Catalytic Convertor Recovery Data

Advertise with us
xelexo
shop deals on amazon
Shop deals on ebay
Gold Refining Forum

Help Support Gold Refining Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Oz said:
....Generally speaking though the melting of PGMs for sale will only hurt you. Buyers are not inclined to take your word for it as to purity which means they will have to re-digest them in order for them to determine PGM content, this is very slow for bars and ingots (boil a chunk of platinum in AR and you will understand). For this reason the best way to sell it as elemental is as a sponge or selling the salts from precipitations.
Click to expand...
Would one not be able to make the PGM into flake much the same way that gold flake is made?? I'm assuming that in flake form, the PGM would be much easier to digest.
 
On thing of interest I heard recently from a guy who I know who does his own stuff. He sent a bunch of smashed up cat converter dust to a friend with a mass spec, and the mass spec revealed a fairly large quantity of silver... He had it assayed, and the assay said about half an oz of silver in a single cat.
He could have just been saying this, but I think it's unlikely, as he was somewhat drunk, and truth is the drunk's native language...
 
maybe the drunk did not part his assay? or dumped some silver into his lot while he was mixing chemical? I have never heard of silver in automobile catalyst material's.

I would also think that you can make platinum group flake but why? it seems it would take specialized equiptment and seems to me more chance of loss of metals, my guess it would be a lot of work and waste of money and time, if a buyer will take salts or sponge that would seem much easier.
 
I have no idea about the assay. I was just passing on the info, seeing if others had tested for it.

As for making shot, I was planning to melt the catalyst, and metals, then pour slowly over ice to make acid dissolving much easier and quicker.
 
amosfella said:
then pour slowly over ice to make acid dissolving much easier and quicker.
Click to expand...

Doubtful that will work. When your gold first hits the ice it will solidify and the rest of your gold will pile on top of it. You will not end up with flakes but with a big glob. And then it is back to square 1.

You can put ice in your water to cool it faster but it really isn't necessary.
 
Barren Realms 007 said:
amosfella said:
then pour slowly over ice to make acid dissolving much easier and quicker.
Click to expand...

Doubtful that will work. When your gold first hits the ice it will solidify and the rest of your gold will pile on top of it. You will not end up with flakes but with a big glob. And then it is back to square 1.
Click to expand...
Man, you said a mouth full. I had a few experiences where I poured molten inquarted gold/silver to a deep bucket of water, and poured too fast. You end up with exactly that which you described. Luckily, I could break it up enough to get it in to a 4,000 ml beaker in each case.

To avoid creating soldered pieces when pouring inquarted metal, do two things. Use the coldest water you can get, or add some ice if there's a lot to pour, and pour a thin stream, moving about constantly. If you pour in one place, a superheated channel develops, allowing molten metal to go clear to the bottom without freezing. That's really not a good thing.

Harold
 
I to would like to make an attempt at refining platinun from what I believe is monalithic catalytic converters that have been crushed and possibly burnt and the final product is brown powder like fine dust or dirt looking material. I have an oppertunity to get up to 500lbs from a junkyard guy. One refiner said they could get 1 toz pt and 1.3 toz of paladium or rodium, cant remember but is was for every 100lbs. Does anyone know of anyone or business I could send a pound or two too to have a true analasys? Or many even process the stuff. As a refiner of some precious metals, I run up on stuff like this from time to time. Pleas HELP!!!
 
I'd be concerned about getting a good sample. You take a bit off the top and who is to say that it's at all representative of the other 499 pounds.
I might take a sample by sticking a pipe deep into the material to hopefully get a nice selection of any possible strata. Then take this sample and either have it assayed, or do some rough testing on it.
Leach the sample in 10:1 HCl:30% H2O2 at room temperature and this will pretty quickly dissolve the palladium and platinum. Ground up material might contain a lot of base metal contamination, so be careful, as the reaction might get out of hand - I'd let the material sit for a bit in straight HCl to dissolve any base metals.

