# Zinc or Aluminum



## PhillipJ (Aug 20, 2007)

In Hoke's book, it says to use zinc to to drop the values out of the "stock pot". I was wondering if aluminum could be used in place of zinc?


----------



## Harold_V (Aug 20, 2007)

Don't use either of them. Use scrap steel, which is least valuable and does the job equally as well. There is no need to waste aluminum scrap that is high in value as compared to steel. 

I simply kept adding more scrap as the old was dissolved, occasionally cleaning out the bucket I used. The recovered values were then incinerated and stored for future processing by furnace. You can do much the same thing, but instead of melting the values, give them a prolonged (heated) wash in HCL, then after rinsing well (with tap water---distilled is not necessary------this will remove unwanted dissolved metals) process the remains for values by conventional means (AR or equivalent). 

Harold


----------



## Anonymous (Jul 10, 2008)

Zinc or Aluminum....or copper wire??? ~how does the copper wire method work? :lol:
tia!


----------



## Junkman Jim (Jul 10, 2008)

Zinc works really well, steel makes such a mess. My question is how do we recover the zinc? Could we boil the zinc nitrate down to a solid then flux it and melt it?

If you introduce copper, everything more noble (gold, silver) drops out, trouble with that is now we have a bunch of copper nitrate, copper can then be dropped with zinc. Back to my question, how to recover the zinc.


----------



## lazersteve (Jul 10, 2008)

Jim,

Copper nitrate can be used to electrolytically prepare sterling silver for the silver cell. The electricity plates the copper out as a sponge on the graphite cathode and leaves the nitric in the solution to attack the sterling which becomes silver nitrate when the anode is dissolved. As the copper levels of the electrolyte drop the silver begins to form silver nitrate in solution and also co-deposits on the cathode. The cathode is scraped clean periodically as the metals build up. These mossy metals are collected in a separate container as the sterling cell works.

The scraped mossy metals are easily separated using a HCl wash. The copper goes into solution easily and the silver remains metallic. The copper chloride from the wash is added back into the silver nitrate enriched electrolyte. This precipitates silver chloride and reforms the copper nitrate electrolyte you started with. The cycle repeats indefinitely.

The Copper nitrate can also be used to rejuvenate your nitirc acid via evaporation followed by thermal decomposition (170C) if desired. Bubble the NO2 gas into distilled water and collect the nitric.

Steve


----------



## markqf1 (Jul 10, 2008)

Steve,
You are the acid man!  

Mark


----------



## Lino1406 (Jul 17, 2008)

I prefer Al in chloride solution,
also basic solution (cyanide)
not sulphuric solution. With
the gentle powder (but not
too gentle). Because electrochemically
Al is more active than Zn, much more,
you'll get immediate results


----------

