AP solution turn clear as water overnight.

Advertise with us
Shop deals on ebay
shop deals on amazon
xelexo
Gold Refining Forum

Help Support Gold Refining Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
C

cmalec1957

Member
Joined
Mar 19, 2016
Messages
5
I have about 15oz of gold plated figers pins etc. Put in peroxide and muratic 3 to 1 muratic 600ml to 200peroxide actually little less about 175. But why did it turn clear as water? Please give help/advise.
 
I have never experienced this, but there may have been base metals that cemented gold and copper. Did you have solder in between?

whatever...save the solids (there is all or most of your gold) and test the solution. Then let the solution settle for a longer time (maybe weeks), there might still be very fine gold powder that takes longer to settle - though I don't believe it. Rather I guess, that most of the gold didn't dissolve even though you made the mistake to use too much H2O2. This ratio would easily dissolve gold if no basemetals with electrical contact to the gold are availabe.

And...read, read, read, take some weeks or even better months of time only reading. This could easily have been avoided by reading the forum.
 
wait! you wrote "fingers, pins etc."??? What exactly and how much? Inclusively solder?

Most probably! What I wrote above was spot on. I just would like to add: Stop any experiments. Store everything savely. Read Hoke and read the library section!
 
Thanks for info , what do you think I should use as ratio for AP I have seen so many diffrent ones. HOAK talks about hydrocloric obvious when using muratic you use more. So what would you say with muratic and peroxide?
 
Hydrochloric acid and muriatic acid is the same thing. The concentration is what is most important. Are you doing this safely outside and away from sensitive plants, pets and people? Any metal in the area will oxidize quickly so if you have tools or any metal items, close by, it will be destroyed by the vapors.
 
cmalec1957 said:
Thanks for info , what do you think I should use as ratio for AP I have seen so many diffrent ones. HOAK talks about hydrocloric obvious when using muratic you use more. So what would you say with muratic and peroxide?
Click to expand...

HCl *is* muriatic.

And really, no peroxide is best.

I will try to explain-

Depending on the material, and amount of base metal, when you add peroxide *it* is what is allowing the base metals to oxidize. If there is too much peroxide, it will eat away the gold foils (which will later cement back on to the base metals as the digestion progresses)

The peroxide is just a way to "jump start" the CuCl2 leech, which, the copper II chloride is what is really doing the dissolving(of the base metals).

Whenever i do fingers, i just use a bit of my old CuCl2 leech with some fresh HCl to help prevent the foils from being taken up into solution. If you dont have any old CuCl2 leech to reuse, just a *dash* of peroxide is all that is needed.

Lazersteve has a great document on the copper II chloride leech (AP).

But, if you must use peroxide, i would only use a few ml.
-but, that depends on *how much* muriatic acid (HCl) will be in the solution

The articles/youtube videos where they say 3:1 HCl/H2O2 is not going to do you any favors. Just cause headaches of "where's my gold!?!"

-topher
 
solar_plasma said:
I have never experienced this, but there may have been base metals that cemented gold and copper. Did you have solder in between?
Click to expand...

It's possible that cmalec1957 didn't use enough HCL. I had the same type of problem while processing pins. I decanted about 3/4 of the solution and added more HCL and it worked after that. There is a lot of zinc (clear/grey solution) in there from the brass under the gold plating.

I agree with jason_recliner about the tin/solder. It could very well be that.

After getting most of the zinc out (or into solution), adding more HCL will start dissolving the copper and you'll get the green color back.

I believe, that if you use too much peroxide, you'll dissolve atleast some of the gold, which would get cemented back onto other pins, or copper etc. You may need to completely dissolve them, to process them properly now.

On a side note,
I'm still waiting for a reply from Noxx, to see if I did infact get my IP banned from miahost, when I was trying to solve that 404 problem people were having with percent signs in their posts. I can't load any pages normally (timed out message), so I'm using an anonymous web browser that doesn't seem to let me link properly.

You can search for Beginner questions and mistakes , a thread I made back in May of 2015. page 2 and on, should explain it better.


Edit - re edit - I swear I read somewhere on here that it takes approximately [stt]1 gallon of HCL/pound of pins.[/stt] 1 gallon/ 2 pounds of pins. If someone knows how accurate this is, please let me know.
 
