Urea to eliminate excess Nitric Acid
- Thread starter Wilo
- Start date
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Wilo, and all new members thinking they are ready to make the trip to (get) the gold.
The brown powder in the top photo looks like rust (iron powders) there could be several metals in there with iron.
You may or may not have had gold in them.
When many metals get dissolved together into acid, the metal becomes ions of those metals, these metal ions can come back out of solution when they come into contact with a metal that is not dissolved.
Say we have strong acids on a big mix of metals, many metals can dissolve to become salts of those metals in liquid (metal ions called cations). The acid also becomes a salt of the acid called anions.
When metal cations comes into contact with a metal (not dissolved) the metal can trade places with the cations. The cation becomes metal powder coming out of solution, and the metal that was not dissolved, will itself become a cation in solution (trading places, called displacement reactions).
Metals like to trade places in certain ways. The more reactive metals (the undissolved metal in thoughts above) will replace less reactive metal dissolved (cation).
Copper metal replaces gold cations from solution.
Iron metal replaces copper and gold cations from solution.
Zinc metal will replace copper iron and gold cations...
This reaction, we call the reactivity series of metals and displacement reactions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactivity_series
You may or may not of had gold in those powders.
The gold may just have been replaced by any undissolved metals (left in the trash you were trying to dissolve, or it could be in both places at once (testing is important) our eyes to see the gold when we cannot...
Study how to make your test solution (stannous chloride), which could be made from the electronic solder you have or better with a more pure tin solder you can get very cheap new...
What you need first, is to understand how to process, or prepare your scrap-- before you use any acids.
preparing the trash (or scrap) before is actually more important than using acids to dissolve, or using chemicals to get the metal back.
When we dissolve gold, we do not want to dissolve any other metal if we can help it. We will eliminate all other metals and organic crap first. So we must prepare by getting rid of the other metals first. Sorting the trash from the good, we do this with mechanical processes first. Which is extremely important.
Failure here will be failure with any process.
We may need to also do a pre-dissolve of metals with acid to further separate the unwanted metals (like using only HCl with no oxidizer (or very weak oxidizer, like 3% H2O2 and water), basically we want to get trash out first .
If you put trash in, with your gold, you get trash out, and maybe no gold.
My suggestion (after this is done), is to forget cell phones and PCB mother boards, or any other electronic scrap for now. They are too hard to learn in the beginning, with (too many metals, and some like tin {solder}) that will make a big mess or nightmares.
You need to work with more simple materials and processes, first, to see how it works, and to see how to get gold, and then to get gold pure. This will give you some experience, to put to, all of that study, that you have been doing.
I know you have been reading Hokes Book, it is really basically what you need to understand, but when we read it there are too many new things we are learning new to us, we focus on words that tell us how, but in between these words, we do not see some of the simple messages between her words, like the important steps of preparing the scrap or metals before they ever see acid. Keep reading Hokes as you gain experience, you will then understand the simple but very important messages she teaches.
Collect memory fingers study about them, study copper II chloride leach (called incorrectly, Acid peroxide method, too late to correct that name now.), these you will only deal with mostly copper, some gold, and very little nickle (we remove all solder {lead and tin} in mechanical process), the process is more simple, to recover the gold, dissolving copper and nickle away from it into cations, which can be reused to do more dissolving (saves you big on chemicals and acids). we do not use strong oxidizing acids like nitric that can be much more dangerous,or hard to deal with.
Note: That same process will work much better on the scrap you are trying to work with now...
The way you tried to get gold from your cell phones this time was completely wrong, for that type of materials, to many things to list now.
First learn to get the gold. Collecting scrap, and recovery of the gold, from that scrap, and then we can learn to dissolve it and get it back in a refining process, such as using HCl and bleach (sodium hypochlorite {used to wash white cloths}, where the process is much more simple than using Aqua regia (HCl and HNO3 nitric acid).
Save what you have from this process (mess). Save everything, liquids, powders, melting dish, any parts that you tried to get the gold from, every thing (you have a good chance to get the gold after you gain some experience).
Continue to study the safety section.
Make a special study of dealing with waste, not only for your safety and others around you. But also much of the principles you will learn there are actually extremely helpful in almost all recovery and refining, a good understanding of the dealing with waste is really very key in understanding many if not most of the principles of recovery and refining, once you understand them well...
It is hard for many people to help you at once, ( it could also confuse you more), there are to many different ways to go, and when you come here asking a question about a problem (like here using a bad method to begin with, aqua regia on electronic scrap, you may get answers of how to get back your gold or what went wrong, but you will not learn much about how to get it right). The raven say's go this way the crow says go to go that way, all of the animals may take a different path to get to the water.
So clean up and pack up this mess, save it for later.
Collect memory fingers and study, study, study, ask questions about what you do not understand in that study.
Forget about using any chemicals for now, collect scrap, and study (the gold will be there when you are ready).
Study is the and understanding is your treasure map, learn to read the map as you collect more scrap, get the memory fingers while you learn the processes, much later when your ready to start, begin with small experiments, to gain experience with what you have learned, discuss with the forum your plans and procedures, what can go right what can go wrong, what it should look like ... start out simple (not fast), start out slow (Slow and easy wins the race in this game).
