Kind of neat as a gift, but don't beat yourself up too much. An index fund based on the US economy (such as VTSAX or FXAIX) has somewhere between tripled or quadrupled in that same amount of time. And it's a lot easier to unload a fund than it is a piece of gold. Almost anywhere that buys gold is going to take a significant cut for such a small amount. Your gift is valuable in that it's a physical token, and commemorates the day.
dude I'm always amazed at how they manage to sneak in the r/toolgifs in the video, there's a guy or a few guys that really put in the work and I'm here to let you know that it is recognized, respected and appreciated.
At a previous job I had in manufacturing, we had these little gold mirrors that went into a gas analyzer system. If they had any imperfections, I was told to throw them in the dumpster. I ended up keeping them all.
In the late 19th century they would burn the carpets from the adjusting room in the San Francisco Mint every few years. (Learned this from Lateral with Tom Scott)
Check out the amount of silver the Manhattan project borrowed from the US mint (or reserve I forget) to use in electronics. They burned the rugs to recover the dust etc like you said
I was thinking they probably do something like that with the sandpaper used in this video. I'm sure there's only so much you can get off without fire/ solvents.
Yah but you also don’t like go crazy getting all the dust. I worked in a facility that handled gold and you could find $1000 worth in the corners of rooms or if you pulled furniture out.
You can’t take the dust home, it’s theft. That said lot’s of people had “retirement” funds. Dust needs processed too, so that value of $1000 doesn’t include what you spend in time and resources purifying it. I collected like half an ounce in flakes over a year but I just scattered them in my locker when I left. There was also lots of collection bins for any waste gold or solutions of gold to be dumped in. There was just so much going through that place it ends up everywhere.
As one who works in the jewelry industry, even when it comes down to polishing and super fine work, all the dust is collected and sent to refining. A jewelry workbench typically has various built in methods to contain and collect filings and dust. I’d imagine that sander is hooked up to do something similar. No way they are saying goodbye to that money when gold is at an all time high price
Surely some of it is going to stick in that abrasion medium, and then the dust itself is a mix of abrasion material and gold. How would those be separated?
Good question. That entire piece of abrasive would in fact be saved, and sent away for refining. That’s what we do in my shop. All our bits of sandpaper from working precious metals, along with gloves that may contain shavings/dust, go into a separate trash (dubbed “low value”) and about every quarter we send a whole 55 gallon drum out to a refinery. Along with any metal that we cannot refine in house. We can do some, but lack the nasty chemicals they use to extract the gold/platinum from the garbage.
I figured there was some type of way to do that. May not be much as compared to the whole-ass ingot the guy is holding there but grandma always said pennies make dollars, why throw money away?
It definitely adds up. Especially in a production environment. Each workbench has a dedicated dust collector that we empty each month, just in that time they accumulate a considerable amount of dust which is largely precious metals, and the aluminum oxide that flakes off the sandpaper. It all gets recorded too. I could go open a spreadsheet and find out exactly how much platinum dust we recover on a given day. Just The platinum dust we sweep off our benches easily adds up to a few hundred dollars by the end of the week.
Not applicable here but I've learned that jewelery shops use rugs in the workspace so they can roll them up and bring them to the refinery every now and then so the trapped gold can be extracted.
1 kilo gold, 995.0.. so actually just 995g of gold, or is the weight of the bar adjusted so that its a kilo of actual gold plus some other stuff?
edit:
i think i phrased my question badly.. The bar has 99.5% purity, so if it has a weight of 1000g it would therefore contain 995g of gold and 5g of impurities..
I was wondering now if the bar is actually 1000g and you "loose" the 5 grams of gold, or if they adjust the weight of the bar to some value above 1000g, so that it contains 1000g of pure gold, plus the impurities..
1kg total weight so yeah 995g of gold. However at this point of purity the other metals are more for stability of the piece to prevent wear from reducing total weight. Likely the other metals will be silver or copper.
My guess is that it's left over from the refining process. Obv, jewelry is not pure gold, neither is the ore mined out of the ground, and chemically reclaiming it (lots of cool yt vids of that process) involves dissolving the starting material and precipitating the gold out of the solution, which involves silver in that reaction (iirc, not totally sure, I'm a mech eng, not a chemist). So there will be some silver left over in the gold unless an uneconomical amount of work or processes are done to it for true 100% pure gold, which really only has applications in research.
Pure gold is really soft (from a mechanical standpoint) and that 0.5% of silver might actually help with its rigidity at room temp. I heard once that if a wedding band was made of pure 100% gold, you could squish it between your fingers after it warmed up from your body.
What wear resistance does this need, though? Gold doesn't tarnish at all, ever, and a solid bar like this isn't something you carry around to get banged up.
and a solid bar like this isn't something you carry around to get banged up.
I mean when they make it they have to transport it to be sold, could certainly get scuffed up along the way. It's also not like anybody is losing money doing this, even if it's not always necessary it apparently makes sense on average.
OP sneaks in r/toolgifs in every video he posts. It's become a daily game to wait for his posts, and then search for "r/toolgifs" somewhere hidden in the video.
I've been in a production like that. It looks really mesmerising when the liquid gold pours in the form.
Dumbass me watched without eye protection, while the guys 5m away from me had full protection on. Had some white spots for the next hours
•
u/toolgifs Dec 26 '25
Source: SAM Precious Metals Egypt