# Newbie Needs Help & Advice from professionals



## Evo8ant (Oct 10, 2014)

Hi,
Im new to all this both ive search the web for weeks, seen videos on youtube, read alot on this forum but im still not sure the correct process to extract, refine and recover my gold.
I'll start by stating what i have and what im planning on doing from what information i have gathered. 
I've got:-
498.1grams of trimmed ram fingers
513.3grams of small cpu pins with solder
49.8grams of large cpu pins with solder
Equipment i have:-
36% Hydrochloric Acid 5l
3% Hydrogen Peroxide 5l
Sodium Metabisulphate 1kg
69% Nitric Acid 2.5l
Urea 500g
Distilled Water 5l
The plan was to start with the fingers fist. To bath 5.2oz (147.2g) of fingers in 50/50 hcl/hp 1000ml/1000ml for 48hrs this should remove all the gold foils. Filter the acid through a coffee filter to separate the foils. Keep the A/P but im not sure if i can reused this acid in my next batch. Can i leave a piece of stainless steel metal in it so it can take the copper out? Or do i have to set some of electrode? Also am i using too much acid and will i be desolving some of the gold in this solution?
Another option was the hcl/cl but i dont have the chloride. Also i need an air pump and i belive the process takes about a week. Also i dont have the exact acid to weight ratios only tells me to cover the fingers with the hcl/cl.

Now i have my foils i need to add 20ml of nitric acid so all the gold desolves then add 20ml of distilled water both beening heated on a hot plate and in a glass beaker. Not sure at what temperature? And the sandy substance used to transfer the heat from the hot plate to the glass. Once its all desolved i need to neutralise the acid with 2tsp of urea until it stops bubbling. Then 2tsp of Metabisulphate to recover the gold. Ive seen on hear the urea is not recommended but i cant find an alternative for neutralising the acid. Any suggestions? Are these quantities correct? Am i going about this the right way?

The pins i will look into more detail later. But a point in the right direction would be very helpful


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## 4metals (Oct 10, 2014)

Welcome to the forum.

All of the information you have requested is here for free on the forum all you have to do is invest some time reading and use the search function. You will find this forum an invaluable resource for information but unfortunately we cannot and will not hand feed members. We have answered basic questions many times in the past, over and over and over and decided that if members are serious the one pearl we will give you is you are in the right place. 

Do some reading and come back with your chemical approach and you will be helped. But your current post shows you really do not know enough to be starting with chemicals at this point. You may have just enough knowledge to get yourself into a bind. Please read and try to avoid the problems.


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## FrugalRefiner (Oct 10, 2014)

Evo8ant,

Welcome to the forum. Please take this in the spirit it's intended, but you're no where near ready to start any of these processes. If you do what you've described, you'll find you have a mess in short order and you'll be asking how to fix it. As examples, if you use that much hydrogen peroxide to start your AP, you will dissolve some of your gold. AP can be reused, unless you throw steel into it. 

You may recover a gram or two of gold from the fingers. Nitric acid alone will not dissolve the gold. If you use HCl and HNO3 to dissolve them, you might need one to two ml of nitric, not 20. We do not use urea to neutralize nitric acid, although you'll see it recommended on youtube, and you'll even find old posts here that recommended it.

If you want to get a good start on this hobby, here are some links to point you in the right direction. I hope you'll follow them all.

The first rule is to be safe in everything you do. Before you jump into any of the processes you see discussed here, be sure you understand the potential hazards and do everything you can to minimize the risks. Read EVERYTHING in the Safety section of the forum, especially the Dealing with Waste topic. No amount of precious metal is worth jeopardizing your health or the health of those around you. 

I strongly encourage all new members to follow the Guided Tour created by LazerSteve. It will provide an introduction to the forum and numerous valuable links including the General Reactions List. Be sure to follow the link to his web site as he has many outstanding videos, a collection of great reference documents, and he sells a lot of the supplies needed to get started including detailed instructional DVDs. Samuel-a also has a lot of videos, guides and tutorials at his web site Gold-N-Scrap.

