Hi :-)

I was chatting on this group back in November 20th of 2004 about working
with gold and have another question that someone might know something
about and want to comment on.

I will have to explain my story in order for someone to get the idea of
what I have been up to... I am no professional so bear with me! :-)

About 4 years back I took two of my hall-marked gold rings of what I
believed to be 18ct gold and melted them in a crucible in my pottery
kiln at about 1300 deg Cent...
I knew nothing at the time about working with gold and so assumed I
would get a blob of gold that I could experiment with as back then I
could not afford to buy new.

Well... if I had used a flux it would have helped but my crucible broke
and I ended up with several scattered blobs of good looking gold and a
load of very nice rich coloured red and black glassy material where I
assumed the copper part from the gold had merged with the glaze that was
on my homemade crucible!

Next thing I decided to do (still at that time with little knowledge)
was take the dozen or so bits of broken crucible out into my garden and
blow torch them until the metallic gold ran off them. I scattered some
flux on to help them run and eventually after a long time I managed to
salvage a blob of gold from the mess I had created.

I think after that I had a go at beating the blob into a disc which
worked and then the project got left for another year or so.

When I decided to finally do something with this blob I re-melted it
AGAIN in a small pure porcelain (unglazed) crucible that I made with
some flux and then beat it into a ring... this time I managed to create
it into a small doughnut shape that I beat on a ring making stake and I
almost got it to a ring that I could wear but because I did not keep
annealing it often enough it split...

So the gold went back and got remelted yet again!

Last week, I decided to have another go :-) and this time I took the
blob and reformed it as a little doughnut (blob with a hole in the
middle) and this time I managed to form a single ring which I later
sliced down the middle and made two beautiful narrow rings from. The
appearance is very rugged with beat marks all over and is exactly what I
wanted to achieve.

Now this brings me on to my questions...

While making the final rings I annealed the metal very often to soften
it... sometimes I quenched it in acid while it was still very hot and
the metal surface when beaten on the stake was very silver coloured, not
gold at all (?!)
Other times I quenched it in acid when it was much cooler and the
surface was a pale golden colour.

The final colour of the rings (because the last time I annealed them I
did not quench but left the very black oxide on them) is a deep rich
gold/copper colour which is rather nice.

Am I right in saying that this is because the gold still has a lot of
copper in it and the copper oxides are trapped in the structure of the
gold?

When I quenched in acid from VERY hot (the glow only just died away) the
colour went almost completely silver which was what puzzled me the
most... I assume this is because the gold crystalised at it's surface
due to rapid cooling and so it was reflecting the light in the surface
layers?

And I assume that if I wanted to change the colour back to the best gold
that I can achieve with this overworked material I would have to reheat
and quench them at a much lower temperature?

Finally, this is a really daft question to ask but is this how different
coloured golds like red and white etc. are created?

In conclusion... those two original rings have certainly been through
the fires, I have learned a few things the hard way, but I now have two
lovely rings that I should enjoy for a few more years to come.

regards
Heather