jonny823,
It sounds like you have good common sense.
May I suggest something to help get you started?
Forget getting gold for the moment, but collect any scrap you can find that may contain value (preferably free scrap, until you have a good understanding of the values involved in any scrap you buy).
I also wouldn't worry about spending much on chemicals or lab equipment, until you know for sure what you need and why, a simple lab can be set up from the second hand store, and many chemicals can be found locally, several you can even learn to make if needed.
Begin with Hoke's book, and doing the experiments in her book, study the forum, a good place to begin is with dealing waste and the safety section, follow the forums guided tour to get introduced to the different processes.
After getting acquainted using the experiments in Hoke's book, and making and using test solutions, I would begin with memory fingers (study the copper II chloride leach (called acid peroxide) to recover foils, then study using HCl acid and bleach to refine the foils, this way you are working with a material that has less metals and problems, you will get better acquainted with reactions with less troublesome chemicals and metals.
Hoke's experiments if you pay close attention to the details will teach you many things you will need to understand about recovery and refining, they will give you an understanding of problems that can occur and how to avoid them, they will teach you many of the basic principles and methods you will need later to make more informed decisions.
These simple steps will put you leaps ahead of where you are now.
Although it may seem like it will take you longer to get gold from wasting your time by studying instead of doing experiments on your own, you will later find you will avoid many problems in recovery and refining by having a better understanding of the basics. you will in reality get the gold sooner, instead of wasting endless hours on failed experiments and not knowing where your gold is disappearing in the messes of failed experiments from mixing chemicals and metals blindly in the dark lab of not having a good understanding of the principles involved, and how these metals and acids and reagents work with each other...
Basically education is where we get our gold, and education is where we learn to recover and refine it, what we do to get that gold comes from us educating ourselves, melting the pure gold in our dish is the rewards of our time spent on that education.
So I can say you do not learn this from experimenting with what you think works.
But you learn this by educating yourself, and then experiment with what you know, to see how it works, and to get a better understanding of how to get better at doing it.
Education will get that pure gold in your dish, the sooner you concentrate on education, the sooner you will be melting that pure gold you recovered and refined.
