AP and gray mud ?

[chrishawn]

I put gray mud ,[left over from prosesing cell phone boards]

in AP and solution turned orenge/red. Stanious tested and it turned purple, any idea what this orenge/red solution is? Thank To Everyone,without you guys i would not have thisgreat hobby.

 

[butcher]

gray mud can be most any or all the metals, colors of solutions sometimes dont mean to much, you will see alot of different colors with mixes of metals and acids,

now the stannous test show's you you have some gold in there.

I would keep up the acid peroxide untill all the base metals it dissolved were removed from the powders, take care not to use too much peroxide.
then the powders I would rinse and boil in water , lower to hot but not boil to let any silver settle,removing lead while still hot decant the lead water, then you should have these powders cleaned up to beging refining.

 

[golddigger2]

i was under the impression that A/P dissolved most of the base metals other than silver?

 

[butcher]

MOST not all.
lead will not, copper1chloride can also be in white or gray powder, there are also other metals that will not dissolve. and if metals or powders left they can be MOST any metal,

most is the keyword of the day?

 

[golddigger2]

I am just curious, is it worth trying to retrive values from this grey mud? The last five or so batches of fingers I have processed I have wound up with a considerable amount of this grey powder. I was thinking of boiling it in water to remove lead and then adding nitric acid to get silver nitrate for silver precip. Are my assumptions correct in this regard?

 

[samuel-a]

golddigger2, as they saied above me, the gray mud is a mix of metals and salts, usually silver chloride, lead chloride and copper chloride (smotimes can contain traces of PGM's).

to be left only with the silver chloride, you can boil for a few minutes in dilute HCL (say 50/50) and water.
the key is, to filter before the solution start to cool down and lead re-crystalized, you can leave the beaker with gray mud on the hotplate during filtration to keep it hot.
once finished, you will see the lead crystals forming in the filterd liquid.
you can let it cool down and use the same dilute HCL to extract yet more lead and copper.


with that said, i can't see whay go with this kind of process to get the traces amounts of silver that might be there.

if gold is presence in the mix it's a much simple story.
i have a batch with a lot of lead and lead chloride and about a zilion of almost nano scale gold flakes, some HCL-Cl will take care of the gold, leaving everythig behind.

 

[golddigger2]

Thanks Samuel. I didn't think it would be worth it! but I wanted learn how as part of my growing education on this subject.
just another quick question with regards to gold and Hcl/Cl. Does hcl/cl only turn gold in to liquid or do the base metals tag along as usual? And does smb selectively precipitate gold or do base metals, if there are any also precipitate. Its just that in 1 batch of aucl3 I did on not completely pure pins had a green tinge to it Im assuming the green colour was copper in solution as well as the gold