# Processing gold sulphide ore



## TheGoldenChild (Dec 29, 2012)

Here is a little tutorial that may help someone out it has worked really well for me but still takes alot of time. Unfortunately I am no scientist and do not know the exact reactions that are going on but know it works pretty well. I have spent alot of time trying to figure out the mysteries of gold sulphide ore and how extremely hard it is to process especially if there is a high sulphide content. Iv'e experimented with aqua regia and found it is really usefull in processing it but is not needed in most cases. Well here it goes if you have a low sulphide content gold mineral break it does and seperate it all till all you see is the yellow shiny stuff then by weight mix a about a 50/50 ratio of it with pure malleable silver. Put your silver and low sulphide content in the bottom of a clay crucible and cover it with about 3 times weight of borax then let it go in your kiln till it hits 2000 degrees and give it some time to react. Pour your mix into a cone mold let it cool then break off the borax on top of your prill. Now you should have a prill that is a brittle gray on upper portion and a little gold/silver button at bottom. Break off the little button from the bottom if you reached high enough temperature it should seperate if not it will be stuck with the gray stuff. Take your gray section of the prill and crunch it up and put it into a clean silica graphite crucible with no flux heat that up to about 2000 degrees and let it sit at 2000 degrees for a bit. Give it a little swish as your pulling it out of kiln then pour into a pre-heated mold. Let it cool and clean the carbon scale off the outside now you should have processible gold/silver mix. If you have high gold content sulphide ore you should see a nice gold looking bar if not it may of been mostly silver. If your processing a high sulphide content gold ore this will not work. With high sulphide gold ore break it down and seperate it till all you see is the yellow shiny stuff then take that and put it into a hydrocloric acid solution and let it sit for a week or so swirling it in bottom of container occasionally. Pour off your acid and save in another container so you can use it later just add a little new hydrocloric to perk it up again, clean your gold sulphide on bottom with water and use same process above. If your acid turned a nice yellow you can extract the gold out of it with small amounts of zinc just add small amounts until your acid turns clear this part is fun as it seems like magic watching it haha. Do not overdue the zinc though just a little bit at a time until it slowly removes the yellow out of acid. Well if you did all this stuff right you should be very happy with the results and you do not ever need to roast sulphide as long as you break it down into small enough particles. Good luck and I hope my years and years of experimenting helps someone! 8)


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## DarkspARCS (Sep 16, 2013)

So...

Having processed your High Sulphide Gold (HSG) in HCL you're saying that gold will precipitate out of an acid only solution that:

1. took a week to saturate to a golden yellow? Why not directly after a heated acid reaction has subsided?
2. Gold was actually made soluable in an acid known not to have the ability to actually do that? Did you add any other chemicals to the HCL to get this to happen and forgot to mention that part, and if so what?

Will this work on EVERY type of refractory ore (HSG), or does your ore come from one established location (which may contain the right elemental composition to ALTER your HCL into a new type of AR) and may not work well with other HSG tellurides?

I ask these questions out of a sincere interest to understand your claims better. You've stated you've done extensive research on this matter, and I am having an extremely difficult time getting my HSG ore types to produce the PM buttons they should be producing, with my values either smoking off during firing, becoming trapped within the cupel (as a dark maroon stain), and/ or being driven off into the slag.


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## Platdigger (Sep 16, 2013)

I hope you realize that you are asking these questions of someone who last visited this forum on Jan 4th of this year.
Just in case you missed that.


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## DarkspARCS (Sep 22, 2013)

heh... you never know...


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## Reno Chris (Apr 13, 2014)

There is no one universal method for processing sulfide ores because they can contain a variety of different metals in all different ratios of one to another. Additionally, once you crush the ore down and concentrate it you have a high sulfide concentrate unless you are processing sulfide free ore.
I hope to do up a couple you tube videos in the next few months on the treatment of some common types of ore and I will post links to them here once they are ready.


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## nickvc (Apr 13, 2014)

Glad to see you back again Chris, we have many questions relating to ores which I'm quite open to say I have no clue on apart from the fact that direct acid treatment is rarely the safe way due to the various elements in them. Your expertise I'm sure will be appreciated by our mining brothers and sisters and who knows may well point others to new processes which can be used on other value bearing materials.
I look forward to seeing your videos even if we have little chance here in the UK to mine and recover values, we had the Romans here for 4 centuries and they cleaned most out and then in the late 19th early 20th century the rest of the best was found and extracted.


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## Reno Chris (Apr 14, 2014)

Thanks for the kind words. I will try to make it as general as possible and will post some pictures taken a few weeks back while I was in Africa. They process gold ore there with very primitive methods and while they don't get great recovery percentages, they make it worthwhile. Of course worthwhile for them and us is different. There a dollar a day is typical wages, so a few bucks for a days hard work is very acceptable.


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