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A good friend of my family has a 1 gallon zip lock bag of gilding that was scrapped off of wall paper from their church after a fire. It weighs several pounds. You can see the flakes in it.

1. Do you think that it is worth trying to extract?

2. How would we go about doing it?

I imagine it would be a negligible amount of gold. Gold leaf can be made extremely thin.

I would try eBay...

I believe that there is a fair amount of gold in the bag. They didn't just peel the wallpaper. They scraped the gilding off of the paper. The bag weighs 5-6 pounds. If we could get a small amount, it would be fun to do.

I think that a mechanical process would work better than a chemical process. I imagine that it would take took much acid to saturate it enough to dissolve the gold. I might put it in water and see if we can get the gold to sink away from the paper.

Suggestions would still be welcome.

I'd torch a sample to see what happens. Once you have a nugget, it should be easy to test the purity with acid, figure out the density, etc.

Here is some round-about info:

http://www.gildedplanet.com/gildingbasics.html

Leaf thickness is best described as grams per 1,000 leaves.
This measurement is used to compare one variety with another.
The approximate weight of leaf for an outdoor surface is 18 to 23 grams per 1,000 leaves.

Best Brand - Italian Leaf Pack of 20 Books. - 500 leaves. Each leaf is 3 3/8" x 3 3/8" square. Approx. coverage is 39 sqft. 22 grams per 1000 leaves.

Each pack of 500 leaves covers a surface area of 39.50 sq.ft.

so 1,000 leaves covers 79 sq ft


at 23 grams / 79 = 0.29 grams per sq. ft.
.29 / 31.1 x $1200 = $11.19 of gold per sq. ft.


at 18 grams / 79 = 0.228 grams per sq. ft.
.228 / 31.1 x $1200 = $8.80 of gold per sq. ft.

Your mileage may vary...

I know when they re-leaf the gold on the top of the West Virginia capital it is a major undertaking they bring experts in from Italy or Greece - not cheap.

So I have been thinking about this for a while. I have come up with several ideas

1. soak it in water and pan for gold. Let the flakes settle, skim the paper off of the top.
2. Bake it to burn off the paper, then pan for gold.
3. Burn the whole lot and see what we get.
4. Use nitric acid to dissolve the gold.

Any pros and cons on these ideas?

Have You tried Scrapman Not sure about Gold but his return on Silver was fair

If its older paint it could have lead in it, so just be careful about the burning process so far as inhaling fumes

1. soak it in water and pan for gold. Let the flakes settle, skim the paper off of the top.

This option seems like a good thing to try first as its basically risk free. If it doesn't work, all that happens is you have wet gold - just let it dry and try something else.

AGgressive Metal wrote:If its older paint it could have lead in it, so just be careful about the burning process so far as inhaling fumes

1. soak it in water and pan for gold. Let the flakes settle, skim the paper off of the top.

This option seems like a good thing to try first as its basically risk free. If it doesn't work, all that happens is you have wet gold - just let it dry and try something else.

That is exactly what I thought.

Thanks for the thoughts on the paint. I don't think that there was a lot of paint in the mix, but I will be double sure to look it over, especially since I have waited until not and will end up inside with it.

If you have not looked yet, I would suggest a trip to the Gold Refining Forum. Do a few searches on with their search tool using terms for gold leaf and gold paint. You should be able to sift through the many threads until you find something similar.

Were it me, I would simply incinerate, then melt, in the same seasoned melting dish. The resulting dirty blob would then go to a bin for later refining.