# refining ore with ar?



## superten67 (Nov 19, 2012)

hi guys after an initial hash up ive got my ap process sorted and am bebefiting from all the help and knowledge available on the forum so thanks and will be staying as its very interesting and informative.
and during the course of my reading on you tube and here have delved into the idea of refining ore but held back as it seems a bit too complicated and a lot more work than electronic scrap.
every process ive found involves different chemicals to what we use doing what most of us do.
but the question i want to ask is if you have ore that is crushed and you can physically see gold or platinum why do people not dissolve it in ar the same as the electronic scrap?
surely if its really fine would it not be the same process?
i know it can be panned but why is ore extraction so much more complicated/


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## nickvc (Nov 19, 2012)

I'm far from an expert on ores or minerals but the same principle applies when refining precious metals from any source, you try to eliminate as many base metals and or compounds as possible before you attempt to refine the values. The ideas as promoted on the forum to refine e scrap address this issue and in virtually all cases the base metals and other materials are removed before the values ate refined, AP, sulphuric cell etc. When it comes to ores the problem is identifying exactly what the other elements are, some when mixed with acids form deadly gases or very hazardous compounds that you really don't want to be around hence the need to concentrate the ores to a point where smelting can give you a solid metal that hopefully will be free of most of the more toxic elelments, the actual heating will drive off a good many and good extraction and fume control is advised unless you know exactly what is vaporising and been driven off by the heat. The bar containing the values can then be selectively refined using the methods ,again here on the forum, and the values extracted.


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## superten67 (Nov 19, 2012)

thanks for that now im a bit clearer as to whats what.


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## bswartzwelder (Nov 19, 2012)

If you crush ores down into a powder then soak the powder with AR, how do you retrieve all the PM's? You will end up with a wet blob of muck. The blob is wet with AR which contains values. There won't be much in the way of values unless you are working with tons of ore. The people who do this professionally create a slurry using cyanide. This isn't something you want around the house, family, pets, or neighborhood. The professionals use cyanide instead of AR probably because cyanide is cheaper to work with and the acid would be corrosive. There are ways to do it, unfortunately those methods are beyond the capabilities (for one reason or another) of people doing this as a hobby. By the way, when I first became interested in precious metals recovery and refining, I bought 10 pounds of "gold rich ore" and crushed it down into a powder. Then I mixed some of it with a flux and heated it till I had a molten mass. I poured it into a conical, cast iron mold. When it cooled, I had a couple of neat looking conical black glass pieces where the gold was supposed to settle to the bottom. Never did see any gold from these "rich" ores. I then repeated the process by dropping a small, measured amount of placer gold in with the crushed ore and flux. This time, when I poured it out and it had cooled, I found a tiny button of what appears to be gold. It was approximately the same weight, or ever so slightly higher, in weight than the original gold. It is pretty, but it has gone into my vial of placer gold to be processed with AR when I feel comfortable with the process (and the weather warms up a bit). Hope this helps.


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## superten67 (Nov 19, 2012)

yeah i know what your saying,and i know people have been doing it for centuries the incas for instance.
but it keeps going through my head (and i know what you mean about it being like mud)but i cant help thinking that if you do the ar process on sand with gold dust and flecks in it surely if there is gold in it it will go into solution?
and if so its then just a case of filtering out said solution and treating it with a precipitant?
i dont particularly like the idea of shipping or from the states cause of the cost but its about the art of extraction for me now.
i keep wondering see i love this site.


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## element47.5 (Nov 19, 2012)

Another way to look at this issue is to look at the "grams per ton" or "ounces per ton" figures from various miners....from their annual stock reports, or, from some of the mining cos promoted by Eric King on kingworldnews.com (which has some good interviews) Various other sources, but the number I am suggesting you focus on is this gms/ton or oz/ton figure. Some mines have much better yields than others. I happen to know that some of Goldcorps' mines allow them to produce $128 gold, some of them let them produce $350 gold. That says nothing about the particular ore you might be able to acquire, those are just numbers I recall from when I followed the stock of Goldcorp (GG) They are, by the way, among the world's lowest-cost producers. 

To get reasonable amounts of values out of raw ore, the truth of the matter is that you have to handle multiple tons of it and maybe thousands of tons of it. Even if you could get an ounce of gold per ton (big fat pickup truckload) of ore....considering the permitting and excavation costs....and considering the chemical costs....and considering the waste disposal and considering the safety gear and various energy inputs and the assay costs....do you truly imagine you could do all that for $1700 processing a ton of muck? (I am talking gold) Maybe you could. Would you be working for $10 an hour? Could you make more money investing in the stock, which you can do in your underwear, with a mouse-click? (Serious question, even though it may sound silly) I yelled at at least half a dozen people to buy NEM common stock in the 44's. Last time it went to 57 in ~45 days. It revisited $44.50 two days ago and I think it's good for at least $50. 

Worldwide extraction costs for gold are, last I checked, in the upper $700 range. This is with all their economies of scale, this with probably legacy-type permitting, this is with various standards that are, shall we say, relaxed compared to what they might be in the US. But the people who do this have gigantic infrastructure and the money to pay off local officials who just might change the rules next Tuesday. 