Download C. M. Hoke's book. You'll find links to both screen readable and printer friendly versions in my signature line below. You'll see her book mentioned repeatedly here on the forum for good reason. It is probably the best book ever written for the beginner who wants to learn refining. It is written in layman's terms and will provide a solid foundation that will help you understand everything you read here on the forum. You'll also find a tremendous amount of information in the two Forum Handbooks compiled by aflacglobal, Forum Handbook Vol 1 and Forum Handbook Vol 2.

bmgold2 has also been putting together a useful set of links for beginners. You'll find a few links there that are duplicates of the ones I'm providing, but he has also taken the time to link to many other very good threads on specific topics of interest. His thread is here: New Member Answers.

Once you understand the basics you can start to try some small scale experiments. If there's something you don't understand or you get stuck, there will be someone here to help you.

Best of luck,
Dave

P.S. I'm going to assume the double post was an accident. If you go back to the second one before anyone else posts, you can delete it yourself. Open the post and you'll see a button with an X that you can use. Looks like 4metals beat me by a few seconds. :lol:


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## Evo8ant (Oct 10, 2014)

Thanks for time and advice Dave. I will read on.


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## artart47 (Oct 10, 2014)

Hi Evo!
Welcome to our forum! As the other members have advised you from reading your post it is obvious that you don't have an understanding of the processes you want to attempt.
there are processes that we use to recover gold, removing the foils from the fingers. Then, there is learning to remove traces of base metals from them. Finaly, there are processes we use to refine the gold to high purity. Only then, is the gold powder melted 
You need to learn each of these untill you completely understand them. The reading materials suggested to you will give you the understanding that you need. You should look up and study,"copper chloride leach" That is what you'll be using to lift the foils from the fingers. 
ps. If you have sodium metabisuphATE, it will not drop gold from the solution! It has to be sodium metabisulphITE .
Keep reading and we'll be waitting to see your first button!
artart47


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## Pantherlikher (Oct 10, 2014)

Welcome and happy studying...

Youtubewillgetyouhurt... is a great place to get ideas but never gives the full and complete process as it needs to be.

It got you here with an interest which is great... But forget anything you have seen a guy do...
Read through and learn what process to follow "EXACTLY" to achieve what you hope for.

You need an air pump to push O2 into the Acid/ peroxide to dissolve base metals releasing gold fingers. 
You only need a splash of peroxide to get the acid working...read and learn how and why 

Learn here from the best as they have shared their "experiment" results and have found the best and cheapest ways of doing things for maximum success.

Good luck and hope to see some excellent results.

B.S.


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## Evo8ant (Oct 13, 2014)

The health and safety was already read up on. I just forget to list the equipment i have. Which was a chemical mask and googles. Also elbow lenght chemical gloves. And and work it be carried outdoors.
The copper chloride leach was an option but i wanted to try the AP solution first. 
Having read on and finding a post on here. I got impatient and decided to try his process which was fill a quart jar with 100g of trimmed fingers, add the hcl to cover the height of any standing fingers and add 2-4 capfuls of hp. Assuming a capuful is 5ml i ended up added 20ml in the end to get the solution to an emarald green. Its been left 24hr so fa and some foils dropped to the bottom. Going to leave it another 24hr then i will filter and clean. Also keep the used AP solution and test later for any desolved gold.
The air pump was not mentioned in his process. So if this doesnt separate the foils completely then i will invest in one for my next batch. This i did read up on this but i thought it was only for the A/Cl process and not for both. 
Am i still heading? In the right direction?


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## FrugalRefiner (Oct 13, 2014)

Evo8ant said:


> The copper chloride leach was an option but i wanted to try the AP solution first.


They're two different names for the same process.



> Having read on and finding a post on here. I got impatient and decided to try his process which was fill a quart jar with 100g of trimmed fingers, add the hcl to cover the height of any standing fingers and add 2-4 capfuls of hp. Assuming a capuful is 5ml i ended up added 20ml in the end to get the solution to an emarald green. Its been left 24hr so fa and some foils dropped to the bottom. Going to leave it another 24hr then i will filter and clean. Also keep the used AP solution and test later for any desolved gold.
> The air pump was not mentioned in his process. So if this doesnt separate the foils completely then i will invest in one for my next batch. This i did read up on this but i thought it was only for the A/Cl process and not for both.


