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Gold/Mining/Energy : A New Age In Gold Refining -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Matt C. Austin who wrote (627)	2/16/1998 11:16:00 PM
From: Michael J. Wendell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 672

Hi Matt, The process using stannic or tin oxide is probably special to certain areas of the world only. Tin is rather rare in most of the US. There is tin in the north eastern provinces of Canada and other areas of the world. Tin is an excellent collector of precious metals. It was always, at least in my time, considered to be a real assay problem in that gold does not separate easily from tin. The geological survey in Canada did a lot of work on tin / gold assays at one time. They were quite complicated. I have one of the papers on the subject around somewhere. I have used tin as a collector instead of lead at times, but can't say that it is an improvement over good assay procedures with lead. The old metallurgy was quite remarkable. They used urea, distilled wood alcohol to pretreat ores, sheep skins loaded with mercury, salt roasts (the patio process)followed by amalgamation. Some periods of history the gold was contaminated with platinum, thus the old bite the metal to see if it is soft. Don't want too much platinum in your gold, you know. mike mike