rewalston
Well-known member
Palladium said:rasanders22 said:So if I understand you correctly....
1. Strip steel, aluminum, and plastic off the boards. (Already done)
2. Place the boards in Hcl in a sealed bucket for 2-3 days.
3. After 2-3 days manually strip the stuff that doesn't come off.
4. Run all the parts that came off through AP. (Does this include the boards or should I run them seperatly?). Then filter AP through charmin plug.
5. Add AC to dissolve gold and leave pgm's and AgCl.
6. Filter AuCl through charmin plug.
7. Precipitate Au with smb.
8. The rest is a mix of AgCl and pgm's. Set those aside for a day when I have more.
Should I worry about solids left in the filter?
Should I pull out things like bga's and set those aside with my other chips for a day when I can process those?
When you do # 5 the pgm's will dissolve also with the gold.
You will recover these after you drop your gold. The way to do this is just to add a piece of copper to the spent solution after you drop your gold. The palladium and if you have platinum in there will cement to the copper. Any silver chloride will be trapped in the filter residues with your trash and chip packages. You can remove the silver chloride with an ammonia rinse and then you can add hcl to the ammonia to re precipitate the silver as a chloride. Then the only thing you are left with is the stripped chips which you can ball mill later. Store them in a gallon zip lock baggy until you have enough to process. Throw the charmin plug in with the used chips.
I then take the stripped boards and run them in some warm sodium hydroxide to remove the green mask and process them in ap also. When your cleaning the parts from step #3 the easiest way i found to do it is take the boards out of the hcl and let them drain for a couple of minutes in a spaghetti strainer. Then i take them and hold them under the water in a 5 gallon bucket with nothing but clean water in it ( about half full ). i take a 1 in putty scraper and holding the board under water i scrap off what didn't come off. Don't worry about any green mask that might come off at this point. Let the stuff settle over night and decant, not filter off the excess water. add everything from the bucket to the ap mix. You will do the same thing with the other 5 gallon bucket with the hcl in it. When i decant the 5 gallon buckets i use a piece of 3/8 in aquarium hose and a pair of hemostats so i can pinch the hose and control the flow. I filter the liquids thru a couple of coffee filter just to make sure i don't loose anything. Don't let the hose touch the bottom of the bucket or you will suck up trash and clog your filter. The filter is only a safety precaution.
Sounds like a good way to collect silver as a chloride if you don't have nitrates to work with.
Rusty
, if you keep it wet, don't keep it in a mason jar, in sunlight. It will slowly eat through the metal lid.
