Anton Lang
Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz and he writes on topics related to electrical power generation.
Having visited the Royal Australian Mint a couple of times now on visits to Canberra, a visit to the Perth Mint was always going to be a part of my visit, and my sister and I spent a couple of hours here, and we both took the organised tour, which included a live gold pour.
This image I took of the front of the building, with a statue of miners during the gold rush in the early 1890s, showing William Ford and Arthur Bayley, and their first major strike at Coolgardie in the goldfields east of the capital, and this gold rush led to the construction of this building to handle and refine all the gold discovered at that time. Unlike the mint in Canberra, the Perth Mint is right in the city itself, and is quite a large building, originally constructed in the 1890s, and it’s now 225 years old. The building in fact was the first building listed on the State Heritage Register.
We had a half hour to look around the gift shop before the tour started and there was just so much to see.
The tour started with a gold pour, and this was an amazing thing to see. They have a raised area with tapered seating (similar to what there is inside a cinema) for the viewing area. This was the original gold refinery first used when the building was constructed, and it has been in constant use since that time. The man (David) doing the display took us through the steps of the making of a gold bar.
The first image shows the furnace, with the top closed and the white hot glow in the middle. Just to the left of the furnace lid there is a second crucible. The crucible is made from clay graphite, and this is what contains the gold inside that furnace.
When we are all seated, David raises that lid, and, dressed as he is for safety purposes, he uses a special pair of tongs to lift the white-hot glowing crucible from the furnace, and he moves that from the furnace to a specially constructed table near the viewing area. Then, using a second set of holding tongs, he pours the contents of the crucible, molten gold, into a special mould on a stand on the table, then returns the crucible to alongside the still open furnace lid. The gold cools a little, and David knocks the mould off its stand to now reveal a gold bar. With tongs he picks up the gold bar and immerses it into water a number of times, giving off copious amounts of steam as the gold cools, and then returns the gold to the table in front of us. He then picks up the gold bar and holds it as shown in the second image, and the third image is a further close up of that second image. He holds it for a minute or so, while we all take images with cameras and phones. You can see the raised lid of the furnace, and the glowing inside of the furnace behind him and near his elbow.
Okay, so, what David is holding there is a solid gold bar of 99.99 per cent purity. That gold bar weighs 6.3 kilograms, (222.226 ounces) and at the current gold price, that comes it at just a tick over one million dollars. Once we have taken our images, David takes the bar to a highly accurate weighing machine and weighs it to see… EXACTLY how much gold has been lost during the whole process. The gold bar then goes back into that crucible and then straight back into the furnace, for the next tour to come through. As we then mill around taking more images and looking at the displays inside this area, he then uses tweezers to pick up gold flakes from the table where he ‘manufactured’ this gold bar. This whole process is then repeated a number of times throughout the day with each new tour.
See in that first image, that crucible close to the lid of the furnace. Well, each of those crucibles will only last for two weeks, before becoming unusable. Each crucible used here is then sent back to the major gold refinery where it is crushed and melted to recover the gold embedded into the crucible over the number of times it was used for each display. From each crucible they recover around a third of an ounce of gold, and that’s about a thousand dollars worth of gold… from every crucible. At the end of each week, that gold bar has gold added to it, to make it back up to that exact original weight of 6.3 kilograms of pure gold.
When they started doing these gold pour displays back in 1993, they used one gold bar of 200 ounces. It was melted and poured again seven times a day for 27 years, and would have continued to be used had it not been for an accident during one of these displays. As the crucible was being lifted from the furnace, the bottom fell out of the crucible. The gold then formed a ‘pancake’ in the bottom of the furnace. They had to cool the furnace and then send it all back to the refinery to recover the gold.
So, this is the original gold refinery, used up until a new more modern gold refinery was constructed, and this ‘room’ once contained a number of these furnaces. Over the now almost 225 years it has been used, gold lost during the process of refining has become embedded into the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the bricks the surroundings, everything inside that room over all that time. It is estimated that perhaps as much as 100 kilograms of gold is embedded into the inside of this building, all of it totally unrecoverable. Even if they could find a way to get it out of the brickwork etc, the building is Heritage listed. That’s around seven million dollars worth of gold, just embedded into the building itself.
Now, inside this room is probably one of the major attractions of the Perth Mint, and it actually has a place in the Guinness Book Of Records as the world’s largest coin.
The coin was minted back in 2011.
This is… ONE TONNE of 99.99 (per cent) purity solid gold. To qualify as a coin, it had to have a ‘nominal’ face value, and for this coin, it has that face value of one million dollars Australian [...] Now, that’s not the actual value of the coin, as at today’s gold price it’s actually worth north of AUD55,000,000 The opposite side of the coin depicts the red kangaroo, as shown in the image at this link. This ties in with the Perth Mint’s manufacture of the very popular gold kangaroo coins and bars, ranging in size from one gram up to one kilogram, and many sizes in between, just some of which are shown at the link, and the further pages at the bottom of the link.
Now, here’s the kicker to this coin. The Perth Mint has had a number of inquiries from here in Australia, and also around the world from people who want to add this, umm, coin to their coin collection. The mint has politely declined, as this is one of their major attractions.
After the display, you could tour around the inside of the mint, and see many displays, some of the of the original nuggets found during the gold rush, and other examples of gold products produced at the mint. It was an amazing thing to see so many displays, and here I have included just one image of some of the mint’s kangaroo gold bars, and the largest one there on the right is ten ounces, priced at around $52,000.
This visit to the Perth Mint was just one of many enjoyable things I have experienced during my visit here in ‘The West’.
One last image. This is me, you know, the closest I’ll ever get to $55 million.
This article was originally published by PA Pundits – International.
