gold plating bath HELP!

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richyrichcolorado

New member
Joined
Feb 6, 2012
Messages
1
Hello to Everyone; I'm Richyrich and I have just joined, and I really do not know what I am doing. If I make mistakes with the forum, please let me know what and where I went wrong. The reason I joined was because I was given about 50 gallons of gold cyanide plating solution a good number of years ago from a friend and neighbor of mine. He told me that there is probably 4 or 5 ounces of gold in it and then told me how to sludge it out. Well that was a long time ago and I did not write it down and I do not remember what I was told and he has since died. Is there someone out there that can steer me to a place to look on this site that I can start to learn what I need to do, and the best way to do it. I am familiar with many chemicals nitric acid [ red fuming ] , hydrocloric 67% , sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide to name a few. I worked at an aero space battery manuf. co. before I retired. Thank-You all in advance for any help with my problem.
 
Rich,
Do not add any acid or any chemical until you do a lot of study, we would hate to see you kill yourself before learning, try a search of zinc and cyanide.

Also if this is a plating solution would it not be better to sell it as such?

Laser Steve's web site (look for one of his post for link) He has a search for forum that works great.

I have not used it so I can only give this tip.
 
Rich getting the gold out is the easy part getting rid of the cyanide safely and without massive costs is the harder part. I'm loath to give advice concerning this material to anyone who really doesn't know their way around chemicals as cyanide doesn't give you a second chance if you make a mistake. GSP is probably your best bet for advice here but I fear that unless you have the necessary fume hood and have a full understanding of what exactly you need to do your not going to be able to recover this yourself and no one will help due to the dangers involved.
It may pay you to change this post and ask for someone to do this for you, someone who knows exactly what to do, even 5 ounces of gold aren't worth your life or the possible fines if you don't dispose of the cyanide safely and properly.
 
richyrichcolorado said:
Hello to Everyone; I'm Richyrich and I have just joined, and I really do not know what I am doing. If I make mistakes with the forum, please let me know what and where I went wrong. The reason I joined was because I was given about 50 gallons of gold cyanide plating solution a good number of years ago from a friend and neighbor of mine. He told me that there is probably 4 or 5 ounces of gold in it and then told me how to sludge it out. Well that was a long time ago and I did not write it down and I do not remember what I was told and he has since died. Is there someone out there that can steer me to a place to look on this site that I can start to learn what I need to do, and the best way to do it. I am familiar with many chemicals nitric acid [ red fuming ] , hydrocloric 67% , sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide to name a few. I worked at an aero space battery manuf. co. before I retired. Thank-You all in advance for any help with my problem.

Before doing ANYTHING to the solution, I would want to know the pH (very important) and whether, or not, there is really gold in that solution (and an idea of how much). It's very possible (and, likely, in my experience) that it contains little or no gold and your "friend" just wanted to get rid of some cyanide waste. I've seen that happen more than once. Since your "friend" seemed to know all about it, I wonder why he didn't recover the gold ($6000 worth) himself or take it to a refiner.

The first thing I would do is take a small sample to a lab and find out what you have. You'll probably have to hand carry it since you'll have problems mailing cyanide. The gold in the solution can easily be determined, fairly inexpensively, by AA or by fire assay. Once you know the gold content (and the pH), you can decide what to do with it - with our help, of course.
 
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