Grelko said:
Edit - re edit - I swear I read somewhere on here that it takes approximately [stt]1 gallon of HCL/pound of pins.[/stt] 1 gallon/ 2 pounds of pins. If someone knows how accurate this is, please let me know.
Click to expand...

take a look at a periodic system

most of our base metals are in the 4th period having a atomic weight of 55-65u which means 55-65 g per mol (btw. Ag and Pd in the 5th period around 107u and Au and Pt in the 6th period around 196u)

HCl has molecule weight of 1u (H) plus 35,5u (Cl) = 36,5u, so this gives 36,5 g per mol

"mol" is a number of atoms or molecules, just like a "dozen" means 12 pieces. 1 mol means 6,02 * 1023 pieces or 602 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 pieces of atoms of molecules

now we need to know how many atoms or molecules will react with how many of the other ones. This is why we need equations like this:

1 Zn + 2 HCl => 1 ZnCl2 + 1 H2 but we don't write the "1", so the correct form would be Zn + 2 HCl => ZnCl2 + H2
 
Same thing happened to me second day of using AP (with air bubbler). I used 400g of mixed (barely magnetic(copper/brass based)) pins. First i added 1l of 16 percent HCl with 100ml of 3 percent H2O2. When solution turned green i added more (1l of HCl and 100ml H2O2). This is a look of mixed pins.
1.jpg
This is a picture of day 1 solution color.
3 day 1.jpg
And then, same as to you it happened to me, solution loose the color over night. I added some more (100ml of H2O2) and solution again started to produce the CuCl2 (green color), so i figured out that there was not enough oxidizer (air and H2O2) in solution needed to start the reaction (oxidizing copper to CuCl). Also, i decided to be patient and at the end everything was doing well. Now its a day 5, here are some more pictures of progress by days. I hope this helps.
Day 2
7 day 2.jpg
Day 3
11 day 3.jpg
Day 4
12 day 4.jpg
 
solar_plasma said:
HCl has molecule weight of 1u (H) plus 35,5u (Cl) = 36,5u, so this gives 36,5 g per mol

"mol" is a number of atoms or molecules, just like a "dozen" means 12 pieces. 1 mol means 6,02 * 1023 pieces or 602 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 pieces of atoms of molecules

now we need to know how many atoms or molecules will react with how many of the other ones. This is why we need equations like this:

1 Zn + 2 HCl => 1 ZnCl2 + 1 H2 but we don't write the "1", so the correct form would be Zn + 2 HCl => ZnCl2 + H2
Click to expand...


Avogadro's number... Beautiful... Simple...elegant.
Isnt it based upon how many atoms are in 12g of carbon-12 atoms?
Incredible to think that Amadeo Avogadro lived in the early 1800's.. And gave us this great gift which has lead to a greater understanding of the world around us.
 
solar_plasma said:
take a look at a periodic system

most of our base metals are in the 4th period having a atomic weight of 55-65u which means 55-65 g per mol (btw. Ag and Pd in the 5th period around 107u and Au and Pt in the 6th period around 196u)

HCl has molecule weight of 1u (H) plus 35,5u (Cl) = 36,5u, so this gives 36,5 g per mol

"mol" is a number of atoms or molecules, just like a "dozen" means 12 pieces. 1 mol means 6,02 * 1023 pieces or 602 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 pieces of atoms of molecules

now we need to know how many atoms or molecules will react with how many of the other ones. This is why we need equations like this:

1 Zn + 2 HCl => 1 ZnCl2 + 1 H2 but we don't write the "1", so the correct form would be Zn + 2 HCl => ZnCl2 + H2
Click to expand...

Zinc's weight is 65.38 (65.4), but would that need to be in solution as ZnCl, so that it matches up with HCl since it is in liquid "aqueous" form?

With a bit of math, using the above equation, we can find out the approximate amount needed, depending on the total amount of zinc, copper, gold, or other metals that are in the pins. Temperature, pressure (above/below sea level) and other things may change the results though.

Math and science have always been my strongest subjects, but I never learned chemistry in school, so I'm slowly teaching myself.
 
This has been only half of what I wrote, then I lost connection to GRF, maybe by a bad IP. I will come back finishing my post.
 
In my first post, where I was still waiting for a reply from Noxx,

If you see this Noxx, don't worry about getting a hold of miahost about my problem getting the timed out message. Either it was temporary, you or someone else got it fixed, or my DCHP expired and my ISP gave me a new IP. Everything is working like it should be again, thank you. :mrgreen:
 
solar_plasma is having difficulties in getting on the forum and posting. I will be posting this reply for him.
 
weird, ok now I try to post my answer myself:

It seems that I can post again (right now)... well, using stoichiometry (I don't want to write all this again, but there are lots of good youtube videos for learning simple stoichiometry) you will find that 1kg basemetal, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni , Cu, Zn, will consume 3,3(Mn)-3,8L(Zn) of 33percent HCl to totally dissolve. Ofcourse you need a little more for an acceptable speed of reaction. But this is what will be consumed.

I think it is most correct to understand copper II chloride as a catalyst.

edit: I could not post before I changed the percent symbol to the word percent
 
solar_plasma said:
well, using stoichiometry ... you will find that 1kg basemetal, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni , Cu, Zn, will consume 3,3(Mn)-3,8L(Zn) of 33percent HCl to totally dissolve.
Click to expand...
Bringing us back to Grelko's question, that does indeed look to be about 1 gallon of HCl to 2 pounds of basemetal. Just converting Solar's numbers above gives us 1 gallon HCl for 2.2 (Zn) to 2.5 (Mn) pounds of metal.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top