# Anyone use electrical pins for inquarting?



## 2002valkyrie (Dec 5, 2009)

Just a thought and wanted to get some input from somebody with experiance. I have some clean no solder pins and was thinking of using them to inquart some karat gold.


----------



## golddie (Dec 5, 2009)

I have seen this being mentioned in the Hoke book.
If there is no solder its perfect.
Maybe you should try a very small amount first to see how the reaction goes.


----------



## butcher (Dec 5, 2009)

I have never tried inqartering karat gold with pins, as silver would be my choice, it should work ok, some copper may oxidize in the melt, but the gold will not, my reasons for using silver would be less nitric acid, and I can get it back for reuse, and if any PGM in melt it acts as collector,
and my byproduct from nitric can be sodium nitrate, or HNO3.

the less copper I have to deal with in my gold the better I like it.

I have not processed any pins here lately, but when I do I like to distill the gold plated pins in a batch of homade nitric, this distills off nitric acid (bubble into water), then I have clean nitric acid, and gold foils seperate easily with water from the copper sulfate salts, I also save my copper sulfate salts for using in projects.


----------



## nickvc (Dec 6, 2009)

I like the way you think,if all the metals are yours then i cant see a problem, so long as there is some silver in the mix ,i think it will carry the pgms if present when you cement the silver out ,Harold or one of our cleverer members will advise if im wrong as i rarely dealt with pgms to any extent,if your metals are free of pgms you could use AR and recover the silver chloride when you filter your solution so only one acid process needs to be used to get fine Au but the rinsing of your powder has to be intense to remove any remaining traces,Hoke gives you the details if i remember correctly and i know its been discussed on this forum.


----------



## Harold_V (Dec 8, 2009)

2002valkyrie said:


> Just a thought and wanted to get some input from somebody with experiance. I have some clean no solder pins and was thinking of using them to inquart some karat gold.


While stripping pins is an excellent course to pursue, they certainly can be used for inquartation (assuming they are not made of a leaded alloy) if the only option is to run them with nitric. In fact, it would be an excellent choice, assuming you had no need to account for the yield, and you had no intentions of using silver in the first place. 

There was a comment about silver acting as a carrier for the platinum metals. While it's true, assuming one has no silver when processing karat gold (highly unlikely, but not impossible), a couple things should be kept in mind. Without the presence of silver, none of the platinum that may be present should go into solution. The other is that should palladium be present, it could be recovered from the nitrate solution by using copper, just as one would recover silver. There really isn't much of an issue with using (lead free) brass for inquartation aside form the greater acid consumption. I have a totally different attitude towards the use of any base metals that may contain tin or lead. Color of the alloy is not a measure of it's contents, so the best policy is to avoid using copper alloys for inquartation. 

Harold


----------



## 2002valkyrie (Dec 8, 2009)

Thanks Harold for your input it has confirmed the one thing that has kept me from going ahead with this practice.



Harold_V said:


> (assuming they are not made of a leaded alloy)



I really don't know what alloy these pins contain even if they are free of lead solder. I purchased them as 1980's Telecom pins but...


----------

