Today I will tell you and show you the whole production process, which starts with mining and finding gold seeds, followed by melting and processing to the final polishing and shaping into gold bars or coins.
Unfortunately, 99% of the Earth’s gold is in its core. So we need to try to get as much gold as possible from the land around us. The process is not that difficult, but it does require a furnace capable of reaching temperatures of around 1,200 degrees Celsius which is around 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
For gold to be liquid, it must be at a temperature of 1200 degrees. You’ve got nitrogen and borax in there to keep the impurities out, but the sand and soda ash is to keep the heat in so you don’t suddenly turn off the flame and it suddenly gets cold, it keeps the heat in and helps with the pouring, keeps it liquid.
Once everything is ready to be poured, you can now see the gold flowing and there are no solids.
In this activity it is necessary to be prudent and the worker must have great experience to know how to work with molten gold properly. This casting process can easily go wrong.
A sample is now taken using the vaccum tube. This is 3 grams, which will be sent to the laboratory and the next day the staff will know how high the purity is.
Last year, China produced the most gold in tonnes, followed by Russia in second place, Australia in third place and the United States as the fourth largest gold producer.
This gold brick is almost cooled and can now be worked and polished. To cool it down, it is simply placed in clean cold water.
The heaviest ever gold bar weighs 250 kilograms and was cast by the Japanese company Mitsubishi Materials Corporation in 2005. Even such a heavy brick, by the way, does not have monstrous dimensions. All dimensions are only a few tens of centimetres.
The gold brick starts to harden relatively quickly, after about 30 seconds it is quite stiff.
Feel free to let me know in the comments section what you guess this brick is worth.
In this case, this gold factory is trying to achieve 95 percent purity. They do this by using reagents, so they add sand, borax, sodium carbonate and nitrate. Together, these substances retain heat, maintain fluidity and remove impurities. That’s why from the top there’s that black slag around the gold brick you see right now. That black is obsidian and it is desirable to remove it to achieve purer gold.
One of will put it in the water bath but it only need a few minutes to cool down, right down so that you can touch it. And then we’ll pick it out and give it a good clean.
We’re quite lucky, most of the bars we do are quite clean. Some of them, if they’re doing low grade through the plant they look a bit ugly and look hard to clean and they’re all quite black.
They’re still 95% but they don’t look so pretty. For any sharp edges, that’s to get rid of that and then you would have seen a few little balls of gold, so it’s just to make sure thay don’t fall off in transit, or get lost on the floor, whatever so we bang them down flat.
Very soft, so we make a bit of a plane put the number on it and that’s basically a recording. That is how many bars we’ve made since 1990.
First of all, Gold is not produced. In fact, it’s only purified.
Gold does not come from the Earth, but from space, specifically from the stars. There are two main ways of extracting gold, namely from underground mines or open-pit mines. The open pit mines that you are looking at right now are usually in Africa.
This relatively simple machine is able to filter gold grains directly from the soil. But you have to have the right soil, and there are very few deposits around the world.
This is what a huge underground gold mine in Canada looks like. The deeper you go, the more gold veins you can find. Special drills work in deep underground tunnels and advanced technology is used to find gold ore here.
This soil or stones contain small parts of gold ore. Once it is mined, the extraction process begins and chemical processes and filtration produce almost pure gold.
Employees here use water cooling when drilling into the rock so that there is not too much dust in the air to breathe. Remote-controlled machines are very often used here and great emphasis is placed on the protection of the miners.
Now complex chemistry begins.
Although this mined rock contains a very low percentage of gold, it is so abundant that the entire mining process is easily worthwhile. These are almost microscopic particles of gold.
Typically every ton of ore produces less than 10 grams of gold.
Extracting gold begins with crushing and milling the ore. At this mine that’s done in these huge drums. The rock is crushed to a fine sand and mixed with water to form a slurry. This is pretty complex chemistry.
It’s pumped to huge tanks for the next stage that’s the heart of the gold extraction process. Small amounts of cyanide are carefully
Although gold is indestructible and difficult to obtain, it is also extremely malleable. Its high density makes it a metal that is easy to store and transport. All these properties make it a unique and highly desirable investment product.
Finally the dried gold cake goes into the furnace to be smelted into the pure metal. Inside a chemical flux is added to help separate the gold.
Because molten gold is the heaviest element, it sinks to the bottom, so when the precious liquid is poured out, the gold is the last to go.
This means that the gold is effectively separated, and the rest is just slag.
