How do you use your refiner? As the place that takes in your scrap and turns out cash? Or as a repository of knowledge—a group of experts ready to look over what you do and help you to do it better? The fact is refiners have a lot of technical solutions at the ready; solutions they can tailor to your needs to maximize your returns. Here are a few instances when refiners came to the rescue.

Everybody Must Get Stones

It’s a common request: Melt my metal, but give me back my stones. The reasons vary, but if this request is fulfilled the result is the same: customer satisfaction. This is the tale of one very good reason—and one very satisfied customer. “There’s a lot of product out there today that has stones that are set really deep,” says Daniel Ballard, national sales manager for Precious Metals West/Fine Gold in Los Angeles. “It might be micro-pavé, channel setting, or invisible setting. If for any reason you have to dismount those stones, there’s a lot of pressure on them and it’s very difficult to tear them out without damaging them. Often it’s diamonds against diamonds—and the fact that it’s the hardest substance around doesn’t help.”

A PM West customer came to the refiner some time ago with jewelry featuring a stone that resembled a purple lapis lazuli. Sadly, the stone didn’t go over well with the buying public. “They’d gone high carat weight,” Ballard says. “One of these stones was set in a pendant with a lot of metal around it, alongside a fully bezel-set half-carat diamond.” The customer came to the end of that production run and saw that it was time to change direction. But they wanted to salvage their stone investment for use in new product. As they started to pull the pieces apart, however, they ran into two problems. First, there was an unacceptable level of damage to the diamonds. Second, the diamond setters were busy dismounting stones in the old pieces rather than spending their time setting diamonds in new ones.

The answer to both problems was found in PM West’s small-batch aqua regia process. “They were giving us coffee cans full of the product,” Ballard says. “There was so much of the stuff, I called my insurance guy and cranked up our insurance for a few days!” PM West caters to customers with smaller refining lots. “Rather than using a big single tank, we’ve always been set up with six two-gallon beakers,” Ballard says. “That puts us in a position where we don’t have to pay people based merely on an assay—for example, when refining gold, we base the return on a full precipitation of the gold and its total weight.” In addition, it makes stone recovery easy. “The material goes into the acid, which dissolves the prongs and the bezels and all the metal around the stones, and we can go back and pretty much pop the diamonds loose,” he says. “Then we can go through the rest of the process and pull the 24k out [of solution] and give them back their metal.”

The purple stones came through the process fine, Ballard says, but he notes that he hasn’t seen so much as a fleck of the material since. Gary Dolinko of Midstates Recycling  & Refining in Des Plaines, Illinois, has also done his share of stone recovery jobs, and his company handles quantities from 10 troy oz. to 250 troy oz. “We’ve had customers come to us with several bags of scrap that are loaded with small stones,” he says. “It would be hugely laborious and costly to have someone sit at a bench and remove the stones—not to mention the likelihood of damaging a few in the process. Now manufacturers and retail scrappers can send out these goods containing stones as-is.”

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