Beautiful Crystal's forming in my AR as the sol6ution is cooling.

Hi everyone,
I am dissolving some gold plated pins in AR, ( I did not incinerate them prior to placing them in) so as my solution became saturated, I poured off some of the liquid into jars in order for me to place fresh acid in my beaker. All the gold has not dissolved yet , so I have gold in the jars floating and lying at the bottom of the jar. Something very interesting happened in two of the jars a white shiny crystal base formed on top of the gold as the solution was cooling. Could this be lead or silver? Any ideas ( this has not happened before)

Lead will make needle-like crystals, see if they dissolve in hot water and reform in cold water...

Thank you,
Will do that.

Silver chloride is normally a fluffy slower to settle white salt insoluble in hot or cold water.
Once washed of acids the silver salts will darken in sunlight.

Sodium chloride salts as you know, are soluble in cold and hot water.

Thanks for the info,
I decanted the AR and then poured boiling water into the beaker today. Wow, the Crystal's were pure white . As shown in the picture. However it was very hard to get it to dissolve, it kind of just became finer the more I tried. In the second photo you can see that.
Will try to melt it..... I think?

Rival metals said:

Will try to melt it..... I think?

Click to expand...

Why!?

What you have are base metal salts. Why would you want to try to melt them? For what purpose? I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm just curious about your thought process.

Dave

Well ,
There is still plenty of gold in between this fine powder....

But now you made me curious, what is so important of base metal salts?

Let me show you what I mean., also I still dont know what metal did this. I just thought if I could melt it , it would be easier to deal with it.

Any thoughts...

Hi Dave
Ok, I think you might have just turned on a light bulb for me,
Its defenatly not silver chloride as it was in direct sunlight today and did not change colour
I think it might be lead chloride based on some photos I just viewed on the net. And the fact that I did not incinerate the pins prior to dissolving.
NOW .... to get my gold out, I think I will place it back into AR , then precipitate lead out with sulphuric acid , them precipitate my gold.... is this more viable?
Thanks
Terence

Melting gold in the presence of chloride salts is a good way to put your gold into the environment as smoke.


White salts containing flakes or foils of gold.
Possible white salts ---copper I chloride, lead chloride, silver chloride, sodium chloride.

Copper chloride is soluble in HCl. The white powder will dissolve into a green solution or dark brown solution when very concentrated or saturated...
lead and silver chloride salts are insoluble in HCl, along with the gold.

Lead chloride will dissolve in very hot water, silver chloride will not (although the trick is to keep the water hot to dissolve lead while giving the fluffy silver chloride enough time to settle to the bottom without being disturbed in order to decant the solution), the lead salt will reform when the wash water is cooled...

Sodium chloride is also water-soluble.

Now with your gold flakes left in the fluffy silver chloride salts, you can use HCl and a little sodium hypochlorite (bleach) to dissolve the gold, leaving you with the silver chloride.

Thanks Dave,
You are a star. HCL dissolved a test sample very quick. Solution turned green almost immediately.
Copper 1 chloride☆.