# wash your gold!!!



## geonorts (Jan 8, 2011)

Wanting to bring the purity of my gold up a bit I followed instruction from Harold and washed some of my gold, boiling in acids and water then redisolving in AR and filtering well.

The gold is from scrap electronic and as many of you may know often quite hard to get clean gold the first time, so wash it.
If your gold after melting doesn't have a mirror finish once it cools then it needs washing. 
This was a bit of a practice run for me and I will now be washing all the gold I have and all I get in the future.
The original recovered gold was a nice colour with an okay finish (math estimates after re-refining puts them at ~97% i'm no expert on judging the purity but i would say the gold is now 99%)
Be sure to check wash solutions for dissolved gold, the small flat bit is from first boil in HCL redissolving some gold 0.1g recovered using same SMB like usual (possibly some nitric left and released during boiling in HCL not sure)


These are after the washes












This is the gold dissolved in first wash solution, it dropped as quite granular/crystalline gold powder. 






*And here is the re-refined gold 12.9 grams*
mirror finish and pipe that goes right through in the bigger piece


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## qst42know (Jan 8, 2011)

That looks nice. 8)


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## glorycloud (Jan 8, 2011)

Beautiful! And so round!! I'm jealous!! 8)


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## philddreamer (Jan 8, 2011)

Beautiful, indeed! It always is. 8)

I just had some assayed @ .996; & another batch, ran only once thru AR @ .994. I'm happy, but will start running it twice & be more meticulous, in order for higher purity.

For the nitric "problem" I've started using Harold's gold button method &, for me, it's the best thing to do. Not only it gets rid of the nitrate faster, but it gives you a better idea of how much nitric to use next time. I experienced on my last poorman's batch, that by adding peroxide, instead of the 28g of nitrate needed for digesting the gold, it only took 18g. After adding the gold button, the solution still dissolved another 1.5g of gold. 
Next time, I'll add my nitrate in much smaller doses. I started with 10g of nitrate; then added 8g, & all reaction stopped in few minutes. I knew there was still some nitrates because all of the original gold dissolved in only 35 min's. 

And yes, after dropping, washing it properly is a must, indeed!

Good job brother!

Phil


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## geonorts (Jan 8, 2011)

haha thanks glorycloud but there nothing to be jealous of, same round buttons as everyone else, now your creations are true things of beauty


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## Harold_V (Jan 8, 2011)

geonorts said:


> haha thanks glorycloud but there nothing to be jealous of, same round buttons as everyone else, now your creations are true things of beauty



Well, I 'gotta" say, they're really pretty. You don't get that nice luster and pipe without quality. 

You did good!

Harold


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