stupid? stannous question

Good evening all. I am at a bit of an impass and seek a little guidance.I started a test run of some foils that I peeled off the boards over 20 years ago and put in an AP solution,well, let me make a long story short....what I really want to know is how to test my stannous solution (2.2 gr Sn dissolved in 20 ml hcl). I was attempting to get some gold to make my standard solution for testing as per holkes but ran into a few problems along the way so am at a complete stop at moment....am documenting my progress but feel I can deal with it at moment.
my question is,if I dissolve 1 or 2 gold wires recovered from ic chips (Thank you patnor) in 2 drops of hcl and 1 drop of cl,will this be enough gold in solution that I can see a reaction and know that ive made my stannous properly? I wont loose anything as that drop can go in my stock pot.....but ive never seen the reaction in person and would like to.
If what ive learned so far counts ,I doubt I could ever loose values in the cucl2 ive created,however believe it or not,could not find NaOH to make a titration solution to test saturation at a single store in my closest town....even went to the hippy place...apparently they don't make soap anymore.
bottom line is ,I'm finding that the math is just as,if not more , important than the process,but I would still like to test each step of the way. thanks for your knowledge.
Glen

You only need a drop of stannous chloride, and a drop of gold chloride to see the reaction or purple of Cassius.

You can dissolve the bit of gold(a tiny gold wire) in a little HCl with a little bleach as the oxidizer, heating the solution to drive off the free chlorine gas, (so the oxidizer chlorine gas would not interfere with the test and keep the gold from reducing to colloidal gold in the stannous test), this could be done in a small test tube or something similar.
Just be sure if you use glass that it can handle the heat you use.

This would help you see the reaction, which can be done with a drop of gold chloride solution (free of oxidizer), and a drop of your stannous chloride on a Qtip or a filter paper.
This wouldn't be a standard concentrated solution, but good enough to see the reaction.

For standard test solutions see Hokes pages 88 to 102.

Not sure why you want the sodium hydroxide for at this point.

Butcher,thank you very much for your prompt reply. I thought I knew a lot until I read this froum....more people should take a humbler approach to things....including a free education.
I wanted to be able to test my solution for gold after rinsing but have never seen the reaction in person so was unsure if I had made my stannous correctly. The point Im at now is this... I took 13.62 gr of gold foils,peeled from boards,(looked heavy to me) and thinking this was a small amount, put them in a vessel with 70ml hcl plus 15 ml h2o2....my thinking at the time plus things I had read was just enough to cover the material.
soon enough my lot looked like a bad cup of coffee and all reaction seemed to stop....so I added some ap from another test on some pins I had done 30ml hcl/10ml h202....the mixture lightened and reaction seemed to start again, but said to myself,shouldnt have done that.
after about anouthr 12 hrs and solution darkened again,i remembered oxygen and introduced 2 air stones...took several hrs but looked much better to my untrained eye.i have since added 30ml hcl/30 ml h20....I stopped here. half my foils are floating on top,the rest are on the bottom. my concern is that I have too much material in too weak a soulution. after rereading I found a post by lasersteave where he said he prossesed 5 lb of finger boards with an average yield of 11 to (I forget) grams of gold and he uses a lot more acid to get that,and as I don't know the weight of the stripped boards I cant even start to make a guess as to how much copper is dissolved in solution.
I wanted the lye to make the titration solution to see how concentrated the copper was in mine...had other problems as well...dryrotted bulb on hydrometer,no litmus paper....bad day.
that's where I am at the moment, I do appreciate the answer,I most likely would have forgotten to drive of the excess chlorine even on a small sample.

Why worry about the copper content?
Trying to figure out how much copper is in solution would be somewhat difficult, the solution can hold a very wide range of copper content, as there are many variables involved, water content, oxygen content, the state of the dissolved copper salts (CuCl, CuCl2) and then you may also have other metals or dissolved metal salts involved as dissolved chloride salts nickel iron....

If you precipitated the metals with NaOH you would just make another salt of copper possibly iron nickle and possibly even gold hydroxides, still making it hard to figure the original copper content of the solution, even if dried you the hydroxide and weighed it as accurately as possible, and tried to figure out the contents of it using the moles of each compound.

I think you are over complicating things, it is possible to figure the copper content of your solution but it would be very difficult, with the other metals involved, I can think of several methods to do it but it would not be easy, and without expensive lab equipment it would not be very accurate (as you would have to separate the other metals from any salts) to get a pure salt, dry the salts and get very accurate measurements and then figure the moles of the salts anion and cation, to calculate how many grams of copper was involved in the salt.

Copper I chloride
Say we had a pure dried sample of this salt of one gram (no other metal salts involved).
copper 63.5 grams per mole
chlorine 35.5 grams per mole
copper I chloride 99.9 grams per mole

copper:
copper grams per mole divided by CuCl grams per mole, times the one gram sample of CuCl salt
63.5g /99.9g X 1g = 0.635 grams of copper in our one gram of dried copper I chloride salt.

figuring chloride in the sample:
35.5g / 99.9g X 1g = 0.355 grams Cl^-

We could use this to figure how much copper was involved in another pure dried salt like copper II chloride ...

But our copper chloride solution can hold a very wide range of contents of copper, as copper II chloride, copper I chloride and well as other metal dissolved salts, depending on its conditions.

butcher said:

... a drop of gold chloride solution (free of oxidizer), and a drop of your stannous chloride on a Qtip or a filter paper.
This wouldn't be a standard concentrated solution, but good enough to see the reaction.

For standard test solutions see Hokes pages 88 to 102.

Click to expand...

I've tried both the Qtip and the filter paper testing methods and finally bought a ceramic spot plate but one thing that worked great for me was a white plastic spoon. The test showed the results real good just like a spot plate but the thing I like the most (besides the low or free cost) was the ability to dump the test liquids into a container with other paper or Qtip tests. I figure there is a tiny bit of gold there so don't want to throw it away. This method makes a lot less volume of stuff that will eventually need processed to recover that tiny bit of gold.

Butcher's directions for making the gold chloride for testing the stannous test solution is exactly how I always made mine. A tiny bit of gold makes a lot of test solution. The stannous test is very sensitive. It's fun and educational to play with it and see just how dilute you can go and still get a positive test result.

As far as the no litmus paper, look up turmeric pH indicator on Google. When I made biodiesel, we often used a solution of the common spice turmeric to do titrations of the used oil.

There are some threads here about making your own lye (sodium hydroxide) if you can't find it. A hardware store might have it or be able to order it for you if you ask. It is sold as drain cleaner but make sure it is 100% sodium hydroxide. We bought it by the case when we were making biodiesel and the local hardware store got it for us.

Agreed. I have a 25ml pot of weak AuCl that I use at the beginning of every day's refining to test my stannous chloride.

Simple and easy and a great checksum.

You can make your own ph test papers very easily, simply cut up some filter paper into strips and buy a red cabbage, cut some up and add to a little water and soak the strips in the mix, dry and your ready to go.

As one of the members pointed out, red wine does the same.

spaceships said:

As one of the members pointed out, red wine does the same.

Click to expand...

Aah but you can drink that :shock: :lol: