# My first and last....



## UncleBenBen (Oct 4, 2015)

...until I get my lab built anyways.


Here she is, from three small batches that were basically just continuations of all the acquaintance tests I've done.

Only once refined for now. Recovered from fingers from 5 old western electric key cards, late sixties. Six 3 pole industrial relays listed as 'gold clad', probably early eighties, that came from emergency generator controls for a medical building. The rest was about 60 old 128mb SD cards that had full gold tracing on the tiny boards inside. I still have the two small IC's from each board I will get to later.

Harold was right. As careful as I thought I was about base metals, I was absolutely amazed at the change in my gold powder as it went through the washes!

The kovar from those relays gave me a crash course in ferric chloride. I will definitely be looking further into the etching power of that amazing compound! It completely broke down the silver cores that I thought I would have left over. Amazing!

OK. Starting to ramble. Thanks to every body here for ALL you do!!!


----------



## JHS (Oct 4, 2015)

It's always nice when you have some positive results.
Great job
john


----------



## FrugalRefiner (Oct 4, 2015)

Nice little BB Ben. Amazing how heavy it is for its size, isn't it?

Dave


----------



## UncleBenBen (Oct 4, 2015)

JHS said:


> It's always nice when you have some positive results.
> Great job
> john


 
Yes sir, it is! But I did have one negative on what would have been the fourth of my small batches. Gonna go ahead and try to process a bunch of dirty paper towels as sweeps before I pack things up. Hopefully I saved a good bit of what would have been much more gold!



FrugalRefiner said:


> Nice little BB Ben. Amazing how heavy it is for its size, isn't it?



It sure is! Thanks Dave. I can't tell you how many times I've already picked it up an inch or two just to hear that 'TINK' when I drop it into its jar!


----------



## resabed01 (Oct 5, 2015)

Nice BB and good start! I seem to remember my first BB of gold weighed 0.91 grams as well. It was humbling to know how much work and scrap it took to get that tiny BB.
They will get much bigger from now on.


----------



## UncleBenBen (Oct 6, 2015)

Thanks resabed01! 

Humbling is the perfect word for it. Though not so much for the size of the BB as for the incredibly STOOOOPID way I lost roughly 8 to 10 grams of gold powder a few weeks ago!

I had processed the contacts from this type of old wire relays from an old phone system.



They have small gold contacts on the wire fingers. From 2 to maybe 2 dozen for each relay. The gold turned out to be solid over a small palladium core.



I will try and sum it up. 13.2g of clean contacts. Roughly 20% palladium, 80% gold. After HCl/Cl, dropped with SMB. I had the gold powder in a jar out back on a table where I was working. Decanted and sitting in mostly water to save to add more powder later.

The whole time I was working I was getting buzzed by yellow jackets (wasps). One land on the gold jar and I had had enough. Grabbed my automatic mapp torch, aimed it at him and pushed the button. It occurred to me what that would do as it happened and heard 'plink' and out pours my gold across the table and onto the concrete slab I was on.

Aaaaaaaaaaarg! I grabbed paper towels and started wiping up all I could. Threw the wet towels into a small plastic box and tried to rinse all I could into the box with a garden hose. 

It finally evaporated enough to force dry and incinerate. I'll find out if I managed to salvage anything in the next couple of days.




P.S. found the yellow jacket nest over the weekend. They won't be bothering any body any more!!


----------



## lanfear (Oct 6, 2015)

It may look like a big mess right now. But if you did like me and treated it as if it was the last drink in the dessert, you will probably get most of it :lol:


----------



## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 6, 2015)

UncleBenBen said:


> Thanks resabed01!
> 
> Humbling is the perfect word for it. Though not so much for the size of the BB as for the incredibly STOOOOPID way I lost roughly 8 to 10 grams of gold powder a few weeks ago!
> 
> ...




Incinerate the towels and reprocess the material.


----------



## johnny309 (Oct 7, 2015)

When you incinerate the material ....try to add some soda ash.... to get rid of the free Cl- ...


----------



## UncleBenBen (Oct 7, 2015)

I sure do appreciate the input and encouragement y'all! I will have to remember the soda ash. I'm sure the day will come that I will be mopping up pregnant solution.

I dropped the gold three days before I literally dropped the gold. After stannous showed barren solution I decanted and diluted the rest with water twice. Any free Cl should have been long gone.

I got to incinerate last night. I'm assuming from the way the ash clumped up into crunchy pellets as the carbon burned off that I did save at least a bit of gold. As I crushed up the ash after it cooled it became a light brown, tan color. Almost the color of really clean gold powder. I'm hoping that's a good sign also.

