Smelting question (basic chemistry)

Hello guys,

I have a question for you, and yes, I did have read a lot of other posts here and I could not find an exact answer, so I am going to ask here:

Basically, I have loads of depopulated mobile boards with gold plating on them, most are quite old ones.
As they take up a load of volume, if I do gasify them (burn in absence of oxygen) and then incinerate the ashes, I'd be left with ashes, copper, tin, and other metals including PM. I plan to then process the ashes in HCl, for now I would just need to be sure that any precious metal would just end up in the ashes and not lost somewhat?

Thanks

You left the largest component of printed circuit boards, fiber glass. A printed circuit board is sheets of fiber glass held together with epoxy resin. There will be very little ash and a whole lot of glass. I don't know if you didn't know or just didn't consider the glass part. If you are going to smelt the incinerated material, you will need to use quite a bit of thinner or you will wind up with a lot of small metal prills locked up in the slag.

Depends on what you mean by "loads".

Does that mean a boat load, a train car load, a truck load, a car load or a bunch of boxes full?

Even if I had a 55 gallon barrel full I'd still process with the AP/Hcl method. It's cheap, not labor intensive and known to work well.

rickbb said:

Even if I had a 55 gallon barrel full I'd still process with the AP/Hcl method. It's cheap, not labor intensive and known to work well.

Click to expand...

Especially if you process it this way.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=11064