Recovering silver values

Gold Refining Forum

Help Support Gold Refining Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Dwight Keene

New member
Joined
Jan 24, 2019
Messages
3
I need to know how to recover a small amount of silver values left after treating gold concentrates with nitric cid. The residue is now dried and crusted in the bottom of a 5-gallon bucket and any silver would be in powder form I suspect. There is probably not more than a quart or so of material, but we recovered good gold from these concentrates and I was wondering how to treat the rest. I have been treating other cons with 3 to one muriatic acid/Hydrogen Peroxide, then filtering and treating with Muriatic Acid and Clorox to disolve gold into solution and precipitating with Bonout Stump Removal. It works pretty well for gold. Can I do the same thing with this silver residue and use copper to precipitate?
 
If you treated the gold with nitric and then left that to dry before any chlorides were introduced then your silver will be silver nitrate in that crusted residue. If that's the case then all you need to do is add water to put it back into solution. You can then filter that and add copper to drop the silver. After you add water you can take a sample and add a drop of hcl or table salt to check to make sure you have silver in solution. When you add a drop of chloride you will see a white cloud form in your solution and this will conform the presence of silver in the solution.
 
Switching to another subject, sometimes when I am treating concentrates with the above HCl/Hydrogen Peroxide solution I get a strong yellow color. What am I looking at? I tried filtering and dropping it with Bonite S. R. but nothing happened. In completing the process with HCL/Clorox I found no gold. Did I screw it up adding the Bonite, or did a dog just come by and pee in my sample?
 
Probably iron. Take a sample of the HCl liquor and do a stannous chloride test for the presence of gold before you try and drop it and use needless smb while wasting time and chemicals. Stannous is your eyes and ears!
 
Back
Top