This is a very long journey, which is very hard in the beginning, you could be a long time before you really need any acids, (Months or even years, depending on how much you learn first), it takes years and years of study, and we all will study the rest of our lives (as we improve and refine our knowledge and understanding of these sciences and arts, and never learn it all in our life time.
So spending a little time studying before you even open a bottle of deadly and dangerous acids and pour them on metals, which makes deadly fumes or even explosive mixtures, and leaves us with deadly and toxic wastes waters to deal with, that time spent in study and preparing our selves for a life long journey into the field of gold recovery and refining is no big deal for anyone serious about, or willing to learn this profession.
The rabbit, and the turtle had a race, the rabbit knew he was fast, and he thought he was smart, the slow old turtle he did not concentrate on gold, he spent his time studying and asking questions to learn before he took off on his long and slow journey, The turtle spent his time and learned where to go, and how to get there, and the best trails. The Fast young rabbit took off, in a hurry, running fast for the gold. The slow old turtle stopped to study safety. As the rabbit ran up and down the mountains, up and down up and down...
When the turtle was ready he started his long, and slow journey, he stayed on the trail( even though it seemed to be taking him the long way around the big mountains.
The fast ole young rabbit, well he got lost in his hurry to find the gold, lost in the mountains and started asking the other animals which way to go. The crow pointed north, and the raven pointed south, the deer pointed east, each animal would tell him a different trail they used to get there.
Well to make a very long story short, just you guess who got to the gold first?
You will if you prepare yourself.
Good luck show us the ways your planning and we can discuss the problems along that trail before you begin your trip.
The brown powder in the top photo looks like rust (iron powders) there could be several metals in there with iron.
You may or may not have had gold in them.
When many metals get dissolved together into acid, the metal becomes ions of those metals, these metal ions can come back out of solution when they come into contact with a metal that is not dissolved.
Say we have strong acids on a big mix of metals, many metals can dissolve to become salts of those metals in liquid (metal ions called cations). The acid also becomes a salt of the acid called anions.
When metal cations comes into contact with a metal (not dissolved) the metal can trade places with the cations. The cation becomes metal powder coming out of solution, and the metal that was not dissolved, will itself become a cation in solution (trading places, called displacement reactions).
Metals like to trade places in certain ways. The more reactive metals (the undissolved metal in thoughts above) will replace less reactive metal dissolved (cation).
Copper metal replaces gold cations from solution.
Iron metal replaces copper and gold cations from solution.
Zinc metal will replace copper iron and gold cations...
This reaction, we call the reactivity series of metals and displacement reactions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactivity_series
You may or may not of had gold in those powders.
The gold may just have been replaced by any undissolved metals (left in the trash you were trying to dissolve, or it could be in both places at once (testing is important) our eyes to see the gold when we cannot...
Study how to make your test solution (stannous chloride), which could be made from the electronic solder you have or better with a more pure tin solder you can get very cheap new...
What you need first, is to understand how to process, or prepare your scrap-- before you use any acids.
preparing the trash (or scrap) before is actually more important than using acids to dissolve, or using chemicals to get the metal back.
When we dissolve gold, we do not want to dissolve any other metal if we can help it. We will eliminate all other metals and organic crap first. So we must prepare by getting rid of the other metals first. Sorting the trash from the good, we do this with mechanical processes first. Which is extremely important.
Failure here will be failure with any process.
We may need to also do a pre-dissolve of metals with acid to further separate the unwanted metals (like using only HCl with no oxidizer (or very weak oxidizer, like 3% H2O2 and water), basically we want to get trash out first .
If you put trash in, with your gold, you get trash out, and maybe no gold.
My suggestion (after this is done), is to forget cell phones and PCB mother boards, or any other electronic scrap for now. They are too hard to learn in the beginning, with (too many metals, and some like tin {solder}) that will make a big mess or nightmares.
You need to work with more simple materials and processes, first, to see how it works, and to see how to get gold, and then to get gold pure. This will give you some experience, to put to, all of that study, that you have been doing.
I know you have been reading Hokes Book, it is really basically what you need to understand, but when we read it there are too many new things we are learning new to us, we focus on words that tell us how, but in between these words, we do not see some of the simple messages between her words, like the important steps of preparing the scrap or metals before they ever see acid. Keep reading Hokes as you gain experience, you will then understand the simple but very important messages she teaches.
Collect memory fingers study about them, study copper II chloride leach (called incorrectly, Acid peroxide method, too late to correct that name now.), these you will only deal with mostly copper, some gold, and very little nickle (we remove all solder {lead and tin} in mechanical process), the process is more simple, to recover the gold, dissolving copper and nickle away from it into cations, which can be reused to do more dissolving (saves you big on chemicals and acids). we do not use strong oxidizing acids like nitric that can be much more dangerous,or hard to deal with.
Note: That same process will work much better on the scrap you are trying to work with now...
The way you tried to get gold from your cell phones this time was completely wrong, for that type of materials, to many things to list now.
