Non-Chemical A monumental mental screwup!

[golddigger]

Several years ago I attempted to pre-treat a coffee can full of plastic pin connectors. These were blue colored plastic with gold plated pins, the type that perforates flat ribbon cables.
The pins were in a ~3 lb plastic coffee can. To this can I added about 2 cups of concentrated H2SO4, placed the lid securely on, and shook the heck out of it. The container got a little warm, but not nearly hot enough to melt it.
I shook the container twice a day for a week, and left the lid loose after shaking to let gas pressure out.
After a week, The blue connectors were greatly reduced in size, and much of the gold from the pins was losened and swimming in the goo.
I dumped the entire contents into a five gallon plastic bucket, which was half full of water.

The material INSTANTLY turned into a basketball sized spaghetti-like grey mass. Words cannot describe this hairball form hell. It was like a giant, tough "chore-boy" scrubber, oozing white liquid. To make matters worse, all the free gold was incorporated into plastic matrix.
To make a long story short, I cut the ball into managable chunks with tin snips, and burned in in a metal coffee can. I leached the ash twice with HCl+Chlorox, precipitated with SMB, and obtained an abysmal qty of gold.

 

[Harold_V]

Your experience is a good example of why I never got involved with reclaiming gold from electronic scrap.

My comment should not be construed as one to discourage others----it's not meant that way. There is a huge amount of value waiting to be recovered from that source------in some cases, free for the taking. It's just labor intensive-----often beyond worth.

I commented only because there are sources of gold that make one's time much better spent, although making the proper connection to access those sources isn't easy.

I'm alluding to what happened for me, quite unexpectedly, when I started refining for manufacturing jewelers.

A small refiner can become a valuable asset to these people, assuming they learn, and are willing to, provide gold of excellent quality, and to be able to process wastes of all types that come from such an operation. That would include recovering values from solutions, polishing wastes, carpets, ultrasonic cleaners, floor sweeps and bench sweeps. The level of concentration of values is much higher in almost all cases (carpets can be the exception, but can also be quite good) than that which is found on plated objects.


Harold