First time HCl/Clorox process

[bswartzwelder]

First, I put a bunch of foils with a few flexible connector pieces in a beaker. Added 240 ml HCl and slowly added 60 ml Clorox. It fizzed up, and then settled down. Turned on the stirrer (but not the heat) and left it to stir for an hour or two. Filtered out the garbage and sprayed a little water to wash the filter. Added in some small nuggets and flakes of gold and put it back on stir. Not a lot seemed to happen so I added another 240 ml HCl and another 60 ml Clorox. Before I came in for the night, I put the stirrer and solution in a small utility trailer and left the stirrer on overnight. I know I overdid the HCl and Clorox since I had only about 2 ounces of gold/gold bearing materials and will open up the trailer and move everything outside once again in a little while. How long should it take for all the gold to dissolve. I assume I have a huge overabundance of nitric. Will keeping everything on stir help to eliminate excess nitric? It is possible to turn on the heat to also eliminate nitric, but I want to be there watching it when I do this. I believe stirring is eliminating chlorine. I will filter one more time before dropping with SMB. I think I'm on the right track, but any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

 

[griptheweasel]

From what you said it doesn't sound like you have any nitric acid in your mixture. The only thing you need to remove from your solution when you're ready to drop your gold would be chlorine gas. Heating will drive off the chlorine gas when you want that to happen.

 

[Claudie]

First of all, it is never a good idea to put something like this in an enclosed trailer. Be cautious of the fumes when you open that door. Second, the HCL/Clorox method is used to dissolve Gold, not Gold plated pins like the connector pieces. You should use something like AP to remove the base metals and only put the Gold foils into the solution of HCL/Clorox. Put all of your foils in at once, not a few at time. If you added Gold nuggets, they will dissolve much slower depending on the size of them.
Why do you think there is Nitric in the solution? Was some of this material from a solution containing Nitric?
Maybe you could post a picture of what you have now.

 

[jeneje]

First, I put a bunch of foils with a few flexible connector pieces in a beaker. Added 240 ml HCl and slowly added 60 ml Clorox. It fizzed up, and then settled down. Turned on the stirrer (but not the heat) and left it to stir for an hour or two. Filtered out the garbage and sprayed a little water to wash the filter. Added in some small nuggets and flakes of gold and put it back on stir. Not a lot seemed to happen so I added another 240 ml HCl and another 60 ml Clorox. Before I came in for the night, I put the stirrer and solution in a small utility trailer and left the stirrer on overnight. I know I overdid the HCl and Clorox since I had only about 2 ounces of gold/gold bearing materials and will open up the trailer and move everything outside once again in a little while. How long should it take for all the gold to dissolve. I assume I have a huge overabundance of nitric. Will keeping everything on stir help to eliminate excess nitric? It is possible to turn on the heat to also eliminate nitric, but I want to be there watching it when I do this. I believe stirring is eliminating chlorine. I will filter one more time before dropping with SMB. I think I'm on the right track, but any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

When processing foils, cover the foils with HCL, add Clorox one cap full at a time, making sure the reaction has stopped before adding anymore. Once the foils have dissolved, filter the solution and let set overnight. The Chlorine will evaporate own its own. Add twice the volume of water and then add SMB to drop your gold.

Unless you are using AR (aqua regina) you should not have any HN03 (nitric) in your solution. If you used AR then you will have to denox your solution to expel the excess nitric.

On another Note DO NOT put your solution of HCL/CL or for that fact any acid mixture in a room or enclosed area unless there is ventilation the gas's released are extremely dangerous, After leaving it (the solution) overnight the buildup could be deadly when you open the door.

Ken

edited Claudie, I think we both posted at the same time. :lol:

 

[bswartzwelder]

First, I did process the flexible connectors in AP. I filtered that mixture after several weeks of bubbling air through it. Some foils still clung to the flexible connector strips so I rubbed them with my fingers and the gold washed right off. There were a few very tiny strips/specks of strips left so I just left them on the filter paper. Then after everything dried, I scraped off as much of the gold as possible and a very few of the flexible connector strips were covered in the gold foil. That's why I put them in the mix. There were no gold plated connector pins and the flexible connector pieces were too tiny to remove easily, They had been in AP long enough that they should have had no base metals present.

Then, I filtered out the strips. Much easier to remove them this way. Added the gold nuggets/flakes and started to dissolve them. The trailer hasn't been used for anything except storage of crushed aluminum cans for years. It has an opening where I removed an air conditioning unit.

Today, after more than 20 hours of stirring, I opened the trailer door. There was no noticeable odor of chlorine gas. Kind of surprising. Also surprising was the fact that there were still some small gold flakes/nuggets in the bottom of the beaker. I was pretty sure that stirring overnight would have dissolved everything. If I filter out everything (only flakes and small nuggets at this time), should I try to dissolve them in poorman's AR? The HCl/Clorox will be poured off and gold dropped with SMB after diluting with water to 50/50 mix.

Thank you for your concerns, but one thing I did learn from Hoke and the forum was to be safe. Later when I remove the stirrer and solution, I'll leave the door standing wide open just in case there are some residual CL2 gasses present.

 

[Claudie]

I may be misunderstanding. Are you working with 2 ounces of Gold foils?

 

[kkmonte]

you might need to add a little bit more chlorox to dissolve the remaining foils, you should take out your nuggets as they probably won't really dissolve (or super slow) in the HCl/Cl, the only way would be to hammer them out super flat and then see if they will dissolve in HCl/Cl.

