supafly---
Maybe you know this, but it's kind of hard for me to tell, by what you wrote.
It may help to pay attention to the differences between recovery and refining, in the following.
There are generally two ways to recover scrap plated gold, which most computer stuff is. First, you can dissolve the base metal underneith the plating, and recover the plating foils. Second is you can recover the gold plating, as a powder, with an electrolytic cell. Both methods are on Steve's site.
For dissolving the base metals under the plating, you can use nitric, which is the fastest, but can be expensive or you can make your own. Or you can use Steve's method of HCl with peroxide, which is aimed at dissolving the copper traces under gold plated board edge connector "fingers," and thus releasing the foils for recovery that way.
HCl / Clorox is generally used in refining, because it will dissolve gold. It's not as fast as aqua regia, but clorox is usually easier and cheaper to get than nitric.
If you use a refining process for recovery, you will usually get yourself into a mess.
Most people use nitric for dissolving base metals when prossing CPUs for recovery. Also some people use a crock pot (because it doesn't boil) and just HCl, but it takes a few days. I haven't tried it, but I think that's about how it goes. You can't use HCl / peroxide unless there is copper present, to form the copper cloride (see Steve's posts and Website), and that's why the previous two methods are usually used for CPUs instead.
You can search the different key phrases above to get exact details on these processes, if you are interested in them.
Or maybe someone will give you exact instructions on what process you decide to use, if you still need help.
As you can see, using HCl Clorox is a refining process. If you try to use it for recovery, it will first dissolve some gold (as will HCl peroxide, at first), then as soon as it can reach the copper or other base metals, it will dissolve that first, then it will dissolve the rest of the gold. You don't want all the base metal in your solution with your gold, because it will make things way more difficult for you. The peroxide method is less aggressive toward gold, if you add it correctly, keeping the color right, as Steve has shown (because, as Steve points out, it soon forms a copper chloride, which is dissolving the copper, and that won't dissolve gold). Whereas the Clorox will just go for the gold when it's done with the copper, and it would be difficult to stop the process at some "mid-point."
So, before you do any particular process, ask yourself: "Am I recovering or refining on this step?"
Also, heat will evaporate Chlorox rapidly. So heating it to "speed things up" doesn't work very well. But you can use that to your advantage when you need to remove the chlorine prior to the precipitation step. That is, you can expell it faster with heat, if you don't want to wait overnight on that step.
I hope this is of some help to you.
8)