I am very skeptical that a small-time guy can do this in a worthwhile fashion, but I have never done it and I could be entirely wrong and I would be happy to see someone succeeding at it. I have absolutely zero doubt that buying junk jewelry from people would yield massively, massively more profit than operating a mine. If you can pick up nuggets with a metal detector and/or a sluicebox, that might be something. 

No criticism intended, by the way, I just like to explore things mentally before breaking ground or breaking bones or breaking laws.


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## superten67 (Nov 19, 2012)

yeah i agree from what i ve read today and a few more vids it seems like a rich commercial type of proposition ie if youve got millions to throw at it you'll make lots back but not really for the small time operation.


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## butcher (Nov 19, 2012)

Miners rarely made money, most worked very hard in very bad conditions for very little money, big investors made money, or company's with deep pockets, or crooks selling worthless ground to the uneducated fool, people who sold supplies to the miners also profited like Levi the tent maker who took his canvas to sell miners and he found out these pour souls worked the pants off of there legs, they needed pants more than tents, so Levi started making britches out of his tent material and sold miners the "blue jeans", or the farmer who would sell one peach to some poor hungry miner for an ounce of gold, or the poor miner who desperately needed salt to preserve the meat he killed, salt was sold an ounce of salt for an ounce of gold, most small time miners could barley feed themselves, if it was not for dried beans and deer they killed they would have starved. Many miners were actually prospectors, the goal was to find the gold, mine a little bit and sell the mine, and move on to the next prospect.

Miners many times are dreamers, always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (I think them little darn Leprechaun's are always moving that pot to another hiding spot, just before you get there).

Mining gold can be found as free gold like placer gold in streams and rivers, or vein gold free gold in rocks which can be crushed and separated from the ore using gravity methods, these are where most gold that has been mined came from, but gold can also be mixed microscopically in ore usually as an compound of other metals or acids that made the compound, this gold is usually mined as a byproduct of some other mining operation like in copper mines, ore can get very complicated, and as Nickvc, has stated can be very complicated and dangerous to extract from the ore.

Aqua regia is a refining method not a recovery method; in mining recovery methods are used before the gold can be refined.

Watch out when chasing rainbows, and educate yourself, it is the best way to protect yourself from crooks and Leprechaun's.


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## superten67 (Nov 20, 2012)

yep theres no doubt they had it hard in the old days,i also watched a program on the bbc a few months back entitled "the hardest places in the world to be a?"and the job changes every week.
and that week it was a miner in mongolia,they sent a british specialist in mines rescue to show a small time gold miner how to mine more safely.
it was really interesting there was no shoring up,no safety harnesses and because of where they live and how cold it is they couldnt even dig a half metre before having to set a roaring fire to thaw out the ground sometimes having to fire the surface before they could dig.
so that went on for say a week until the got to the right coulour of clay that they knew would contain the gold.
there were lots of people on the same patch of ground mining often within a metre of each other.
they wouldnt shore up their shafts as they had to drive a long way from home on little mopeds and could only carry limited supplies and were afraid to leave it overnight as their neighbours on the dig which was illegal incidentally would steal the wood to burn on their own ground to thaw it out!
no win shore up and be safe,or shore up and loose it the next day anyway to thieves.
the poor guy in the film had finally one more thaw to go and then he was in the money he lit the fire and got on his bike with his son and went home to fermented goats milk and sheeps head to celebrate with his family.
the next day they went back to the shaft which was say three metres deep only to find it 5 metres deep.....one of the other miners had got their just before daybreak,extinguished the fire and dug out the vein,he was distraught.
it was so sad to see theses people worked so hard for the little they had and to think one of your friends would do that to you made it even worse.
just goes to show how money can corrupt even the simplest of souls.


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## butcher (Nov 20, 2012)

Darn crooks and Leprechaun's.


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## superten67 (Nov 21, 2012)

lol


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## herbbartley (Nov 24, 2012)

Just wanted to add a little bit. The comments on the economies of scale are right on the money. If you had ore that was 1 oz. per ton, and you worked say 5 lbs. of it, if it was typical it would have 1/200 oz. or 1/10 dwt. That's not a whole lot of gold. How much AR are you going to be able to afford to put on it to leach it? There is about $8 there. Any ore that somebody is selling on ebay or elsewhere to the general public isn't going to have that much gold. 1 oz. per ton is really good ore these days. The big mines in Nevada turn a profit working ore that contains 0.02 ozs. per ton. That's right 2/100 oz. per ton of ore. They can make a profit because they process truckloads that are bigger than a house. It is leached, but not with AR. They use sodium cyanide. It is cheap and selective. It mostly ignores iron. They don't spend a lot of time processing the ore, they pile it on a big piece of plastic and spray it with sodium cyanide. The biggest problem for the small miner has always been that economies of scale work against them. They often were very low on the socio-economic scale. They made it because they roughed it. They lived at the claim, and they mostly lived off the land. The quail is the California state bird because it saved many a miner from starvation. That's not to say that money can't be made, just that what you are trying won't work. If you can make a deal with one of the many hobbyist miners who have buckets and buckets of black sand and don't know what to do with them, you will be way better off than buying ore from a stranger. Look at some of the material about processing black sand on the internet. I believe there are some videos on youtube. If you didn't already know black sand is the concentrate from a mining operation that contains countless tiny specks of gold. Much of the work has already been done, but getting the fines out of the black sand is a problem that has always plagued miners.


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