I'm fairly sure you need an offset of 18 at the end at a minimum. With an offset of 16 you can drop the last gold but to make a ready product it needs to be bonded. You need at least 2 turns to bond it at a corner with 3 bonds. Thus, I'm pretty sure 93,714 is the theoretical minimum.

Just. Ew. My solution is summarily worse than yours, too. 1845/93785/1038. Mine does use a 64 base cycle to make one gold, which is the fastest way from one lead. I didn't have to lay down any repeat instructions (so that the game didn't lag while running).

I made a string of gold 61 long, then moved it around to form all the bonds and the final shape.

64x61=3,904 cycle + 16 offset yields a length of 93,712 absolute minimum across 24 products, though.

My solution is 785/93714/640. I'm pretty sure that the 93714 is the theoretical optimum for the cycles. The cost and area probably could be improved though.

I've been tinkering for over an hour, but this mf is gonna be hundreds, if not several thousands of cycles. This is a long term project, to say the least.

This isn't as "horrifying" as it could've been. I could've e.g. encased the lead inside large amounts of salt that has to be disposed.

this is horrifying