# Tin collected big values?



## WIZZARD (May 5, 2010)

Mobuis Cell is used with silver to create pure silver at the CAT, however when tin is use as a collector the results were stunning!
How to part Au and PGM's from tin, when tin is 80% and Nobel Metals are in the 18% range. When attempting to melt, under 600F, (expecting pure tin) the collected metal Cat's feathers turned to gray powder some brown. Electromotive voltage is .14v for Sn, however to get things moving a higher voltage was use.


Tin 99.9% granulated to minus 60 mess mixed with matrix with Noble Metals and milled to minus 1,000 mesh was placed in collecting steel container and brought to a temperature of 600F. The tin turned golden at once and when examined micron size metal flakes of metal and tin were created. Much of the flakes would not integrate with the main pool of melted tin. The entire bulk was place in a graphic crucible and fluxed with borax, and soda ash........heated to 1650F and results was a button, very white metal shinny.




When this button is melted in open stainless steel cup it turns golden. (See the results in the bottom picture.) Notice the black dark metal on the button. (somehow two cell images posted and I can not delete the one for some cyber space reason, some other out of order has taken place too?)




The problem with this is, the feathers will not appear unless more volts are used, which causes a over charge, which allows the other metals in the dor'e to cross over to the cat. The next problem is time.........this takes forever........How do I get more amps out of simple power source without increasing the voltage, to speed up the process, without closing the space in between the electrodes? The anode mud is full of Sn compounds and NM values. Need some advice to make this work better. The way this is supposed to work, the mud in the anode bag, goodies, and tin on the cat 99% tin to be use over. 

WIZZARD


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## g_axelsson (May 5, 2010)

Tin will oxidize when melted in air. Faster at higher temperatures. The yellow tint is from metal oxides forming on the surface of the melt. The black mass is just more concentrated metal oxides.

/Göran


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## machiavelli976 (May 5, 2010)

larger surface for electrodes. flat shape not rods.


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## lazersteve (May 5, 2010)

If your precious metals portion was only 10% (2%/20% = 10%) contamination why did you add tin? Why not process the 90% (18% / 20% = 90%) Precious Metals away from the 10% trash using conventional chemistry?

Aqua Regia would have served you well in this situation. If the silver content was too high in the PM portion you could have inquarted with silver and parted with 35% nitric. 

Steve


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## goldsilverpro (May 5, 2010)

At a place I worked, we got in 100# batches of dental amalgam quite often. After the mercury was removed with a retort, we melted the remaining tin/silver into bars and ran them through a standard 30 gallon Thum silver cell. The tin content ran about 50-60%, with silver as the remainder. The tin was converted to insoluble metastannic acid by the nitric and was trapped by the filter cloth under the anodes. Essentially all of the silver was liberated and plated out normally as crystal. The anode bars started out about 3/8" thick. As the metastannic acid started forming on the cloth, they would grow to about 2" thick.

It's been so long that I don't remember the operating conditions. I would imagine it was standard cell solution and was run at the normal Thum silver cell voltage of 3-4 volts. I also don't remember if we had to re-melt and re-run the silver - possibly not.


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## WIZZARD (May 5, 2010)

Thanks for the input.

Soldier has tin in it and when doing some electronic waste you deal with minor levels, understood. As I understand it, tin, oxide develops around 900F and comes off a white powder. When I test pure tin and heating in it a new stainless steel cup the tin when cooled is still tin silver color, at 900F the white oxide forms. When the tin is around 460F and exposed to powdered ore the color goes golden at once.

A alloy of Au 80% and tin 20% will melt around 556F, so when tin melts at 460F it will amalgam NM and base metals just like Hg at room temperature. The alloy of gold and/pgm/base metal that is formed at 460f causes the melting temperature to go up to 600F - 700F. ExRay indicated the surface to be .56% Au. If Ex-ray's are blocked by lead and tin is a sister metal, should tin also block XRD reading except for the surface? Another subject!,

When I use silver I use 100g of Ag to 100g of ore, however when using tin I can mix up 500g of ore to 100g of tin get the metals to make small heaver alloys than the micron NM's and they can be collected and fused with much less flux to get the loaded button.
So If I can get this loaded tin cell to act like a Ballbach-Thurm or Moebius Cell using tin electrolyte instead of silver nitrate then I can load the metals that will fuss at low temperature to make pre fusion, then high temperature to make a alloy, to be use in a cell, to recover NM in one bag and the pure tin on the cat. That's the goal.

The rounds are a re-melt of the high temp fusion in a cup to get the shape, and melted again in long flat mold to make thin dor'e for the cell, I should roll them much thinner.......yes?

The dross method is well known to separated metals from one another, however the gold seams to stay with the tin, and dossing is a overnight deal. The thick dark stuff on the top is ugly but it's the metal that does not want to stay as an alloy. They are suspected to be the very high melting temperature NM's.........some of the pgm's like Ir. At white oxide temperatures one can see a purple film and what looks like gold film under it and silver tin under that. 

I found using silver over 2 volts I would get Au/Pgm's in the electrolyte and on the cat, I wanted more silver on cat so the the volts went up to 9 - 12 gold and pgm's would go over to cat. I need higher amps and keep the voltage low. Will a rectifier work with low volts and high amps rather than just a DC power supply? Or make sheets of electrodes? The feathers grow at speed faster than I can knock them off sometimes and even after two hours of doing this still got a lot of dor'e in the bag.

Going to AR off the bat or even thiourea leach places values in ions that are not zero valance and the fusing the tin will and will keep a lot of the other elements from going in as a hot amalgam or alloy. When metals melt and do their thing many host elements do not go with the pool. Some leaching will take days as fusion is very fast, it's parting the dor'e , to keep tin elemental, keep the goodies in the bag, and keep the solutions from being sower. 

WIZZARD


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