# Ferric Chloride recovering??????



## Anonymous (Jan 12, 2008)

First I would like to say I am a newbie. I have been collecting cell phones and computer parts for about a year knowing there is pms in them. I have boards with gold and cpu's pins and parts with gold also platters from hard drives. I have been experimenting with alot of stuff from chlorine to ferric chloride and Nitric acid Which scares me. 

I want to thank all of you for this page and i will be donating to it soon. I would like to also thank Lazer Steve WOW what a good set of learning videos. 

I have been using ferric chloride and would like to know how to get the pms out of it after it is used and how to rejuvinate it. I hope i posted this in the right area.


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## Noxx (Jan 12, 2008)

The best section would have been «Help Needed» but that's ok.

I never used ferric chloride for extraction but I recall seeing it in Ammen's book...
Let me see...

Hmmm he doesn't say how to extract gold but he says that you can extract silver of a purity of 99.1%-99.7% and copper of 98.2%-98.6%.

So I suppose gold would be at the bottom (not dissolving).

I never heard about someone using this system... Is it easy to build ?
I know you must keep an oxygen pressure, keep agitation and cool the reaction...


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## lazersteve (Jan 12, 2008)

I've never used FeCl3 with oxygen or Peroxide, but I've used a lot of it by itself to remove the gold plating off of copper based pins. It works very fast and does a good job of striping the plating. 

It's messy and requires a lot of after stripping acid washes to remove all the residual crude from the foils. This was the method I used before I started using AP.

Steve


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## Anonymous (Jan 12, 2008)

I do not disolve the gold it floats in the ferric chloride some of it sinks too but it is very good for removing exposed gold off of fingures and cell boards but mainly fingers it takes about 2 hours to remove the gold this way. I use a tumble and a glass spagahetti jar to keep this agitated. I am looking at how do i get the silver and copper back out of the ferric chloride and is it possible to rejuvinate it too. Thanks for the help in advance and next time i will put it in the help section.


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## aflacglobal (Jan 12, 2008)

Welcome to the forum Mike


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## lazersteve (Jan 13, 2008)

Mike,

I'm not convinced the FeCl3 alone dissolves silver. You could do a small test with some sterling silver to see what happens.

I have looked into rejuvenating Ferric chloride quite a bit and found only a few references to possible processes. It's been several years ago, but I do recall I found something in the U.S. Patents on the subject. 

Here are a few links:

Patent 1

Patent 2

Ferric Chloride Etchant Chemistry

I hope this helps.

Steve


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