First learn to get the gold. Collecting scrap, and recovery of the gold, from that scrap, and then we can learn to dissolve it and get it back in a refining process, such as using HCl and bleach (sodium hypochlorite {used to wash white cloths}, where the process is much more simple than using Aqua regia (HCl and HNO3 nitric acid).
Save what you have from this process (mess). Save everything, liquids, powders, melting dish, any parts that you tried to get the gold from, every thing (you have a good chance to get the gold after you gain some experience).
Continue to study the safety section.
Make a special study of dealing with waste, not only for your safety and others around you. But also much of the principles you will learn there are actually extremely helpful in almost all recovery and refining, a good understanding of the dealing with waste is really very key in understanding many if not most of the principles of recovery and refining, once you understand them well...
It is hard for many people to help you at once, ( it could also confuse you more), there are to many different ways to go, and when you come here asking a question about a problem (like here using a bad method to begin with, aqua regia on electronic scrap, you may get answers of how to get back your gold or what went wrong, but you will not learn much about how to get it right). The raven say's go this way the crow says go to go that way, all of the animals may take a different path to get to the water.
So clean up and pack up this mess, save it for later.
Collect memory fingers and study, study, study, ask questions about what you do not understand in that study.
Forget about using any chemicals for now, collect scrap, and study (the gold will be there when you are ready).
Study is the and understanding is your treasure map, learn to read the map as you collect more scrap, get the memory fingers while you learn the processes, much later when your ready to start, begin with small experiments, to gain experience with what you have learned, discuss with the forum your plans and procedures, what can go right what can go wrong, what it should look like ... start out simple (not fast), start out slow (Slow and easy wins the race in this game).
This is a very long journey, which is very hard in the beginning, you could be a long time before you really need any acids, (Months or even years, depending on how much you learn first), it takes years and years of study, and we all will study the rest of our lives (as we improve and refine our knowledge and understanding of these sciences and arts, and never learn it all in our life time.
So spending a little time studying before you even open a bottle of deadly and dangerous acids and pour them on metals, which makes deadly fumes or even explosive mixtures, and leaves us with deadly and toxic wastes waters to deal with, that time spent in study and preparing our selves for a life long journey into the field of gold recovery and refining is no big deal for anyone serious about, or willing to learn this profession.
The rabbit, and the turtle had a race, the rabbit knew he was fast, and he thought he was smart, the slow old turtle he did not concentrate on gold, he spent his time studying and asking questions to learn before he took off on his long and slow journey, The turtle spent his time and learned where to go, and how to get there, and the best trails. The Fast young rabbit took off, in a hurry, running fast for the gold. The slow old turtle stopped to study safety. As the rabbit ran up and down the mountains, up and down up and down...
When the turtle was ready he started his long, and slow journey, he stayed on the trail( even though it seemed to be taking him the long way around the big mountains.
The fast ole young rabbit, well he got lost in his hurry to find the gold, lost in the mountains and started asking the other animals which way to go. The crow pointed north, and the raven pointed south, the deer pointed east, each animal would tell him a different trail they used to get there.
Well to make a very long story short, just you guess who got to the gold first?
You will if you prepare yourself.
Good luck show us the ways your planning and we can discuss the problems along that trail before you begin your trip.
Butcher,
Absolutely the most spot on, well written and inspiring newbie must-read post I have seen so far! In my opinion, this post should be read by all new and inexperienced members before attempting to “run fast”.
Thank you!
"Starting to trot along" James
Absolutely the most spot on, well written and inspiring newbie must-read post I have seen so far! In my opinion, this post should be read by all new and inexperienced members before attempting to “run fast”.
Thank you!
"Starting to trot along" James
Here are a few of the must read posts which I find should help out our new members.
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=47
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=1300
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=3781
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=85
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=42
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=4646
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=796
http://au-prospecting.com/gr/gr.html
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=562
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=5604
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=9349
http://goldrecovery.us/forum_search.asp
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=19798
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jpbirk/qual/qualanal/catprop.html
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jpbirk/qual/qualanal/confirm.htm
http://www.goldnscrap.com/
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=6873#6873
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=47
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=1300
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=3781
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=85
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=42
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=4646
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=796
http://au-prospecting.com/gr/gr.html
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=562
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=5604
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=9349
http://goldrecovery.us/forum_search.asp
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=19798
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jpbirk/qual/qualanal/catprop.html
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jpbirk/qual/qualanal/confirm.htm
http://www.goldnscrap.com/
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=6873#6873
Thanks . . . . my "trotting along" continues!
James
James
butcher, thank you so so much for your explanation. will do from the beginning again and start fresh although it failed it gave me experiences.
I will continue learning and keep on reading the tutorial. while experiment I will post step by step the process i'll be doing entirely.
appreciate it so much if everyone can guide me.
I will continue learning and keep on reading the tutorial. while experiment I will post step by step the process i'll be doing entirely.
appreciate it so much if everyone can guide me.
nickton
Well-known member
I think you all just wrote a treatise on "how to thoroughly confuse a newcomer".
Well, if so, they wrote is about six years ago. Do you have a better response?
Dave
Dave
