatever you have handy.  I've heard the liquid flux will last a bit longer in the flame, but I don't know, both seem to work fine.

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   OK, what you didn't see.  As the metal melts, it wants to pool into a small blob/ball.  This is less than useful for my purposes here.  Remember, I'm trying, in this instance, to make an certain,approximate shape, in order to have a small piece of usable metal to size a ring. So what you have to do is, just as the metal melts, and before the metal pools up, I gently, but forcibly, set/press another piece of charcoal(or some other refractory material) onto the molten metal.  Not hard enough to break the mold and scatter molten metal, just enough to flatten the molten metal into the mold.  This would be hard to do and take pictures at the same time, hence, no picture of this exciting moment.  Here you can see me picking up the hot little piece of metal from the charcoal block.

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Here I'm just putting the little bit of freshly made metal into the pickle for a few minutes to clean it up.

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A picture of the piece of metal. It's pretty small.

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   Here I'm tapping/hammering the small blank to render it a little more flattened.  If I was going to reduce it a lot in thickness, I'd have to anneal it. I think I did.

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  Here, I'm passing the small bit of metal through a rolling mill in order to reduce it's thickness some more.  You don't necessarily have to use a rolling mill, you could just hammer it into shape.  But I have a rolling mill, so it'd  be crazy not to use it. It's fun tool.

   The next thing is to look at the post concerning sizing a ring and see how this little bit of metal get utilized in order to increase the size/diameter of a ring. 

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