Hello to everyone here on the forum, I'm Chris, this is my first post so I hope it is in the appropriate place. I would like to start by thanking everyone for their knowledge, dedication, and help. I am new to refining but for years the idea has always intrigued me. I have read, read, and re-read for two months straight, and after finishing Hoke's book for the second time and I tried to use her small scale format for familiarity tests but applied it computer scrap, and if this has been discussed anywhere before I apologize in advance.
I took one of the many computers I have been collecting and pulled out the ram and pci cards and clipped of the fingers (6 fingers total), cut them into smaller pieces to fit in my beaker then covered them in 30ml AP and let sit over nite. After all gold foils separated (I'm not sure of the weight of the foils my scale doesn't go that low, maybe 1/10th of gram) I then filtered, washed, and rinsed, set aside to dry. Put the foils in a test tube and dissolved in Hcl/Cl, then slowly heated to dissipate chlorine. I the mixed up my stannous chloride for testing and dipped my q-tip in then a drop of stannous and I got that beautiful purple everyone loves to see when testing.
I thought this would be a good process for anyone new to refining, it gave me a fair understanding of the AP method, Hcl/Cl, and stannous testing all in one without the risk of losing major values. I now have a test tube half full of a known gold bearing solution to test my stannous against. I have also omitted the various details of each method intentionally because if someone doesn't know what AP or stannous is, I personally feel they haven't read enough. I read the "what went wrong" posts daily, someone mixed up aqua regia then threw in a few cpu's and don't know what happened. All the knowledgeable one's here don't tell everyone to read and re-read to be rude, they say it so we can grasp a safe understanding of what we are doing. Thank you everyone for the vast knowledge here, if this post is in the wrong place please tell me, and if any of my info is incorrect definitely tell me.
I took one of the many computers I have been collecting and pulled out the ram and pci cards and clipped of the fingers (6 fingers total), cut them into smaller pieces to fit in my beaker then covered them in 30ml AP and let sit over nite. After all gold foils separated (I'm not sure of the weight of the foils my scale doesn't go that low, maybe 1/10th of gram) I then filtered, washed, and rinsed, set aside to dry. Put the foils in a test tube and dissolved in Hcl/Cl, then slowly heated to dissipate chlorine. I the mixed up my stannous chloride for testing and dipped my q-tip in then a drop of stannous and I got that beautiful purple everyone loves to see when testing.
I thought this would be a good process for anyone new to refining, it gave me a fair understanding of the AP method, Hcl/Cl, and stannous testing all in one without the risk of losing major values. I now have a test tube half full of a known gold bearing solution to test my stannous against. I have also omitted the various details of each method intentionally because if someone doesn't know what AP or stannous is, I personally feel they haven't read enough. I read the "what went wrong" posts daily, someone mixed up aqua regia then threw in a few cpu's and don't know what happened. All the knowledgeable one's here don't tell everyone to read and re-read to be rude, they say it so we can grasp a safe understanding of what we are doing. Thank you everyone for the vast knowledge here, if this post is in the wrong place please tell me, and if any of my info is incorrect definitely tell me.
