Another Lesson Learned

[snacker47]

Hi all,

so... after making the initial mistake of mixing too many various components in my effort to harvest the gold from various cpus, ram chips, network cards and various other little cards with gold spots I went ahead and used a sand bath to remove most of the chips and then soaked the boards in lye so that I could determine where the gold was. I then tried to cut as much gold out and add that to my AP bath. Now I'm faced with the arduous task of filtering out what appears to be quite a bit of dark brown powder and determining the most efficient approach to removing all of the solder mask flakes that are as you can quite numerous amongst quite a bit of gold. There's enough gold that I'd like to try and get as much of it out and separated from the other material as possible and I've been searching around using terms like "solder mask flakes" soldering masking flake removal, looking on youtube but I am not making swift progress. Will the solder mask separate once I get to the HCL/Clorox point of my project. I could certainly use some guidance and yes I have done quite a bit of reading but I've obviously been doing quite a bit of reading on topics that are not directly related to my particular challenge at hand.
Thanks for any feedback,

S

 

[Palladium]

proceed with hcl/clorox and the mask will get caught in the filter paper afterwords.

 

[Harold_V]

Funny. There was a simple method of eliminating carbonaceous materials that saw me through years of refining.

Can you say "incinerate"?

Harold

 

[snacker47]

Thanks for the responses I do appreciate it.

I was thinking of both approaches as the heat would eliminate the solder mask and then I'd probably still be able to see the visible gold flakes and then I could filter out the ash and proceed with the HCL/Chlorox approach, I just wasn't sure which one would be the most efficient due to my lack of experience.

Cheers,
S

 

[rickbb]

Tip # 3, forget learning on YouTube, lots of bad, wrong and incomplete advise there. Here you will get the real deal.

 

[ilikesilver]

Funny. There was a simple method of eliminating carbonaceous materials that saw me through years of refining.

Can you say "incinerate"?

Harold

I dont know harold, i see you comment all over the forum and for some reason people dont want to listen!! I surely did.. made my life easier for refining lately. lol

 

[Harold_V]

.. made my life easier for refining lately. lol

And there you have it.
It makes refining easier.

Harold

 

[kurt]

snacker47 --- Harold is absolutely right when he says to incinerate

That "fine dirt like material" you mention being in with your gold is from base metals - you don't say what all you did to get to this point - so depeneding on what you did when & were in your different processing (you say you mixed stuff from different sources) you still have base metals involved & more then likely they are the salts of these base metals & there is a good chance that one of those base metal salts is metastannic acid

You need to incinerate to turn these base metals &/or the salts of these base metals to oxides of the metals - incineration is key to turning those base metals &/or there salts to oxides - then do a hot HCL wash to get rid of them before going to the step of dissolving your gold --- if you don't - those base metal salts will cause some of your AuCl to convert to Au colloids

colloids are particals that are so fine that they can not be filtered & can in fact be so fine that not only can they not be filtered but they can stay in suspension & not even settle out

What that means is you will suffer a loss of "some" of your gold as colloids if you skip the steps of incineration followed by hot HCL washing before dissolving your gold

Go to Chemical Processess then go back to August 25th 2012 & look for a thread titled Metastanic Acid Experiment --- I posted instructions for incineration & HCL washing there along with pictures

Kurt