Salts in my solution.

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Mountain Man

Well-known member
Joined
Sep 11, 2016
Messages
102
Hey Everyone,

I am back with another question. I am suddenly having an issue with what I believe is what is referred to as salts. I have a white powder that is appearing in my AR mix. When I poor off the solution from the materials I have a white powder that is accompanying my gold powder or maybe some of the white powder/salt is my gold. I know nothing about how to stop this or recover any lost to salt gold or anything about this powder.

Once again I ask for some help and to be pointed in the right direction where I can learn how to deal with or avoid this problem.

Thank you in advance for your help. I am studying my Hokes Book but I have not figured it out from the book as of yet. Your help is always greatly appreciated.

Kirk
 
Thank you for responding.

It has happened in my last 2 batches. I use Sodium Nitrate dissolved in 8 oz. of hot water. I mix that with 32 cups of hcl. I used a little more of each so it covered the blank computer boards I was processing. They were completely clean of any hardware of any kind including soder so they were very clean. I processed 6 lbs of these boards. Let it set for about 12 hours and poured off the solution the next morning.

The solution was black and clean of any debris. I filtered and strained it. Poured it into a 2 gal jar with a spicket so I can drain the excess fluid off without disturbing the gold mud.

I neutralized the solution by dropping urea in small increments until the bubbles stop. I do not have a ph test kit as of yet. * interesting side note, when dropping the urea I saw a white almost foam looking substance forming on top of the solution and did form a thick, 1 to 2 inches thick dense foam. I tested the solution with urea until there were no more bubbles. Some of the matter that was on the top of the solution did settle to the bottom as well.

The crazy part is when I added SMB to drop the gold all the foam disappeared, so I thought. So at this point all seemed well so I let that sit overnight and when I checked it in the morning the solution is clear green, the dropped material is a light brown tinted white salt looked material and is roughly 2 inches thick covering an 8 inch bottom size jar. That has happened to me off and on over the last 2 years and I am ready to figure out how to stop it.

Will happily follow any advice you can offer with great appreciation. In the past it meant a lost batch and I have paid that price to many times over.

Kirk
 
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