It will probably be next week before I can process any farther. My wife won an all expense paid trip to Boston, Mass. To take a VIP tour of the Sam Adams brewery. Luxury hotel, airfare, cab fare, the works. They even gave us $450 to play with! I'll have to pack tonight as we fly out of Nashville at 6 o'clock Friday morning.

I'll post updates as I sort out the mess I made. Keeping my fingers crossed for now!


----------



## Palladium (Oct 7, 2015)

I ran into some of those relays about 25 years ago. The ones i came across were basically the same design and yields, but they were designed for a different purpose and they came from Johnson Space Flight. I was snipping them off and sending them to a refiner then. I was a buyer for a scrap yard and purchased a warehouse that had been sitting for a number of years after the owner died. It was pad locked upon his death and i was the first one the family let in. It was my very first venture in gold of any sort! Yes i got screwed! I walked in and found bins full of equipment and along another wall was old worn wooden counter tops the kind you know has been used for years because of the wear. Their were buckets with screws and nuts of every size everywhere. 

This man had the manufactures manuals and data sheets on every piece of equipment in there. That would be a feat almost impossible today unless you had the inside track. The yard was full of scrap metals that i bought for the scrap yard, but as i looked around the inside i thought " What was you up to you sly old man ". I ask the granddaughter a few questions, because granddaddy had died like 10 years before and grandmother not long after, but she wasn't much help. I ask to come back later and look around. She gave me the key and left. The more i looked the more i figured it out! I contacted a refiner in N.C. and sent him some pictures. Back then we didn't have email! :mrgreen: 

He ( the refiner ) told me what to do and how to do it. I remember after all was said and done i made like $ 30,000 and i dare to think at the gold price then what was stolen from me. It took me and a buddy almost 6 months to process all of what we found it that warehouse. It would be another 15 years before i learned how to refine gold.


----------



## UncleBenBen (Oct 8, 2015)

Wow Palladium, that sounds like a whole lot of contact snipping. I bet that refiner could hardly contain his excitement when he saw what you had knowing that you didn't know too much about it. The old Western Electric finger and sequencing relays I've come across have some impressive metals in them. I can only imagine how much more would be in those purposed for the aerospace industry. I hope I'm not rubbing salt in anything, cause it does sound like somebody else hit a good lick from all your work!

I guess that's how we learn though. I think I've still got about 20 of those relays I forgot I had. Then around 100 of another type with heavy palladium contacts that I'll get to eventually.

Oh, and if anybody comes across any old W.E. key cards from old telephone systems, those will have some nice gold as well. It's was hard to tear them up as they quite nice to look at, almost like works of art. But once I saw the amount of metal there it got easier!

I think I'll keep an eye out for padlocked warehouses from now on! :mrgreen:


----------



## Palladium (Oct 8, 2015)

It wasn't only contacts, though i remember their was enough that my hands hurt for days! Their was pallets of silver battery cells, as well as aircraft spark plugs, turbine parts from jet engines, barrels and barrels of those little early 3 leg transistors with gold plating inside and out and the jumper wires inside the transistor were gold, not gold plated! Gold plated circuit boards of every shape and size. Buckets of resistors that until this day i don't know what they contained, but that refiner guy wanted them pretty bad, and gave me what i though was good money then. The one thing i remember about the gold was how buttery deep yellow it was compared to today shiny thin crap! That's how you know you have old gold! It definitely was like finding a stashed gold mine. It was the first step of many that lead me to become what i am today.


----------



## UncleBenBen (Oct 8, 2015)

Then let me say I'm glad those steps eventually brought you here. I couldn't begin to put a price on what I've learned from you're posts, as well as the posts from so many others!

This place might as well be McDonald's because....
BahDot Dot Dot Daaahhhhh.....I'm lovin' it!!

(dang that was cheesey)


----------



## UncleBenBen (Oct 30, 2015)

]So I finally got time after a long list of chores for the wife to process some of that ash last weekend. I definitely save a bit. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't waisting tme and acid chasing lost gold.




Should have time to finish this weekend finally.

But, that's not why I'm posting. I just wasn't sure where to put my first real question. I've been kind of hung up on the seemingly anomalous drops I've come across here and there reading through the forum. The ones that precipitate as shiny gold snow globe flakes.

My first little one did that. It was a hand full of button contacts from relays. 

I was thinking today that all but one of the small drops I've done had shiney floating gold on top of solution. The only one that didn't was the one I lost. The 8 to 10 grams from the wire relays. Those are the only ones I never really touched. Just lined them up and snipped them off. They are also the only bit that I incinerated before dissolution.

Could it be that something from the oil from you're hands causes those gorgeous drops?

Or maybe in the way the oils exposes the reduced or reducing gold to the atmosphere by floating it to the top of the solution?

