# Hindsight is 20/20, or... How NOT to do it



## jweldridge (Sep 13, 2010)

This is the result of removing the the foils from a 1/2 of a 5 gallon bucket of ISA "fingers"...



After finding lasersteve's web page and videos and this forum, here is my second attempt...



Notice the difference?

1st it seems there are some pretty intelligent people that hang around in here. I have learned much, such as weight is MEASURED as pounds, ounces, or grams. Not 1 gal bucket of fingers, 1/2 of 5 gal bucket of lime. And 500 ml of liquid is MEASURED, not 2 glugs when you turn the 1 gal jug up.

Well back to my questions. I now have about 3 quarts of thick blue green liquid with dissolved "fingers" from a lot of ISA cards. I used various methods of removal and poured them all together in a bucket. It contains nitric acid


sulfuric acid, bleach and hydrogen peroxide... I think that's all.
It was about 3 gallons at one time which seemed like a lot to work with. I used the burner from my turkey cooker and simmered it until I boiled it down to what it is now. It's all still there but much more concentrated. 
Is there any chance to recover the gold out of this mess or should I just pour it down the drain?

I also have 37.72 pounds (notice my unit of measure now... I bought a digital scale) of 486's, various Cryix, AMD ceramic, and Pentium chips to process



Then 44.22 pounds of 32 and 72 pin memory chips



I have done what I have seen many times "just SEARCH the forums - you will find the answers", all I can say is if you don't know WHAT you are specifically looking for the answers are hard to find. Plus everyone seems to have their favorite method that others don't seem to agree with.
But anyway any help will greatly be appreciated.

Thank For Listening (Reading),
John Eldridge


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## Palladium (Sep 13, 2010)

Welcome to the forum John.


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## jimdoc (Sep 13, 2010)

Don't pour anything like that down the drain.
You have more reading to do.
Search disposing waste and safety

Jim


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## jimdoc (Sep 13, 2010)

Also your gold should never be lost,until you dispose of it.
Check it with stannous to see if it contains any gold.

Jim


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## Claudie (Sep 13, 2010)

I will let someone else explain how to get your gold back (because I don't know). Something to keep in mind, next time you are trying anything new, use small amounts to experiment with. If something does go wrong, you don't have as big of a mess to clean up. :|


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## goldenchild (Sep 13, 2010)

jweldridge,

Im glad you posted this as its relevent to a question I have and I wont have to start a new thread. I will help you and then maybe you or someone else can answer a question I have. 

First of all your remaining solution looks to be super saturated with copper. So much so that your values may already be cemented out and waiting to be recovered at the bottom of the container. Im guessing it got to its soupy consistancy by your simmering and boiling you spoke of. Hopefully you didnt "boil" much of the values away. By the volume you have left over I bet you denoxed most of the nitric (this is good). On that note this is what I would do if someone handed me that solution and asked me to try and recover its values...

-Firstly I would test it with stannous chloride.

-Whether its positive or negative, I would get the solution to the consistancy of water. 

-If the stannous test is negative and you are satisfied with that, add water. Use only enough water so that the solution isnt syrupy anymore. Dont over do it with water. It will be more volume to process. Filter the now watered down solution leaving the values in the filter(s). Refine values as usual. 

-If the stannous test proves positive or you are not satisfied with a negative result, get the solution's consistancy to that of water using equal parts of water and HCL. Again, only use enough to get the solution to the consistancy of water.

-Add a copper bus bar or copper pipe to the solution. 

-If your previous stannous test was positive, keep rinsing the copper object and testing the solution with stannous until the solution tests barren. If your previous solution tested negative and nothing cements onto the copper bar, you can be fairly certain your solution is barren. If values do cement out keep rinsing copper and testing with stannous. Leaving your copper object in solution overnight should be suficiant for your initial submersion.

-If any values are cemented filter and refine as usual. 

If I missed anything please add to this. Now for my question  

In your second picture of the foils how many pounds did it take to accumulate that many foils? I recently did my very first AP processing with 200 grams of memory fingers and yeilded 1 gram of Au. It was great success!



Ok. So I have 3 pounds of gold fingers from various sources. Here is my question to you or anyone else who cares to answer. Would you process all three pounds at once or a pound at a time? My main concerns are that there will be so much copper in solution that it will cement out values. This will be harder to rinse off the plastics without missing some. I'm also thinking that it may be hard for all the foils to make their way to the bottom of the strainer bucket and holes, again complicating recovery. I know this may seem simple to many but I just want to make sure I do it right the first time around. Here are some pics


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## jimdoc (Sep 13, 2010)

You shouldn't have any problems doing all 3 lbs at the same time.
I like to do 5 lbs at a time,it makes it easier to do them in bunchs.

Jim


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## qst42know (Sep 14, 2010)

Hello John.

Read the post by 4metals in this thread for dealing with waste.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=1300&start=0&hilit=waste


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## glorycloud (Sep 14, 2010)

When I am able to collect or acquire lots of fingers (10+ pounds), I just
run them in AP in "parallel". Meaning that I have multiple lots going
at the same time. They all seem to end about the same time and I do
all the washing of foils and rinsing of foils together as much as possible.

I reuse the rinse water to help keep the volume of waste water down.
I keep using it until the white copper chloride keeps forming and starts
really slowing down the time it takes to filter the foils from the rinse water. 

Sometimes, when I am impatient with the foils that want to cling to
the fingers, I just filter and wash the fingers and let the scraggly
fingers with little bits of gold foils here all go in one bucket and
just let it sit in AP for days and days until I end up with totally 
(oK 99%) clean fingers. 

I have just found that it's easier to handle them en masse and the
volume of precipitated gold powder is always nice to see. 8)


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## Chumbawamba (Sep 14, 2010)

I just did my first batch of ~100g of PII/III slot processor edge connectors. I think it was either 40 or 50 processors (I'll have to go back and count). My dirty pile of filtered foils weighs about 0.4g, almost half a gram. Properly purified and melted it should be at 0.4g.

I'm currently working a batch of previously processed fingers that didn't work out. They're from a friend's process where I think he tried to do AR on the fingers. It ended up leaving a bunch of foils in tact that are visible, but also covered up most of the fingers with a layer of what I'm guessing is CuO (a greenish pasty film). Pretty soon after I threw them in the AP pot the CuO layer dissolved away exposing gleaming gold fingers  I figure I'll get upwards of a gram from this batch.

Oh what fun this is!


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## samuel-a (Sep 15, 2010)

let's see if i understand currectly your first attempt...

you put your fingers in nitric acid, then added sulfuric acid H2O2 and bleach ?
NO HCL ?

in which order did you add them ?


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## goldenchild (Sep 16, 2010)

All went well without incident. I processed all the fingers with less than a gallon of waste.


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## goldenchild (Sep 17, 2010)

I embedded a video of me precipitating the gold from the above fingers in the thread "SO2 AND ICE WATER" or you can just go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwc4LTTuZB4


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## joem (Sep 17, 2010)

Goldenchild: How many fingers of ram or grams (pounds?) did you start with?
or is this the 3 pounds pictured above?
Great Vid by the way


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## goldenchild (Sep 17, 2010)

joem said:


> Goldenchild: How many fingers of ram or grams (pounds?) did you start with?
> or is this the 3 pounds pictured above?
> Great Vid by the way



Its the 3 pounds pictured above. I currently have the waste precipitating out values too. Looks like there will be another 1-2 grams from that.


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