Gold recovery from melting dishes.

Hello to all and thank you again for your help with my smelting furnace.

I have a new issue I would like your opinions on. I have had trouble getting my gold to gather in the melting dishes for some time now. Looking through my jewels magnifying glass I see lots of small beads of gold that would not gather in the bottom of the dish but rather get suspended in the flux on the sides and the bottom of the dish. Over several weeks of trying to correct the issue without success I went to a furnace and that has solved the issue. However, the dishes are still filled with a lot of very small but clearly visible gold balls.

I decided to use a rock crusher and crush the dish with it into a fine powder and then I put all that into an A.R. solution in hopes that it would dissolve the gold again and I could recover all the lost gold. As soon as I put the powder into the A.R. solution it went to work and turned the AR green. After several times of stirring the powder and left to work on the gold for about 2 days I poured of the solution and began the process of trying to recover the gold. I neutralized the AR and checked for the gold using the standard Sta nous chloride test and it shows nothing. The color is a clear medium green. But no response on the S.C. test.

I would think the A.R. solution would have dissolved the gold but it does not show.

Any ideas on what is going on?

Mountain man.

Small beads of near pure gold will probably need heat to dissolve them, powders and small flakes usually don’t but larger solids will unless you have a lot of patience and or time.
One question is can you still see the beads in the bottom of your solution if so the comments above will help you recover your gold.
Next time you crush into powder try to remove as much of the worthless powders before trying to recover the values, a small sieve should do the job, as the powder can cover the values which are heavier so are buried in the powder not allowing the acids to reach your values to dissolve them unless you boil the solution which will agitate the solution and allow the acids to work on your values.

Dissolving the flux by putting the melting dish in weak H2SO4 and heating is another way to free the beads without losing the melting dish.

Obviously clean the dish and heat in clean water and dry out before use.

Thank You Your suggestions make perfect sense. I will rinse the powder and remove it from the AR solution first. Then filter the powder to remove as much of it as I can. I will then examine the remaining fine powder and see if the beads are there still. Likely they will be and then apply heat to a new AR solution and see if I can dissolve the beads then and recover the gold. I will keep you posted.

Thanks again.

I find that just exposing the dish for prolonged time in boiling water tends to dissolve the borax. Acid is needed if the dish is discolored with base metal. Black is usually copper and is dealt with in hot, weak sulfuric acid. If the dish is pink or rose colored, just boiling hot water for a couple of days should get it all.