# Muriatic acid



## Anonymous (May 26, 2010)

I see that the formula for AR is 41 parts hydrochloric to 9 parts nitric, or 3 to 1. Can you use muriatic with the 34% hydrochloric? It would take 3 gal to equal 1 gal but what of the other ingredients? Would they hinder the recovery?


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## 4metals (May 26, 2010)

Aqua regia works in ratios from 3:1 to 5:1 the acid most production refiners use is in fact Muriatic acid, which is just a commercial grade of Hydrochloric acid. It is a greenish color rather than the clear color of reagent HCl but it is much cheaper and commonly available.


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## philddreamer (May 26, 2010)

Thanks 4metals for that bit of info. I'm always learn'n something new. I did notice the difference in concentration while check availabilty at a store, but thought it was just the brand. 
A question though, can I still use muriatic in my HCI-CI? For drop'n silver? Please clarify this for me.

Thanks.


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## goldsilverpro (May 26, 2010)

prospector bill,

The ratios that 4metals gave of 3:1 to 5:1 are *volume* ratios of the commercial concentrated acids as you buy them (about 30-35%, by weight, for muriatic and about 67-71%, by weight, for nitric). Don't worry about these "by weight" percentages, as long as they're somewhat within these ranges. For example, to make up 5 liters of 4 to 1 aqua regia, you would use 4 liters of 30-35%, by weight, muriatic acid and 1 liter of about 67-71%, by weight, nitric acid.

philddreamer,

Yes, you can use muriatic in HCl/Cl or to drop silver as silver chloride. For most all refining work, you can consider muriatic acid and hydrochloric acid to be the same thing.


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## philddreamer (May 26, 2010)

Thank you GSP! :lol:


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## Anonymous (Jun 4, 2010)

Through the learning process I finally got a batch to precipitate a nice medium brown powder. Next I'm going to try the ice down procedure instead of adding water. this way I won't be diluting my HCL. There are a lot of other minerals in this black sand ore besides gold. Is it ok to reuse the HCL after precipitating? It seems if there were "contaminates" like iron the HCL would'nt be able to hold the gold into the solution until these free electrons are used up leaving gold powder in the material. Would a bath of straight HCL help to remove these before the HCL/CL solution? Should I not bother trying to reuse the HCL, I know it's only $5-$6 a gal but I'd like to get as much use out of it as possible. A penny saved is a penny earned and less waste.


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## butcher (Jun 4, 2010)

I reuse mine say I have HCl used from recovery processes( note using copper to drop metals and did not use a sulfite) even though it has other metals and may seem saturated, it works great with an addition of oxidizer and heat at dissolving copper and for cleaning up some of the copper chloride from my batch's of copper and silver chloride, and then I can precipitate values from it with copper, once I am ready, even if it is loaded with iron it will leach copper, when I think I got my money from it I will concentrate it and distill it into a small amount of water. this saves me on waste volume I have to deal with, But I cannot say it saves me money or time.


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