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yvonbug

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 20, 2007
Messages
174
Location
Mtn. Ranch, CA. USA
Hi everyone! I've been gone for a couple of years from this forum. In 2015, Sept. we got burned out by the "Butte" fire here in Calaveras county. We lost everything! Including all my gold scrap. Which was several pounds worth. It was a fast evacuation and I didn't have time to move my trunk full of cleaned gold scrap or to gather any of my refining equipment. So I'm starting out with nothing, but a small bit of scrap I recently acquired. I did save my gold bible, (by C. W. Ammen) and a lot of notes I took while processing. They were all in a briefcase I grabbed on the way out.
Anyways, just wanted to say hi again to all my friends that are still here on this forum. :D

love, Bug (Yvonne)
 
Welcome back yvonbug! So sorry for your tragedy. I would donate if you had a 'Go fund me' account set up. Wish you the very best in your recovery.
Regards,
Dennis
 
Welcome back Yvonne!

It's always nice to see old members returning. Too bad about the fire, but just look at it as extreme incineration.
Somehow I'm imagine that dragon running through the fire, firmly holding a briefcase...

Calaveras county, that's an interesting mining area with a long history of gold. The mineral calaverite is named after the county. I have a number of rocks that I collected last summer at a gold mine close by, I'm going to go through them with a microscope to see if I can find any calaverite in them.

Göran
 
Greetings, Yvonne!

Glad to see another PM chaser in No. California.

I'm pretty new to the refining end but have a lot of experience in the cold rivers and creeks of our habitat.

All the best from Sacramento,

James
 
Hi Goran! You said something about extreme incineration. No kidding! When we were driving away, evacuating, I was looking out the back window, thinking that all my gold I had in this huge chest would all just melt into puddles. And that all we would have to do is pick it up out of the ashes. But nooooo. The plated material just, ...well it vaporized. And went up in the thermals with the smoke. Brass things survived better. It was truly sad. :cry:
 
When plated things are heated the gold doesn't evaporate. It migrates into the object and copper migrates to the surface to combine with oxygen, forming a black oxide layer. When you heat carat gold or silver the jeweler calls it firescale.

That effect can be used to guild objects by making an alloy with down to 0.5% gold. Repeated cycles of heating, dissolving the firescale in a weak avid and polishing the surface concentrates the gold at the surface until a pure gold surface forms.

If the fire was too extreme, as in your case, anything thin as the copper traces on circuit boards could be oxidized to the point where the metallic copper would disappear and the only thing left is black copper oxide with gold atoms mixed in. It would look like sooty ash. Nothing that would be easy to recognize or even collect in the aftermath of a fire.

I'm sorry for your loss, but at least you came out with your life intact and could start on collecting a new treasure chest.

Göran
 
I know this sounds silly, but I couldn't let go of my (past) life very easily. We bought a little house in town, and with it came this big old barn. Well, right after the fire, I started packing all my ashes and whatevers into buckets and bags and garbage cans, and took them home and now they're in my barn and I have been slowly sifting them and I did manage to get hunks of pins and other stuff that was gold plated. But it all looks like the gold vaporized off of it. But I haven't thrown any of it out. I went mainly to where ever I had gold and got the ashes and even a small layer of dirt. I left no ashe there. I've got all of it, (I know, I'm nuts). So I'm sitting on all this dirty stuff thinking there's no gold left in any of it. I just thought, well.... maybe there'd be something left. Oh, do you know any of the Lilja's? They'er my cousins.
 
You basically have a material that is similar to an incinerated jewellers sweep that may well have values, what sort of quantity do you have?
If it’s not a huge amount it might be possible to recover the values by using a hot AR leach with plenty of agitation to expose all the values to the acids.
 
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