Gold Lustre

[Imu]

Hi guys, I'm new here, I seemed to come across this forum a fair bit when researching things so figured it was about time I signed up, its given me some pretty useful tips over the last year or so. Happy to give back what I take, I have more of a technical history than ceramics but there's plenty of overlap.

Anyways, my first post I'm looking for a bit of guidance on creating my own gold lustre, there is very little information floating around the Internet and any books I've purchased are more geared towards using lustres than making them so I've been fumbling in the dark. Now I know commercial  lustres are available but I have a working project that requires me to make my own to give provenance to the finished piece

Now as far as I can work out a gold lustre is simply either elemental gold in a nano/powder form or gold chloride mixed with a carrier oil, lets say pine oil, would this be a correct assumption? I would then use toluene, turps or similar to thin this to the right consistency? Would I pretty much just mix say 10-15% gold with the oil, then boil to ensure it mixes well? I already have some experience in refining gold and do have the necessary nasty chemicals to produce my own powder or chloride so its really just the last step that im fairly vague on

Thanks for any input, like I said, information on the process seems very patchy, even a pointer to a decent technical book would be appreciated.

 

 

[Min]

Try sending @liambesawa pm asking about this. He hasn’t been on the forum for ages but when he was he was making lustres. 

[PeterH]

Some plausible-looking advice on techniques and H&S referenced in:

Historically there have been two sorts of lustres: reduction lustres and resinate lustres. Your comments seem to apply more to the reduction-fired reduction lustres. While tho commercial oxidation fired products are resinate lustres.

Ever wondered why solder is often sold with a rosin flux running through it? When you apply it to the joint the hot rosin reacts with any oxide on the copper surfaces to form copper resinate.

The resinates lustres are made by reacting metal oxides or salts with rosin and dissolving the resinate in  or another solvent. With luck you finish up with quite a high concentration of metal resinate  in the solvent. When these are fired they decompose leaving a thin metal film (and often some pretty nasty fumes).

As Min said, do try and get in touch with @liambesaw if you can, but he hasn't visited the here since  2022.

A friend used to run a garage industry making resinates and had very strong reservations about many of the solvents used in commercial lustres, sticking to - AFAIK - linseed oil.

Manufacture a gold lustre is fairly briefly covered in "Pottery Decorating" by R. Hainbach.  Which involves mixing "bright gold" with a bismuth lustre. Bright gold apparently containing resinates of gold and rhodium (and also possibly bismuth, uranium, chromium and iron?). Although a simpler wet process is also described for producing gold resinate from gold trichloride and resin-soap.
... probably much better to find out what people do nowadays.

PS The book seems fairly expensive at the moment, change this search to your location and currency.
https://tinyurl.com/2d783cv8

 

[liambesaw]

6 hours ago, Imu said:

Hi guys, I'm new here, I seemed to come across this forum a fair bit when researching things so figured it was about time I signed up, its given me some pretty useful tips over the last year or so. Happy to give back what I take, I have more of a technical history than ceramics but there's plenty of overlap.

Anyways, my first post I'm looking for a bit of guidance on creating my own gold lustre, there is very little information floating around the Internet and any books I've purchased are more geared towards using lustres than making them so I've been fumbling in the dark. Now I know commercial  lustres are available but I have a working project that requires me to make my own to give provenance to the finished piece

Now as far as I can work out a gold lustre is simply either elemental gold in a nano/powder form or gold chloride mixed with a carrier oil, lets say pine oil, would this be a correct assumption? I would then use toluene, turps or similar to thin this to the right consistency? Would I pretty much just mix say 10-15% gold with the oil, then boil to ensure it mixes well? I already have some experience in refining gold and do have the necessary nasty chemicals to produce my own powder or chloride so its really just the last step that im fairly vague on

Thanks for any input, like I said, information on the process seems very patchy, even a pointer to a decent technical book would be appreciated.

 

 

I wasn't successful getting the gold to reduce with just pine resin, if you buy Greg Daly's book "lustre", he details making it from elemental sulfur and gold chloride. This works well.  Commercial lustres using pine resin thinned with toluene use a different gold salt, I'm guessing that's the reason they work.  I think the compound is a chlorohexanoic salt of gold. 

You'll also need a bit of bismuth in there to act as a flux bridging the gold and glaze.  

I had some luck making a silver lustre by making silver soap.  Silver decanoate.  But it was difficult to dissolve in almost everything so it was a pain to apply.  Was conductive though and I made a few touch lamps using it.  Also had success doing a similar thing with copper.

Edited April 15 by liambesaw

[Imu]

Brilliant answer, exactly what I was looking for.  Thank you

I did have my suspicions that a flux would be needed. I really don't mind spending time experimenting but working with gold has obvious drawbacks. I have allocated a few grams of scrap for this purpose.

I've ordered Greg Daly's book so this will be a good starting point. Hopefully I'll have some positive feedback in the coming weeks.

Sounds like you've been down this particular rabbit hole yourself with success?