How to part gold from metallic iron??

Gold Refining Forum

Help Support Gold Refining Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

boarteats

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 31, 2018
Messages
48
I collected magnetite and smelted iron from it. Unexpectedly, ended up with a metal bead containing iron, gold, copper (I think), other. Did a streak test to convince myself that I actually had some gold. Here’s what I’m seeing: iron (starting to oxidize), gold, a metal that is oxidizing to a really nice blue color (think this might be copper), and some other silver malleable metal that does not appear to be oxidizing.

I’m not a gold prospector, so this is new to me. Would appreciate some tips/reference material for parting and identifying the non iron metals that I appear to have. Thanks in advance.
 
Hi , welcome to the forum.
Why do you think there is gold in your metal, did you test it?
If not, try a stannos test, it is simple.
Write " stannous test" in " search" in the top at these window.
 
Hi canedane!

Good bet that it’s gold: soft, yellow metal that is not oxidizing and leaves a shiny gold streak on a streak plate. Also, went back to my batch of black sands. Took a closer look with loop. Could see flour gold along with the expected pyrite, etc.
 
You'd be better served removing, or at least concentrating, the gold before smelting everything together. I'm going to move this thread to the Prospecting, Mining, Ore Concentrates & Geochemical section of the forum so those who deal with black sands will be more likely to see it.

Dave
 
Oye vey. I really want advise on how to part gold from base metal like iron after they’ve already been smelted and are co mingled in one mass. This was the original question.
 
I can think of three possible ways.

1. Dissolve the iron in hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid, creates a lot of waste.

or

2. Melt together with some silver and mix well while the metals are molten. Silver and iron doesn't mix and gold prefer to alloy with silver so you get 95%-99% of the gold in the silver phase. The silver can then be treated in a silver cell and the gold can be recovered as a black anode slime.

or

3. Add some copper to the metal and melt it together, then burn off the iron with oxygen sparging. The gold will follow the copper and end up as an alloy. The gold can then be recovered via copper electrolysis as a black anode mud, just as with the silver cell above. Takes some specialized equipment and proper safety gears.

The question is, is it worth it? How much do you have and what is the amount of gold? If you do any testing, do it in a small scale and use safety gear.

Göran
 
Göran, great info! I’m inclined to go with door #2.

Hard to know how much gold there is relative to the iron. Almost certainly enough to justify spending a day or two to part it from the iron.

There’s a longer term issue as well. It is not clear to me where the amount of gold that I’m seeing mixed with my smelted iron is coming from. I can see a small amount in my iron oxide ore but far less then what I ended up post smelt. Hence, I’m not sure how to get the gold without first smelting the iron ore thereby reproducing my current situation. Can’t concentrate it via panning or other means if I can’t see it, right? As far as problems go, it’s not a bad one to have. Lol.

Barring some other insight, I’ll be in the gold/iron smelting and parting business for a while.
 
If you don't know how much gold there is mixed in your iron, how do you know that you have more gold than you see before smelting?

As for door number 2, it's a procedure I've heard about but I don't know anyone that have used it so there is probably a lot experimenting to get it right.

Göran
 
Göran, can’t say for sure how much gold is mixed in with the iron. However, I see much more gold on the smelted iron than I’d expect given that I only see trace amounts of gold in the remaining batch of unprocessed material. Admittedly, not a terribly scientifically rigorous assessment. :)

I’m good with experimenting with different processes. I really enjoy doing this kind of stuff. I’m not motivated much by any potential monetary gain. For me, it’s all about the exploration and learning new, cool things.
 
What is the source of your black sands? Second question is the gold actualy bonded with the Fe before you smelt it? The reason I ask is because the solution might be easier than you think.
 
Hoosierdaddy2.0, I’m finding larger pieces by crushing chunky magnetite. Biggest piece so far was about 1 gram. I’ve used dilute nitric acid to clean up these nuggets. You’d never know there was gold just by looking at the original source material. This is probably why no one found gold in the stream before I did.

After grinding all the remaining iron oxides to a fine powder, I can see flour gold that was not apparent before grinding. However, only small amounts can be seen. Nothing close to what I see mixed in with the iron post smelting. After smelting, I can get a general idea of how much gold I have by dissolving some of the iron with nitric acid, a messy bit of work.

Mixed in with the flour gold (post grinding), I can see chunky, shiny, bits of higly reflective silvery material along with pyrite. Not sure if there is gold entrained with the pyrite. Also, don’t know what the shiny material is.

I guess this is a really long way of saying that I’m not certain where much of the gold is actually coming from. Simple classification/panning isn’t enough to identify it, which is strange since I’m getting a lot of gold from small samples of original source material.
 
Back
Top