AP vs Nitric acid Pros and cons?

[wildbill_hickup]

Greatings to the board I'm one of those newbe's that thought I was going to retire on the fortune I made recovering PM's from electronic scrap and cat. converters :roll: (that was before the reading I done sofar here :shock Now after being dually educated lets just say I'm an incurable DIY'er (biodiesel, homemade wind turbines, solar panels, earth batteries, etc, etc) that justs wants the experiance of doing it (and maybe wind up with a little booty as a bonus)

That being said I'm in the process of reading Hokes book. I have just finished chapter six and I'm left with a question. It probably will be answered later in the book and I'm sure it has been covered here, so I will probably look like an impatient fool. My question is, what are the pros and cons of AP vs Nitric acid?? As I understand it both are used to remove base metals. While I am finding it near impossable to find nitric acid and almost as hard to find sodium nitrate(I did finally find a small container of Potassium nitrate) Muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide are a piece of cake. For the perpose of removing base metals are there any major drawbacks to AP.

Thanks in advance and I will try and limit the dumb questions but this one was bugging me. :?

 

[lazersteve]

Bill,

AP is a decent substitute in most cases.

AP is slower than nitric is one of the biggest drawbacks I see to it. A second smaller issue is the tendency of strong mixtures of AP (excess heat and/or peroxide) will dissolve some of your gold whereas nitric won't. The dissolved gold is not lost just tied up until the solution gets saturated with dissolved base metals. A third drawback is that AP does not work effectively on all base metal substrates.

The positive sides of AP are :

1) Easy chemical access.
2) Reuseable.
3) Low fumes (no nitric oxides).
4) Cheap.
5) Easy to use.
6) Works on a variety of copper and base metal substrates.
7) Never lose sight of your gold flake/foils (*if mixed properly - i.e.: small peroxide additions, only when absolutely necessary, a bubbler can solve this)
8) Work is done via the CuCl2 molecule. Solution can be dehydrated and CuCl2 crystals can be mixed with water and a very small amount of HCl and used on an as needed basis.
9) Solution or CuCl2 crystals keep very well.

Steve

 

[wildbill_hickup]

Thanks Steve, still having some problems viewing some of your videos can't wait till they have been reformated.

Thanks again

 

[lazersteve]

Bill,

Which videos are giving you trouble and what sort of problem are you having with them?

Steve

 

[dndglobal]

Hey Bill
I was having the same problem with some of Steve's video's but there an icon that would come up for Microsoft silverlight. After I downloaded the silverlight, all the video opened up fine. Don

 

[wildbill_hickup]

Bill,

Which videos are giving you trouble and what sort of problem are you having with them?

Steve

Here are two Recovering foils after about 2 minutes buffering stoped at 4% waited another 5 min and nothing happend. Tried clicking play button nothing happened.

Harvesting header pins. On this one there was no play button, no controls at all. Also didn't display buffering on screen. Waited ten minutes and nothing happened.

I am using DSL by the way.

I'm going to check on dndglobal's suggestion but I think I already have silverlite. This is the second computer I am trying this on. One or the other I downloaded silverlite for one of the files and it seemed to work OK (can't remember which file now), but it didn't seem to help on others.

I PM'ed you on this awhile back and you suggested clearing buffers which I did and it didn't seem to affect anything.

Computer 1 running XL
Computer 2 running Vista

I'll let you know how I make out