# Finally got a Button !



## aga (Mar 26, 2017)

After much messing about, here's my first button 








Ok, so it's small (0.35g including junk & borax) but it's mostly Gold !

Woohoo !

Many thanks to all who gave pointers and advice.

Plenty of work to do before the other ~5g drops out ...

Edit: Special thanks to UncleBenBen for getting me hooked, anachronism & nickvc for advice, and my camera's macro lens so i could actually see the button in any detail.


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## g_axelsson (Mar 26, 2017)

Congratulations!

And you thought you had gold fever before... :mrgreen: 

What was the source material? Did you get any gold from your original mess?

Göran


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## aga (Mar 26, 2017)

After silently botching more e-scrap, i ended up putting all the gold-bearing materials together and tried to recover them by cementing out on copper for two weeks.

The 'button' above is from some solids and many incinerated filter papers/kitchen towels.

My plan for the remaining liquids is to boil them dry, then try to recover the gold from the remaining solids as if it was Ore.

There's definitely more gold in there, somewhere ...

Edit:
The source material was a random assortment of CPUs, pins and fingers.

Edit:
To be clear, the remains of the Mess were included with all the rest, so there _might_ be some gold from the Mess in that button, although i have no idea how much, if any.


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## Tndavid (Mar 26, 2017)

Very good Aga. Yup it's on now. Hooked they say. Psssst, that's an understatement. Lol. Good job buddy.... :G


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## aga (Mar 26, 2017)

Thanks Göran and Tndavid for the congrats.

After gouging out the rest of the gold from the massively increased volume of mess i made, it would be nice to do it 'properly' !


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## Tndavid (Mar 26, 2017)

Patience + non idiot= Gold. Your got your gold!!

 :G


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## Topher_osAUrus (Mar 26, 2017)

Nice!
You can remove the borax a few different ways.
Heat it up and quench it in cold water to "shock" it off.
A hot, dilute, sulfuric bath will remove the flux.
As will a hot, dilute, nitric bath.
Or you can just boil it in water for (what seems like) forever (compared to the other methods)

Looks good though!

You are now part of the club.
(please kneel)
-I dub thee, Sir Aga -refiner--
One of the select few, who knows that when you refine, you dont simply - "melt the gold to make it pure"
(it seems most everyone that asks what I do thinks, "refine gold eh?, so you just, what?, melt it and make it pure, huh?" -'sure', i say, 'something like that' :twisted: )


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## glorycloud (Mar 27, 2017)

The Au powder looks nice and the button is shiny as well. 
Keep up the good work.


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## everydayisalesson (Mar 27, 2017)

Great Job! Every one starts with a little guy like that, or at least I did.

Mike


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## Tndavid (Mar 27, 2017)

If I'm not mistaken Aga, I see a little pipe in amongst that borax :shock: Nice..


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## aga (Mar 27, 2017)

Tndavid said:


> If I'm not mistaken Aga, I see a little pipe in amongst that borax :shock: Nice..


Really ?!?! A 'pipe' means OK doesn't it ?

(I thought it was just junk 'n' borax !)

Today i found a tiny bit more gold powder hiding in some copper powder from an earlier attempt.
The colours of those powders are really really close ...

Happily a couple of 1L borosilicate beakers arrived today, so the [stt]boil-down[/stt] evaporation of the rest of the liquids will go quicker. 

I'm reliably informed that there's about 5g of gold altogether, so it must be hiding in there somewhere.


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## Tndavid (Mar 27, 2017)

Oh yea. Definitely ok. Most times its a sign of good purity. Coupled with the shine of your button and color of your powder. I'd say she is pretty good buddy. You just gotta get after the rest now


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## aga (Mar 27, 2017)

The rest is being chased, you can be sure of that !

Not sure about the 'pipe' thing, after dissolving off the borax in sulphuric.



Amazing how round it is on top, while the bottom is flat.


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## Tndavid (Mar 27, 2017)

Still looks great my man!!!!


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## UncleBenBen (Mar 27, 2017)

Way to go aga!!

While I'm not sure if I should take any pride in another's addiction, I guess I'll take it since it's just gold and nothing else! LOL!!

Can't wait to see where you take it from here!!

Ben...aka... :twisted:


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## Fireflymetals (Mar 29, 2017)

Brother, Monster conga rats to ya!

I am a legit BioChemist (bit of paper and everything) a number of years ago a buddy of mine decided we were gonna get gold out of cpu's...

He is a serious gold hound (dredges, hard rock mine etc) and a physicist....

So, picture a pair of over educated idiots jumping into something totally out of their actual skill sets.

First pass.... about 60 pounds of CPU's...

My knowledge in theory was ok... but notice... BIO Chemist.. I am really good at growing things and running analysis... in a lab....

Lots of effort later... we had our gold BB... only it wasn't even a bb... 

My first one was literally 1.3 grams and it took about 2 hours to get the bloody thing to even join up in the flux.

Colour me Jelly...

Notice... the serious variance from what we had to what we got...

Yup, it took a few years of learning to get the rest of that mess together... Being both over educated and completely field ignorant... We got the solids out... in one bucket, the liquids out in another and started over with new material.. it literally took 2 years before I was comfy enough to dive back into that long stored mess.

You did better than I did, not sure what exactly that says aside from good on ya!

--Launce


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