# My first digger gold bead.



## chemdom (Jul 3, 2012)

Maybe I should start by introducing myself. I'm Johan, a 27 year old PhD student in organic chemistry interested alot in metallurgy.
With my goal by applying one day with Umicore it looked interesting to me to get some feeling of metallurgy in my fingers.
By reading this forum, Hoke and lazer steve's site, I got a pretty good idea what to do to recuperate some digger gold.
With all the necessary chemicals available here in the lab, plus all the glasware etc, it was easy to fool a bit around.
Stripped down some old computers and got the gold out of some CPU's and some ram chips (in separate processes). Purified by nitric and/HCl washes,
dissolved in AR, precipitated with SMB and at the end put everything together, AR again and then oxalic acid as precipitant.
Found some old melting dishes, and as expected the first one cracked, so again AR and SMB and to the next melting try.

This time it melted nicely, with a special thanks to the guy of the workplace downstairs for his help with the oxy-acetylene burner.
Picture will follow later, I'm heating the bead with some distilled water to get rid of excess Borax.


----------



## chemdom (Jul 3, 2012)

Picture


----------



## tek4g63 (Jul 3, 2012)

Nice work!


----------



## jmdlcar (Jul 3, 2012)

A good looking button.


----------



## samuel-a (Jul 3, 2012)

Excellent result chemdom !

Welcome to the forum.


----------



## BAMGOLD (Jul 3, 2012)

Greatest first 2 posts I've read so far!


----------



## chemdom (Jul 10, 2012)

As a follow up on my first gold nugget, I was wondering that there are people present on the forum from Belgium
or western europe for that matter that have experience with selling their gold to jewelry shops or the likes?

thx for any help


----------

