# Smelting question (basic chemistry)



## VanMarco (Jan 8, 2017)

Hello guys,

I have a question for you, and yes, I did have read a lot of other posts here and I could not find an exact answer, so I am going to ask here:

Basically, I have loads of depopulated mobile boards with gold plating on them, most are quite old ones.
As they take up a load of volume, if I do gasify them (burn in absence of oxygen) and then incinerate the ashes, I'd be left with ashes, copper, tin, and other metals including PM. I plan to then process the ashes in HCl, for now I would just need to be sure that any precious metal would just end up in the ashes and not lost somewhat?

Thanks


----------



## Geo (Jan 9, 2017)

You left the largest component of printed circuit boards, fiber glass. A printed circuit board is sheets of fiber glass held together with epoxy resin. There will be very little ash and a whole lot of glass. I don't know if you didn't know or just didn't consider the glass part. If you are going to smelt the incinerated material, you will need to use quite a bit of thinner or you will wind up with a lot of small metal prills locked up in the slag.


----------



## rickbb (Jan 9, 2017)

Depends on what you mean by "loads". 

Does that mean a boat load, a train car load, a truck load, a car load or a bunch of boxes full?

Even if I had a 55 gallon barrel full I'd still process with the AP/Hcl method. It's cheap, not labor intensive and known to work well.


----------



## Grelko (Jan 9, 2017)

rickbb said:


> Even if I had a 55 gallon barrel full I'd still process with the AP/Hcl method. It's cheap, not labor intensive and known to work well.



Especially if you process it this way. 

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=11064


----------

