Please help me, my head is spinning

There is so much information to take in, I am very confused and would be very grateful for any help. The summaries I wrote below are actually all questions. If you can Please tell me what Is correct what is way off and what I have missed and totally and omitted.

I know there are many more methods that I I left out and that there are different chemicals that can be used, But are these the most common? Are they the most efficient? When would you use each one? And why do you use different methods for different things?
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, and you may be responsible for saving a life.

Nitric acid- used to dissolve base metals that are attached to gold but does not dissolve gold, thereby separating the gold while leaving is solid and intact. Hot nitric acid dissolves base metals more readily than cold nitric acid (common for most chemicals??) the gold is then washed and processed. Used primarily for what?? Gold karat scrap??

Acid peroxide (AP) - Mixture of Hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Used to dissolve base metals (mostly copper?). Gold remains as a solid and is then collected. Slow acting, used primarily for gold finger scrap?

Aqua regia (AR) – Mix of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid. Dissolves gold and base metals alike creating chloroauric acid which is then heated and transformed into auric acid. sodium metabisulfite is then added to precipitate gold from auric acid solution. Used primarily to process gold into high quality/purity, also used as a last resort for difficult recovery and used for ceramic chips?

Reverse electroplating – electric current is run through cold plated scrap to remove plating. Copper wire mesh holds gold plated scrap in sulfuric acid bath (primarily pins separated from all metal and plastic) current is then run through mesh into pins and then across sulfuric acid into anode on the other side of the bath. The current cause the nickel underneath the gold plating to plate the anode, dropping the gold plating as flakes into acid bath?

Inquarting- Used for high karat scrap. Purity of the gold is reduced to 25% or less by alloying with base metal (primarily silver because it dissolves more readily in nitric acid) alloy is then bathed in nitric acid dissolving base metal, leaving gold as solid?

Incinerating – literally burning off materials to isolate PM. Used on filters and lint and other flammable contaminants. Also used as an added step in some of the processes above?

You are asking a lot of questions about ALL the processes and what, in general, is to be used, how, and why. In essence, you are asking for a summary of most of the information contained on this forum, by various authors and refiners, as if you are going to be taking a test or a quiz or a final exam in some imaginary "refining" course. Because you are asking for curt summaries of information that have been previously laid out, along with cautions, side notes, hints and tricks and individual practices, you're asking for people to repeat that which they have already posted over many months and even years. My suggestion is that this is not a good way to operate or proceed. Not only are you asking for others to do your studying for you, but by summarizing everything, you or those who choose to reply to you, are inevitably going to leave out specific details.

Instead, my suggestion would be to focus on one and only one particular method of treating exactly one form of raw material, and find out everything you can, by 1: downloading, printing out (369 pages) and reading and re-reading and re-reading again the Hoke book, 2: searching for information already detailed by members of this forum on that and only that topic, and 3: viewing any of Lazersteves' videos, if available.

There are no shortcuts to firmly and completely grasping the totality of ALL the details about a SPECIFIC process you are interested in. There is no gain in being a generalist or asking forum members to approve your particular summaries....it leads to cursory, sloppy, inaccurate information that leaves details out. It does no good to be thinking about an AR process when you are talking about a Thum cell for purifying silver. You are absolutely right about one thing: There are too many details and too much information to try to summarize in 2-3 sentence snippets. The only cure is to study the material presented, over and over, to the point of exhaustion, exactly how you are going to proceed to perform ONE AND ONLY ONE PROCESS AT A TIME.

yossarian,

I enjoyed you in Catch 22.

In other words, you want a complete refining education. Everything is on the forum and has been repeated many times. How much time have you spent searching and reading? Be honest. Your questions say not much.

Do read Hoke. It's free and is very readable. You'll have a lot fewer questions after you read it.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=2480

You will also find the Guided Tour helpful, it contains many links that will fill in many of the blanks you are encountering.

Steve