# Removing gold from iron/steel



## rasanders22 (Jul 6, 2011)

NOTE: this is hypothetical only. 

Lets say you had some gold plated pins. If you were able to find a way to vacuum out a canister then heat the pins to approx 1100 celsius, the gold would sublimate then attach to walls of the canister. The Iron would remain solid and, in theory, you could treat the walls of your canister with AC or AR. 

A few afterthoughts. Finding a vessel that will survive that high temps and remain a stable vacuum would obviously be a issue. This would obviously cost a decent amount of money in energy and would still require chemicals to get the gold off your walls. 

The process is called vacuum deposition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_deposition


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## Lino1406 (Jul 7, 2011)

Gold sublimes? at 1100?


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## goldsilverpro (Jul 7, 2011)

I know you said iron or steel, but how often do you see iron or steel pins? Or even Kovar pins? Most are copper or a copper alloy. What about the copper or brass pins themselves. Both melt lower (brass considerably lower) than 1100C and would alloy with the gold, so I don't think your idea would work.


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## amosfella (Nov 30, 2011)

could not one use an oxidizing flux to take a bunch of the copper out of the gold alloy to the point of purifying the gold?? I suppose that the pins would have to be ground to a powder... Wouldn't even need to take it to the melting point...


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## butcher (Dec 1, 2011)

No its not that easy.
(or should I say its not that hard to recover your gold and refine it to purity)

have you guys ever thought of making some square wheels? then you would not have to worry about flat tires.


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## Harold_V (Dec 1, 2011)

butcher said:


> have you guys ever thought of making some square wheels? then you would not have to worry about flat tires.


Chuckle!
Makes just as much sense. 

I've long said one should not waste time trying to improve on a process that has been proven by time. Do that only if your objective is to re-invent the wheel. If your objective is to accumulate and refine gold, there's no shortage of methods that are known to work. Why waste valuable time screwing with the unknown?

Harold


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## Lino1406 (Dec 1, 2011)

Are not such a bad idea if
your road is made of stairs.


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## gold4mike (Dec 1, 2011)

:shock: :roll:


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## Lou (Mar 19, 2012)

I accidentally deposited a beautiful layer of gold when I was flame sealing some quartz ampoules containing gold-tin alloy ( a catalyst/promoter for the preparation of black phosphorus).

PVD can have some very thick gold. I once scored a bunch of gold deposited items that were very, very good.


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## butcher (Mar 20, 2012)

I would imagine that they use vacuum deposition of precious metals a lot in industry now a days and much of the electronic scrap we process may have used this method in its manufacturing processes.

I think it would be very hard to recover values with this method unless you had the equipment already set up in your shed.

I know gold chloride will vapor off in gas in high temperature, and can condense on the walls of cooler surface (my guess at a much lower temperature than the 1100 degrees C as stated earlier in this thread, and probably other metals salts, or acid salts, may change the vapor points of the volatility of these metals as gaseous compounds, just a guess here).

For me vaporizing valuable metals is something I have tried to avoid, but I can see where others can use it as a very useful tool.


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