Just something I've had stuck in this big ol' melon of mine!

Would love to hear some thoughts on that.


----------



## Geo (Oct 30, 2015)

If you are precipitating with SMB, that one is pretty simple to explain. The SMB decomposes into sulfur dioxide gas and sulfuric acid in solution. It's the sulfur dioxide gas that precipitates the gold. The SO2 starts out in solution as a tiny bobble so small, it can't be seen with the naked eye. As the bubble rises, gold precipitates on the outside of the bubble until the bubble is consumed or the bubble reaches the top where it pops. Sometimes, this action deposits the fine gold particles on the surface where the surface tension holds it up. It can collect as the gold settles but if left undisturbed overnight, there should be at least a little gold floating on top. If there isn't, you should test the solution to see it it contains any more gold (you should test anyway whether there's gold floating or not). If you add too little SMB, all of the bubbles were consumed before reaching the surface. If you add too much, the bubbles are not consumed but are made so small that they are not buoyant enough to rise to the surface and the gold particles precipitated outside the bubble are not heavy enough to break away. This leaves the solution with gold that will not settle. Leaving it overnight gives it time to "gas off" and the fine gold will settle. If not, you would need to heat the solution to drive the SO2 out of solution. I prefer to wait because there is a risk of the gold re-dissolving when the solution is heated.

Use a spray bottle of water set on mist to knock the floating gold down. It should settle quickly.


----------



## UncleBenBen (Oct 31, 2015)

Thanks Geo. That is a good explanation of what's going on during a drop. That definitely explains how those floaters get up there. Any idea how they become shiney flakes instead the same familiar brown powder?


----------



## Geo (Nov 11, 2015)

Have you ever stirred gold solution with a plastic spoon or spatula when adding SMB? Did you notice a sheen of gold on the plastic? If the glass is not perfectly clean, the gold precipitates on the side of the glass and then peels off in small flakes. They will only be shiny on one side. Glass is not as smooth as it looks. Under magnification, glass is porous with little holes and dimples. It's harder to clean than you would imagine. Keep one special container (beaker,jar,pot) that you only use to precipitate clean gold. Dropping dirty, impure gold that needs to be re-refined can be precipitated in just about any glass container. Keep in mind, garbage in, garbage out.


----------



## UncleBenBen (Nov 12, 2015)

I haven't plated the glass, but I have seen some plate on my stir stick. I use some sturdy plastic stirrirs that I found at the dollar store that were in a cocktail/martini kit. I really like them. They are about 7 or 8 inches long. A little smaller diameter than a #2 pencil with a small ball on one end for general stirring and an upside down open triangle on the other that can really agitate a solution.

I finished up on the ash over the weekend and was quite pleased with the amount of gold I managed to salvage. Last night I moved the powder into a clean pickle jar so I could give my good coffee pot a good wash to start a second refine. 

Placed cleaned pot on my work table out back and went inside to get more stuff and walked out just in time to watch a gust of wind blow my coffee pot off the table and smash it on the concrete slab!

Oh well. At least it didn't have a bunch of gold in it.


----------



## UncleBenBen (Nov 12, 2015)

Oh, and let me says thanks to everybody here that drilled the religious use of stannous into my head! 

I managed to put some gold back in to solution with the third HCl wash on this batch of powder the other day. With proper testing I was able to catch it and keep about half a gram from going to the stock pot! I guess that open triangle end of my stir stick works a little too good.

Thanks every body!!


----------



## UncleBenBen (Nov 29, 2015)

Well here it is. Finally got to melt last night. Not quite what I was hoping for, but I learned so much from it as it fought me every step of the way that I'll take it. 2.7g.



After the initial recovery/refine from cleaned ash, put gold back in solution with third HCl wash. Dropped with three .25g additions of SMB.

The next refine gave another beautiful metallic snow globe drop with 3g SMB. It took two more .5g additions to get a negative stannous.




The second HCl wash dissolved gold again. Only this time it wasn't heated or even stirred. It was getting late after decanting first wash and just poured in fresh acid and put it away for the night. The next evening close to a gram back in solution. Dropped again with SMB.

After all washes, the metallic powder refused to aglomerate. It would a bit until the last of the water evaporated. Then it would just fall apart. Just a tap on the side of the beaker would stir up a fine cloud of the dried powder. Tried to rehydrate and evaporate three times. Same result. On to another refine.

The last refine finally gave normal results. Even in the washes. Now to work on my little stock pot, treat a little waste, then store the rest of my usable solutions until I get my lab put together. 

Until then its 'wax on, wax off' and a small mountain of mechanical processing piled up in the basement.

P.S. My new phone does not like taking pictures of reflective surfaces so you may have to use your imagination a little!


----------

