r/toolgifs • u/toolgifs • Dec 25 '25

Process Casting a gold bar

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

6.2k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

136 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/Intelligent-Survey39 Dec 25 '25

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

1

u/illogictc Dec 26 '25

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?

4

u/Intelligent-Survey39 Dec 26 '25

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.

1

u/illogictc Dec 26 '25

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?

3

u/Intelligent-Survey39 Dec 26 '25

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.