 

[bswartzwelder]

The 10 to 20 grams of foils seemed to dissolve in a couple of hours (or less since I wasn't sitting there watching them). Then I filtered the junk out of the liquid added 50 to 60 grams of flakes/nuggets and continued. When that didn't seem to be working, I added the second 240 ml of HCl and 60 ml Clorox. I will try to post pictures below. They are fuzzy.

 

[Claudie]

10 - 20 grams is a pretty wide spread. With foils you can usually add small amounts of Clorox to the HCL until they are completely dissolved.
What are the "flakes and nuggets"?

 

[bswartzwelder]

The flakes/nuggets are gold flakes or gold nuggets either panned by me from gold paydirt or have been purchased from reputable people selling gold online. Some of them came from the porcupine creek area of Alaska, some came from Felix paydirt (never again), and some came from prospectors in the western United States. I have been collecting these specimens for the past couple of years and was always a little scared of losing my gold when I diddolved it. I know there will be some loss since it is not pure 24 karat gold, but that's the idea of refining it. Once I am comfortable with the processes, I have a 1 ounce (28 gram) man made nugget I want to refine to 24k. I had a jeweler give it the acid test and he said it was around 22k already.

 

[JHS]

Sorry wrong post
john

 

[bswartzwelder]

I have read Hoke. I even purchased the hard copy of it to read. Originally, I was going to use poormans to dissolve everything, but was told the HCl/Clorox method would be better since there is less waste to deal with. HCl/Clorox did seem to work rather well on the foils and that will be my preferred method for foils in the future. However, HCl/Clorox did not work very well on gold that is thicker than a few microinches. In the future, I'll stick with poormans AR for the thicker pieces. When I have a nice bottle with more than an ounce or two of powdered gold, I'll dissolve in true AR and precipitate with oxalic acid. Then it will go into the furnace for melting and pouring into a graphite mold.

 

[Claudie]

I would filter out the flakes & nuggets that did not dissolve and save them for a different process later. Concentrate on getting the Gold from the solution you have. Dilute it with water and add about the same amount of SMB as the amount of Gold you have in the solution. If it has been sitting for a day, the Chlorine should be gone but if it's not, you can heat it a little to drive off the excess.

 

[Eaheisler]

From what I'm understanding about the HCI/Clorox process heat is the key. I've processed 2 successful lots of gold fill now using this method for dissolving the gold with success when heat was introduced. Last weekend I tried it at ambient temperature and, could get little to no gold to dissolve.

P.S.

For those of you keeping track of my failures: I butchered my first lot of gold fill but, I was able to get everything filtered than into a coffee pot and evaporated all moisture so that now I have a coffee pot with a thick layer of what was 200g of gold filled scrap in the form of silver, gold and, a touch of copper. Went back began to understand more and more of the process gave it another go. Although I had a few hick-ups (busted glass jar x2 &, getting the final gold flakes melted with only a small butane torch... I gave up by the way and placed the flakes into a glass container as motivation). My main problem was I was being so cautious after my first two abortions I was only running lots of 50g at a time leaves little final product to work with but, at the same time I'd rather gain small than loose big.

 

[bswartzwelder]

I did filter everything out of the original beaker. Tested the solution with stannous chloride. Very strong positive even using really old stannous. Turned on the stirrer and very slowly added 4 small spoonfuls of SMB. After about 5 minutes or so, the entire solution turned almost black. Dipped in another Q-Tip and tested it with stannous. Completely negative. Turned off the stirrer and a dark cloud slowly settled to the bottom of the beaker. Will decant in a day or two and give it several washes in HCl then several more washes in boiling distilled water. Then dry it out in preparation for a final dissolve in AR and precipitation with oxalic acid. At that time, it should be ready to melt and pour. The gold flakes/nuggets are resting peacefully in a beaker of poorman's AR on stir overnight. Will awaken them tomorrow and proceed at that time. Will most likely just precipitate that batch and treat it to HCL and distilled boiling water washes then pour them together.

 

[Pantherlikher]

Hi...
If I remember correctly, you have some trouble with english...
HCL and Clorox after AP is great. Remove solids and drop as seems you are doing.
In the trailer, put a small fan near 1 opening so air flows and gasses do not build up.
No more cans inside though as Aluminum will disolve.

Next batch you do, Mix half as much as you think you need and pour through your used filters and into the container with your current solids. This will disolve any gold that might be in the filter or easily dissolvable on the solids. Watch and wait for no reactions and then move fluids on to your new batch.
From there, add HCL to cover what's to be dissolved and only alittle at a time of Clorox Bleach to get the reaction going again. This way you don't have to worry about excess Nitric/(CL..Clorine)... Try to remember what you are working with so as to not confuse yourself or others.
Good luck and be safe.

B.S.
You can lead a horse to water. But if it does not understand your words, it may never learn to drink...

 

[bswartzwelder]

Evidently you have a memory problem. I was born, raised, and have lived in the United States for almost 63 years. I am not concerned with any Cl2 buildup as the opening is large enough for a small window air conditioner and there is usually a slight breeze blowing past it. I always open the door slowly and wait for a while before reaching in to retrieve anything I've put in there to process. There aren't enough chemicals in there to dissolve more than 1 or maybe 2 cans in direct contact, much less the hundreds of pounds I have accumulated and are in plastic bags with little or no air circulation through them.

As far as the HCl/Clorox method, I didn't sit down and look at the reaction that closely. I should have. In HCl/Clorox, there is NO nitric to deal with. Hydrochloric acid contains none, and bleach (Sodium Hypochlorite) also contains no nitric atoms that I am aware of (NaClO).