Ugh what a mess this was to recover.... but WORTH IT! Once all was said and done I only had about 1 to 2 grams of powder dropped from the filtered clean solution and at least another 3 to 4 grams recovered from the filters, paper towels, etc following the cleanup of these yellow salts. I ended up deciding to do the recovery sooner than I planned as there was known 2.5 grams in the original solution, in addition to the foils from another pound of fingers so I knew there was a significant amount (to me anyway) trapped in these salts So here's what I did, hopefully it helps someone else in this situation...
Initially I did try to incinerate, however on my budget I was only able to setup a charcoal furnace with a cheap grill. Unfortunately I was unable to get the heat anywhere near hot enough to do anything with so I moved onto plan B. On the gut feeling that there was tin and/or copper in solution (due to the original recovery from waste solution that was admittedly, STUPIDLY added to clean known solution, and that I know I rushed the pre-cleaning of the waste salts originally) I went ahead and took the filters/towels and began introducing them into a 1:1 solution of 32% HCL and tap water totaling about 6 cups in my coffee pot. Once the solution had dissolved the filters down (after a day of sitting on medium heat as I didn't want to boil it just yet but instead just break down the paper/organics) I would continue to introduce filters and papers until again there was insufficient room for further papers. Allowed to soak in the warm HCL solution for another day until it broke down to the pulped paper sludge again. Repeated this procedure for the next two days until I had all paper towels and filters with these yellow salts (adding more clean HCL/water solution as needed) dissolved down to a pulp-like sludge. Next I took the pot off the warmer and put it on my hotplate inside a pan with sand to boil for about an hour. Allowed it to cool slightly and filtered. Took the filtered mass (filter and all) and returned it to the hotplate to boil for most of the day until the paper was pulped and solution was very dark brown. Allowed the solution to cool for about an hour and again filtered off. Following this I proceeded with the standard HCL + Clorox method intentionally using too much bleach (approximately 300 ml bleach into 8 cups of HCL) to ensure anything trapped was dissolved. I then spent the next two days filtering off this dirty AuCl, pouring off about two cups of solution at a time as the filters would fill with the pulp sludge. Using my spray bottle I then rinsed the sludge/filter 3 times to ensure all AuCl was rinsed from the sludge as well as taking sampled from the sludge and doing a stannous chloride test to make sure no gold was still there. Poured off the filtered solution into a crock and repeated this procedure 3 or 4 more times with the remaining dirty solution all the while looking for indications previously seen (cloudy solution, salts sticking to the sides of the crock, etc). As there was a rather large amount of solution at this point (approximately 8 cups in the coffee pot and 600 ml in another beaker, in addition to the presumed chlorine still in solution I evaporated it back down to a manageable amount. Diluted and dropped with SMB as normal.
This will obviously need another refining but one thing that I found curious was that the AuCl after introducing the SMB remained a light yellow with a greenish tint to it. Checked for gold in solution with Stannous Chloride which was negative reaction. For now I'm allowing it to sit and settle however after two days if anything further has dropped it's an imperceptibly small amount. My gut feeling says that there was copper still in solution (given the green tint) however it's of no real consequence either way. But in the end there was easily twice as much powder dropped from the filter recovery as was dropped from the filtered mess in the OP.
Let this be a lesson to the newbies. When you're impatient and rushing a process you WILL get nasty results as happened here. This entire week and change of recovery effort could have easily been avoided if I had A) Not introduced the dirty solution to the main solution crock B) Allowed for the solution to properly dissolve the base metals (should have boiled that for another day before making AuCl originally) and C) Just being patient.
Comments? Criticism? Fire away!
