beginner searching for catalytic converter refining help.

I have a good source of catalytic converters. I would like to process of them myself cut out all the middlemen. I'm searching for books and videos of how to get me started. Are there any specific books or videos specifically tuned to what I'm trying to do. I'm not the brightest bulb chandelier so looking for something that's easy to understand. If not oh well. All the info I found out here is very helpful but its over my head. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Jake

Kadriver has done some very good post on converters. Here are some of his post. http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&keywords=kadriver+converter

Steve also has a dvd on the subject http://goldrecovery.us/pricing.asp

So far I herd that aqua Regis can actually breakdown the building blocks of platinum on a molecular level? I also heard that I could break down the ceramic in the catalytic converter with sodium hydroxide (lye)? Sadly I have to wait till next week until I can buy lasersteve DVD on platinum recovery. Can anybody confirm this or lay this to rest. Thanks
Jake
P.S
thanks Steve for lookin out

You can dissolve platinum in hot aqua regia, there are other solutions that will dissolve platinum.

Sodium hydroxide, lye or caustic soda would not break down the ceramics enough for a method of recovery of the values, (the only way I can see that happen is unless they were melting the catalyst in the caustic using a furnace, and I do not know that if that would work).

Just so you do not get your hopes up too high, you may find it hard to compete with those middlemen, you may find your self-looking for a better middleman.

To confirm what Butcher said you will struggle to better the returns from the large refiners. If you can get the cats for free or very cheaply and want to learn the process then fine but to make money in any volume it's a better proposition to crack them open, remove the substrate mill, sample, assay and sell on, if the volumes good the large refiners will offer excellent terms, if not find another buyer doing the same and sell to them. The problem is the amount of substrate which soaks up a certain amount of the pregnant solution and to remove it fully by filtering and additional washes leaves you with large volumes of solution with little values, the big boys do not use wet refining but huge arc furnaces running 24/7.

So basically its not worth my time to refine converters. I'm starting to think that the gap between overhead and profit is very small unless done on a large scale. Not cool! I have never been so interested in a potential business operation. Any other thoughts any body?

It is my belief the large refiner can get more values from these easier than we can with the processes we use, leaching of these with acids, would not work as well as the methods they may use, metals like Rhodium are harder to recover.

The work, time involved, and dealing with large volumes of waste may not be worth trying to refine these.

Knowing the value of what you have and what your gettting paid for them is very important, although this data can be hard to determine if selling truck loads of used catalytic converters.

I am not in this bussiness, and really do not know that much about it.

I would think there are ways to get more from your product, look into cutting the honeycomb out and, and getting a well mixed sample's of of what you have for sell, having the samples assayed for values by weight of material, giving you more of an idea of what you are dealing with when you do sell them.