Usually I can get a reasonable idea of the grade of the material by the colour that the peroxide leach solution develops, assuming base metals don't change the colour too much.
A nice deep red or brown colour after the solution clarifies is a very good sign. Orange is decent. Yellow is usually pretty weak. I'd confirm this with stannous chloride testing, looking for very deep stannous reactions. At this point depending on the results I might feel comfortable paying a low price for the material on the spot, without a real assay. Even if I thought it was excellent material, I don't think it would be advisable to pay more than $8-10 a pound. With a rich looking solution, and deep stannous colours, you'd be unlikely, in my opinion, to come up on the losing end at that sort of price, and the seller should be satisfied.

You could get a real assay, but in between sampling and your receiving the assay who has possession of the 500lbs and will it be tampered with? Maybe you could put seals on the container, if the seller is agreeable to you holding onto the material.
Whoever buys the material from you will want to have their own assay done anyways. At which point your own earlier assay is only a way to tell if you got burned.

As far as buyers for this sort of quanitity, I remember EDI gold said they could do this. They quoted reasonable payouts too.
 
So according to this report, if I didn't mess up on my conversion, on average, per every pound of honeycomb, you can recover about 1.25grams of platinum, I forgot the other PGMs.
 
All I notice in your question is one word we do not need here on the forum, we have ladies and young people reading our posts; let's speak like we would in their presence.

Please edit your posts so we can give you an intelligent answer.
 
Is it possible, that a honey comb that lookes completely new tests absolutely negative for PGMs? Do honey combs exist, which contain other metals than PGMs or is it a fake?

I bought a comb 15x15x30 cm³, 2,6 kg for 1€+6€ shipping on ebay, it was placed in a wrong category, so I saw the [stt]change[/stt]chanceto make a good deal without any risc. I made a quick test on a sample with undefined AR. Next days negative...ok, maybe still too much oxidizer. Vaporized, still nothing. Placed the whole comb in 1l HCl 25%/chlorox, some days without heat, still negative. Next apprroach: I will take a bigger sample and heat it in AR for some hours.

Do honey combs exist which only contain rhodium, so it is hard to dissolve anything of it?

edit: my stannous works fine on my "standard" platinum solution
 
Thanks for quick reply. Btw the solution from the comb is yellow (much like iron) and turns colourless with my stannous.
 
solar how are you
I will be back on in a couple of days and will explain

for now I get cats that are brand new from the manufacturer that have no values at all
they have been tested

that's why I get them :mrgreen:

they are called blanks
they look new ,smell new and feel new and they are honeycombs

hope this helps
thanks steyr223
 
steyr223 said:
solar how are you
I will be back on in a couple of days and will explain

for now I get cats that are brand new from the manufacturer that have no values at all
they have been tested

that's why I get them :mrgreen:

they are called blanks
they look new ,smell new and feel new and they are honeycombs

hope this helps
thanks steyr223
Click to expand...

interesting - so what do you do with them if there are no values in them ? Why are they blanks in the first place ?

Kurt
 
steyr223 said:
solar how are you
I will be back on in a couple of days and will explain

for now I get cats that are brand new from the manufacturer that have no values at all
they have been tested

that's why I get them :mrgreen:

they are called blanks
they look new ,smell new and feel new and they are honeycombs

hope this helps
thanks steyr223
Click to expand...

Thanks, I am fine, all bad people are :)

That is a perfect description of what I have, brand new comb without any smell, even the package looked like it came directly from the plant...and there is absolutely nothing precious in it, not even traces. I think I will not throw it away, maybe I will use it as a kind of refractory clay for the place where I melt my buttons. ...chamotte is quite expensive in small amounts, so it was a good deal :lol:
 
Tyler yes i am back thanks
I. Am ok i broke my last phone and decided
I liked not being called
:lol:
Plus i ran out of my stock but i am behind again
I also was getting burned out there were no mew posts
For a while.

Seems like everyone pretty much arrived at a new. Education level and doesn't need to ask for much help
Like a few years back when you couldn't even keep up
With reading all the crys for help

Or ? Maybe thats just my perception

Any how i got a new phone and i started a new process

So um tyler did you set up the incinerator yet


Kurt um i ..a..well theres a muffler shop that buys them
I dont know why they know there blanks

Maybe there in cahoots with the smog guys,thats the only
Way i can see that working
They dont do enough to. Mix them with a big load

Solar whats chamotte?

Thanks steyr223
 

Latest posts

Back
Top