treasurefish
New member
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2012
- Messages
- 1
I purchased about 60 lbs of used, broken jewelry. I separated out all the wood, plastic, feathers, shell, glass, and rhinestone jewelry. Next, I put everything silver-colored in one bag, and everything gold-colored in another (10 lbs total). There is everything from gold/silver plated to stamped 925 and 14k. I'm sure there is alot of lead, nickel, copper, iron, chromium, zinc. The plan was to take these bags to a refiner in Houston, and get the best price - which was $400 lump sum.
Now, I am trying to do it on my own. So, the plan so far is to:
1. Dissolve as much as I can in Nitric.
2. Use copper tubing to precipitate out everything below in the electromotive series (silver primarily - along with any gold, rhodium, platinum, or palladium that might have been dissolved).
3. Put everything that didn't dissolve in the Nitric together with the mostly silver precipitate), and then dissolve in Aqua Regia.
4. Drop any Platinum and Rhodium with Ammonium chloride.
5. Precipitate gold "somehow" - still reading, still researching.
I want to get the biggest bang for my buck, and I hate to be wasteful. So, I came up with a crazy idea. The question I really want to know is about the waste solution. I know lots of people will throw in aluminum foil or non-iodine salt into it to pull out all the metals at once, but I have another idea based on the electrochemical series. Here it is:
If I combine the old nitrite solution (nitrate) with the old AR solution (whatever that is), can I sequentially go up the electrochemical series, and refine pure metals at each step (similar to the Tollen's replacement of silver with copper) and end up with a useful nitrate solution - other than waste or sodium nitrate / aluminum nitrate (unless that's useful)? For example, can I get 99.99% copper out with lead fishing weights? Then, recover all the pure lead with tin? Then, pure tin with nickel? etc, etc
Probably best to dump in salt, send the precipitate for assay, and properly dispose of the sodium nitrate solution. Right? What do you do with the nitrate waste (please don't say dump it in the ditch - if that's the case, I don't want to know). Thank you!
Now, I am trying to do it on my own. So, the plan so far is to:
1. Dissolve as much as I can in Nitric.
2. Use copper tubing to precipitate out everything below in the electromotive series (silver primarily - along with any gold, rhodium, platinum, or palladium that might have been dissolved).
3. Put everything that didn't dissolve in the Nitric together with the mostly silver precipitate), and then dissolve in Aqua Regia.
4. Drop any Platinum and Rhodium with Ammonium chloride.
5. Precipitate gold "somehow" - still reading, still researching.
I want to get the biggest bang for my buck, and I hate to be wasteful. So, I came up with a crazy idea. The question I really want to know is about the waste solution. I know lots of people will throw in aluminum foil or non-iodine salt into it to pull out all the metals at once, but I have another idea based on the electrochemical series. Here it is:
If I combine the old nitrite solution (nitrate) with the old AR solution (whatever that is), can I sequentially go up the electrochemical series, and refine pure metals at each step (similar to the Tollen's replacement of silver with copper) and end up with a useful nitrate solution - other than waste or sodium nitrate / aluminum nitrate (unless that's useful)? For example, can I get 99.99% copper out with lead fishing weights? Then, recover all the pure lead with tin? Then, pure tin with nickel? etc, etc
Probably best to dump in salt, send the precipitate for assay, and properly dispose of the sodium nitrate solution. Right? What do you do with the nitrate waste (please don't say dump it in the ditch - if that's the case, I don't want to know). Thank you!
