Ferric chloride sulphate (gold filled)

[Au79]

Hello

I have got a large pile of gold filled jewelry and watches. I have never being recovery gold from this kind of source before. Is the base metall rich inn silver in your experience?

I have acsess on "unlimited " ferric chloride sulfate 40-60% and 20-25% HCl solution. Is this iron (iii) source suitet for cobber/base metall etching? And would it give any problem later on?

Thanks for answer

 

[Yggdrasil]

Welcome to us.
The mantra here is, read and study and one may end up wiser than before.
One good place is to start with Hokes book, you will find links several places

A couple of starting points
http://goldrefiningwiki.com/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://goldrefiningwiki.com/mediawiki/index.php/Hoke_Refining_Precious_Metal_Wastes
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Frugalrefiners (Dave) profile or posts.
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I haven't done such things myself, but as I have read here on the forum the idea is to get rid of most of the base metal first. That is always the best way to do things, less waste and less cost.
Wathes has just a few parts that is gold or goldfilled, so take away all the other stuff, as much as possible.
Copper ii chloride is a versatile and cheap way of etching copper, but it takes time and Ferric iii chloride may be the same, but will not be regenerated the same way.
But as the copper is dissolved away, it will and up as coppper ii chloride, so that part may or may not be important for the etch itself.
Anyway one need only a small batch of etch to start the process and then it is just to keep it acidic and it will go on indefinately.

Gold filled may be more tricky, but I'm quite sure some of the experienced ones will chime in soon
Either way, the carat part of this gold often have a subsantial content of silver and copper, depending of what kind of carat alloy it is.

Gold over appr 9 carat needs to be inquarted anyway and the "only" way out of that is diluted nitric acid to dissolve the silver and copper.

Regards Per-Ove

 

[Jmk88]

Before I start... I just want to make clear I am by no means experienced or an expert. What I will describe is purely based on what I’ve read and experienced through application.

Firstly, please make sure you have all safety equipment in place.

There is plenty of info on this.

If you use ferric or copper chloride, it will indeed recover your gold.

You will however, experience a mountain of hurdles. The first and main one will be silver chloride.

I recommend studying silver chloride first. The reality is at some stage, you will need to apply chemicals that address this in theory quite straight forward; in practice not so.