The air pump is almost always mentioned. If you try processes after reading just a few posts, you may miss important details. If you read a hundred threads about a process, you'll be a lot better prepared.

You do NOT use an air bubbler with HCl/Cl (it's not referred to as A/Cl).



> Am i still heading? In the right direction?


Not in my opinion.

Dave


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## MarcoP (Oct 13, 2014)

FrugalRefiner said:


> Evo8ant said:
> 
> 
> > The copper chloride leach was an option but i wanted to try the AP solution first.
> ...


I put myself in the newbie section, as in fact I'm still are. When I read Copper II Chloride leach I would have liked they were actually talking about using CuCl2 salt + HCl instead of Acid Peroxide + HCl. They do both gets you to the same point but I believe are actually two different processes. My very limited knowledge is telling me that AP may dissolve some gold where CuCl2 leach wouldn't.

I believe the OP still doesn't have this fine thinking, and by the circumstances Frugal is 100% right.
Would be nice if I'm right as well as it means I'm actually learning something :lol:


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## FrugalRefiner (Oct 13, 2014)

MarcoP said:


> FrugalRefiner said:
> 
> 
> > Evo8ant said:
> ...


Marco, there is no question you are learning, but I believe you had a fair amount of knowledge and wisdom when you arrived here.

The AP process, as it's known on the forum, began back in the earliest days of the forum. Lazersteve introduced it to the forum. In the beginning, he described using a 2:1 ratio of HCl to H2O2. Now, most would agree that that's more peroxide than desirable, and can indeed dissolve some gold. The process came to be known as AP (or A/P, acid/peroxide, etc.).

But people realized that the peroxide was only needed at the beginning to "kickstart" the process. HCl alone does not dissolve copper. But HCl will dissolve copper oxide. H2O2 is a strong oxidizer. It will oxidize some copper, which can then be dissolved by the HCl, forming CuCl2. 

That's when things change in the solution. It is now a mixed solution of HCl and copper(II) chloride (CuCl2), with a bit of peroxide continually oxidizing whatever it can until it's exhausted. At this point, it has become a copper(II) chloride leach. Steve coined the original name of AP here, but he has also lead the effort to change the name to copper(II) chloride.

So ends today's forum history lesson.

I believe you are correct. If you started with CuCl2 salt and HCl, you probably would not dissolve any gold. Once you have started your first batch of CuCl2 leach, you can start subsequent batches just by adding a little of the solution from your first batch to HCl. Very much the same idea.

Dave


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## MarcoP (Oct 14, 2014)

I can use 50ml of my saturated AP to kick-start the fresh one! That's right, I've read it a while ago and it slipped out of my mind, I guess my brain was too busy learning other stuffs to remember this little trick.
Thank you FrugalRefiner!

My AP is etching at an amazing rate now. I used a ratio of 1:50 and from taking a week to clean fingers with constant bubbling (two ways bubbler and a tee at the end of each tube terminal) and exposure to sun in a closed (not sealed) container it now takes 2 days while bubbling is only active for two hours at day. When it starts to get slower I would make a new one but kick-start it without peroxide addition, saving money in acid (even if just few cents) and gold from going into solution.

EvoBant, in this thread you have a lot of great information about etching, hope it helps you to understand this basic process and clarify some of your doubts. But this is not all of it, there is a lot more to read, learn and understand. Two weeks of reading can feed your confusion, more you read and more questions you will have. At this stage your best mates are the search tools. For weeks I've been sitting and reading only posts by authors without any keyword search, or in some of my keywords searches I read old topics first.
You will be amazed on the info you will find and how easily all you currently know comes to an end because you start learning proper procedures.

Oh, welcome and be safe please.


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## joekbit (Oct 17, 2014)

Welcome aboard , have fun and be safe. 

It still amazes me how a seemingly inactive solution will crank up with a bit of bright sunlight.


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