# gold ore question



## bswartzwelder (Mar 9, 2013)

Hi All,

I have some quartz which appears to have some veins or specks of gold in it and was wondering what the best way to process this would be. Right now, I'm thinking of crushing it into a powder, then treat it to a bath of HCl and Chlorox. Next, filter out the quartz, and spray down the filter paper with water, catching it in the HCl - Chlorox. Next step would be to drop it with SMB. Does this sound feasible?


----------



## nickvc (Mar 9, 2013)

I'm no mineral hound or miner but i would suggest that the crushing would be the first step followed by concentrating the values, removing as much rock as possible, as the guys say trash in trash out, and then try to refine your gold. 
Panning may be the way to concentrate your values if you only have small quantities but other methods are covered in the mining section for larger amounts.


----------



## reddgold (Mar 20, 2013)

I have crushed gold ore. I then put the material into 4 parts HCL for an hour, then added 1 part nitric acid. I estimated the amount of gold and added a volume of the aqua regia. IE I estimated 30 grams of gold, and added 120ml of aqua regia. I heate the batch for 2 hours. I estimated that all the gold and any other metals would be dissolved by then. After I added some urea to neutralize the nitric acid. The solution went from orange yellow to lite yellow greenish. After which the solution was no longer fizzing. I then added some SMB to the solution. It is then that the solution went beige in colour.
I am now stuck?


----------



## butcher (Mar 21, 2013)

reddgold,

You say you are stuck; I am not sure what you mean.
From what little you stated here I did not see you going anywhere anyway with these strong acids in the powdered rock to try to leach gold.

So you put strong acid on a crushed rock (which depending on the rock could be terribly dangerous, rock can be made up of most anything, and arsenic with gold bearing ore is not uncommon).

I did not see where you dissolved gold in the aqua regia, because you said you put the acid on crushed rock, what type of rock? Carbonate, phosphate, fluoride, sulfide, arsenic sulfide, arsenate, oxide, chloride, chromate, silicate, or which of the several other types of rocks, what metals were involved in the rock? Lithium, sodium, potassium, calcium, barium, zinc, mercury, lead, copper, iron, nickel, aluminum, chromium, selenium, tellurium, silver, or the many other metals rocks are composed of, and what complexes of these was the rock, what was the rocks chemistry? 

You say you had gold in the rock, how did you prove this, most gold in rock you will not be able to see, there are some exceptions, I have seen so many people thinking they would be getting rich on pyrite (fools gold) it is not even funny any ore.

What pretreatments did you do to process the rock, how did you remove the gold from the rock, or how did you remove sulfides or other compounds...

From what you stated here not only are you stuck doing something that to me not only sounds very dangerous, but it almost sounds foolish without knowing more details, How did you come up with 30 grams of gold in one little rock, or did you mean to say 30 grams of gold to the ton of rock.

Rock can be very complex mix minerals or salts of metals many of which can be locked up in crystal structures, throwing powdered rock in an acid like aqua regia may not only put off some very deadly gases, but may not really do much good at all, think of the rock and what it is, the rock is a chemical compound, and it can be made up of many different chemicals and metals, so when you put the rock in acid what does leach could be most any chemical, or your rock could just neutralize your acid, you may not even be able to leach the gold, it could be locked up as a sulfide compound, that the acid could not touch, you could leach any number of metals depending on what the rock was made of, many of which would use up acids and others may just pull your gold if it is leached right back out of solution, and back into the rock or metal.

Aqua regia is a very strong acid, but it could get very expensive to pour it on rocks, and most of the time not only very dangerous but useless to try and get any gold, very seldom would I even think of leaching ore with aqua regia.

Maybe if I could see the rock you are talking about, or seen a detailed assay on it I may change my mind, but without seeing those, and not hearing of pretreatments, or the type of ore I say, not only are you stuck but you are lucky, and what you did may have just been useless.

You could try removing free nitric acid from the solution (I know you said you dumped some useless urea fertilizer in there, but depending on conditions that may or may-not have done much of any good), and test the solution with stannous chloride, cement out any values (if there are any in the leach) using copper metal, treat your waste solution (cement out metals using iron), raise pH to 9.5 to precipitate metal hydroxides, lower pH to 7 to precipitate remaining, and when clear salt water, dry metal powders and dispose of the waste solution and dried powder hydroxides in approved waste disposal.


----------



## mitchd (Mar 21, 2013)

Butcher is right on this you should read his post 4 or 5 times so that you understand what he is saying about minerals. You should never add acids to minerals without knowing what you have, this could kill you.
Without a PHOTO of what you working on and based what you are saying happened I think that all you have if iron pyrite or chalcopyrite and this has a very nice gold color.
120 ML of AR leads me to think that your total sample weight about 30 to 40 grams? The fact that is crushed at all having SOOOOOOOOO much gold in this sample say that there is no gold or very little gold in this sample. With real gold you would not be able to powder it it would flatten out just like any other metal would.
Chalcopyrite does sometime have gold in it, where I live in Arizona the chalcopyrite can somethime be very rich in gold a around 1/3 of an ounce in a TON of chalcopyrite, yes 1/3 ounce per ton and this is very very rich gold ore most mines are mining gold ore that is less that .10 or an ounce per ton of ore. 
Fool gold fools lots of folks that why they call it FOOLS GOLD.
Mitch


----------



## Nijiman (Mar 29, 2013)

I recently saw something that taled about how miners in the Phillipines crush the ore, then work it in soapy water with a little borax and then pan the micron gold out. They gather it carefully in a piece of plastic wrap adding an equal amount of borax in with the gold and then melt it in a clay port. I found this video on Youtube. I too have Quartz ore and had been wondering how to get the gold out without using cyanide and mercury. I think this is it, at least it seems to work for them. Once you make the buttons you can refin with AR and shouldnt have any problems. Heres the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B28dTncIrJw


----------