Employees in the factory who work with the gold bricks must wear a thick protective suit. The molten gold has high temperatures for many tens of minutes after it cools.
A cast gold bar is created by melting the gold, removing the impurities and then pouring it in liquid form into the desired mould. Embossed gold bars are more technologically demanding because their manufacturer invests more in their appearance. A conventional cast bar is usually pressed by machine and then cut to the required size.
Vědci tvrdí, že zlato nepochází ze Země, ale z kosmu, konkrétně z hvězd. Asi 200 milionů let po vzniku Země byl její povrch údajně intenzivně bombardován meteory s vysokým obsahem zlata a dalších drahých kovů. V té době už zemská kůra nebyla roztavená, tudíž meteority se na povrchu planety usadily.
But why isn’t pure gold 100% pure? The answer lies in the specific nature of the gold industry. It is virtually impossible to eliminate 100% of all additional elements that gold may be exposed to during processing.
Oxidation. Where ever the metal touches the air it instantly and it’s no longer pure because the .0001% that constitutes the surface is now oxidized. The other reason is that it is nearly impossible to remove absolutely 100% of all impurities from any metal.
Now the gold brick will be cleaned. The process of making a beautiful gold brick into its final form is a long one. The gold bar will be cut and polished many times over and over again.
The surface must be beautifully flat and shiny. Of course, it very much depends on the particular gold bar. Every gold bar you can buy comes with certificates and the purity value of the gold should be correctly stamped on the gold bar.
The purity of gold is marked in carats. You can tell by the numbers 585 and 750. The higher the number, the higher the proportion of gold in the alloy.
I hope that you have already had the chance to hold such a golden brick in your own hands.
In terms of properties, gold is a very heavy metal, almost three times heavier than iron, with a specific gravity of 19 grams per cubic centimetre, which is favourable for gravity-based mining technologies.
Finished gold bars usually have a huge value and it is common for a company to purchase them and further melt the gold and process it into smaller castings which are then sold to end customers.
In this case, fraudsters very often enter the production process. They dilute this pure gold and sell it fraudulently at a higher value than it should be. So beware.
But of course, this is not the case with this luxury Turkish company. As you can see for yourself, the production is completely professional and the resulting gold is ideal to buy as investment gold.
The rolling machine produces thin gold foil in several processes. This gold foil ribbon is machine cut into regular squares and placed between the separating sheets.
Although much has changed since the Middle Ages in the modern production of gold leaf, the basic principle has remained the same. The laws of physics cannot be changed and the special elasticity of gold can only be achieved by following certain rules. The old recipes for the various alloys are a well-kept secret. The alloying ingredients are mainly gold, silver, copper, palladium and platinum.
Most of the gold is extracted from porphyry and Carlin deposits by large-scale open pit mining. Smaller quantities are obtained by underground mining of gold-bearing veins. Some gold is also extracted by panning from sediments. In Australia, gold is recovered by dry panning, with larger nuggets often traced by metal detectors.
Gold doesn’t have to be just yellow, there are many different alloys. For example, the purple one is created by an alloy of gold and aluminium, the red one is a combination of gold and copper, while the blue shade is obtained by an alloy of gold and steel.
White gold is usually created by adding palladium, which intensely discolours natural gold.
But now you’re looking at automated robotic transport and processing of gold in the form of silver bars.
This is an almost completely automated process overseen by factory employees only through computers. Robotic operation is becoming more common in processing, it is of course a cheaper way and above all it does not happen that gold disappears from the factory thanks to the employees.
Gold does not rust and is basically indestructible, it dissolves only in a solution of royal jelly or potassium cyanide, the condition is the presence of air during this chemical reaction.
But otherwise it will resist any acid or salt, perhaps that is why it is called “eternal”. Gold is also very malleable, since a single gram of the metal could be melted into a sheet one square metre in area.
Investing in shiny metal is undoubtedly worthwhile. It is a centuries-tested, ageless and, moreover, virtually indestructible value, whose price continues to rise in the long term. However, not only bricks are valuable, but also medals or coins.
The most expensive coin ever was the gold twenty-dollar, which was auctioned at Sothebys and Stacks in New York for a whopping 7.6 million american dollars.
At the end of the production process, these coins are boxed and distributed to their customers around the world.
For larger bars, given their size and intended purpose, they aren’t typically for gifting, and are made as cheaply as possible for investors.
Both cast and minted bars are usually impressed with the manufacturers name, weight, and the fineness or purity.