Dear forum members,
My (real) name is Marcel, I am an engineer with a degree in electrical engineering, journalist and author from Germany. I have been around for quite some years and I took my first steps in recovering and refining right here at (the old) GRF forum.
After a very long preparation time, I have finished my translation of C.M. Hoke's book: "refining Precious Metal Wastes" to German language.
There may not be so many German speakers around, but I will outline some of the changes that were done to the original text in English.
Here is a look at the cover:
First of all, this is not a modern version of the book. It is a translation. It is situated in the time when the original text was written. So most methods remain the same.
Additions:
Added some warnings whenever regarded appropriate, such as: working with cyanides, mercury, lead, explosive compounds etc.
Added some advices as proposed by FrugalRefiner in his PDF version.
Overworked parts:
Workflows have been overworked, with modern PowerPoint appearance
Photos have been overworked and some colorized.
Almost all units have been converted to metric SI. So no more lbs, gallons, quart and so on, but instead mm, ml, g , Kg, °Celsius...
It appeared that C.M. Hoke almost never gave any exact temperatures, sometimes no exact weights, instead just saying to "heat" or "boil" liquids or use "some" instead of saying "add 5g of". I tried to fix that wherever possible.
In 1940 there was barely any plastic known, so expressions like "shellac" were changed into "plastic" (Which did not exist at that time, so you see that the translation is not historically correct)
As you can see the German title now is "Edelmetall Recycling" which would translate to "Precious Metal Recycling". The word Recycling itself includes the use of a secondary source (wastes), so that the German title itself gives you an idea on how this translation was made.
The word "Recycling" itself did not appear even once in C.M. Hoke´s book. It was simply not in use at that time. Similar approach was used for translating "to refine" or "to recover", whereby the differentiation and translation was not always easy in German.
Parts cut:
- Some outdated safety recommendations
- All procedures that require cyanides for recovering - these are no longer available for everyday users anyway, and they are simply far too dangerous to handle for the novice.
- Parts that dealt with cyanides solutions were maintained, since it can still happen that a refiner gets in touch with such materials. It may be important to know what the dangers are and how to handle them (no acid addition, etc.)
- legal information (outdated and if not only valid in US)
- Shortened the part on large scale refineries
- Some pencil drawings removed who were either low quality or had little value of information for the reader
80 years (since the book was first published) has been a long time. Our language, also the English language, has changed ever since. So some long-winded sentences sometimes had to be broken up into 2 or 3 short ones.
Here are some early previews of the book:
Please note that they were taken from an early version, so content and look may be different in the final book.
Instead of 384 pages, the book now has condensed to 282 using a 10p font and removing a lot of redundant stuff from the original, I would say it is an almost complete translation. Since the information in it has become denser, I find it even much more useful.
SPOILER ALERT!
At the end of the translation, I added some bibliographic information on the life of C.M. Hoke, which will be free for the users of this forum to read. It is by far not complete, and it is in German.
I have added this .pdf as an attachment to this post. If you do not know who C.M. Hoke was, better save reading it for later. read the book first...
There has been a great support from the GRF forum with this project over all the years. I will not start to name them all here, since I would surely forget the one or the other. But you know them all! Special thanks to Dave.
The book can be purchased via Amazon (use https://amzn.to/2YrXkmD) or the publisher website ( https://www.adrenalinemedia.de/product-page/über-die-kunst-edelmetalle-aus-abfällen-zu-gewinnen.
If you contact me through this forum, I can give you a bonus code with around 25% off, for a limited number of copies, but at this very moment, I myself have not seen the printed book yet.
So bear with me, I am not too much into the commercial details.. I am just happy I finished my part almost in time.
Auf Wiedersehen,
Marcel
PS: There will be an ebook version! But this one will take some more weeks, because it will be very richly filled with many additional functions and information like videos, wikipedia articles etc. So not just a simple PDF and more information on C.M. Hoke. The ebook is free with every purchase of the printed book.
My (real) name is Marcel, I am an engineer with a degree in electrical engineering, journalist and author from Germany. I have been around for quite some years and I took my first steps in recovering and refining right here at (the old) GRF forum.
After a very long preparation time, I have finished my translation of C.M. Hoke's book: "refining Precious Metal Wastes" to German language.
There may not be so many German speakers around, but I will outline some of the changes that were done to the original text in English.
Here is a look at the cover:
First of all, this is not a modern version of the book. It is a translation. It is situated in the time when the original text was written. So most methods remain the same.
Additions:
Added some warnings whenever regarded appropriate, such as: working with cyanides, mercury, lead, explosive compounds etc.
Added some advices as proposed by FrugalRefiner in his PDF version.
Overworked parts:
Workflows have been overworked, with modern PowerPoint appearance
Photos have been overworked and some colorized.
Almost all units have been converted to metric SI. So no more lbs, gallons, quart and so on, but instead mm, ml, g , Kg, °Celsius...
It appeared that C.M. Hoke almost never gave any exact temperatures, sometimes no exact weights, instead just saying to "heat" or "boil" liquids or use "some" instead of saying "add 5g of". I tried to fix that wherever possible.
In 1940 there was barely any plastic known, so expressions like "shellac" were changed into "plastic" (Which did not exist at that time, so you see that the translation is not historically correct)
As you can see the German title now is "Edelmetall Recycling" which would translate to "Precious Metal Recycling". The word Recycling itself includes the use of a secondary source (wastes), so that the German title itself gives you an idea on how this translation was made.
The word "Recycling" itself did not appear even once in C.M. Hoke´s book. It was simply not in use at that time. Similar approach was used for translating "to refine" or "to recover", whereby the differentiation and translation was not always easy in German.
Parts cut:
- Some outdated safety recommendations
- All procedures that require cyanides for recovering - these are no longer available for everyday users anyway, and they are simply far too dangerous to handle for the novice.
- Parts that dealt with cyanides solutions were maintained, since it can still happen that a refiner gets in touch with such materials. It may be important to know what the dangers are and how to handle them (no acid addition, etc.)
- legal information (outdated and if not only valid in US)
- Shortened the part on large scale refineries
- Some pencil drawings removed who were either low quality or had little value of information for the reader
80 years (since the book was first published) has been a long time. Our language, also the English language, has changed ever since. So some long-winded sentences sometimes had to be broken up into 2 or 3 short ones.
Here are some early previews of the book:
Please note that they were taken from an early version, so content and look may be different in the final book.
Instead of 384 pages, the book now has condensed to 282 using a 10p font and removing a lot of redundant stuff from the original, I would say it is an almost complete translation. Since the information in it has become denser, I find it even much more useful.
SPOILER ALERT!
At the end of the translation, I added some bibliographic information on the life of C.M. Hoke, which will be free for the users of this forum to read. It is by far not complete, and it is in German.
I have added this .pdf as an attachment to this post. If you do not know who C.M. Hoke was, better save reading it for later. read the book first...
There has been a great support from the GRF forum with this project over all the years. I will not start to name them all here, since I would surely forget the one or the other. But you know them all! Special thanks to Dave.
The book can be purchased via Amazon (use https://amzn.to/2YrXkmD) or the publisher website ( https://www.adrenalinemedia.de/product-page/über-die-kunst-edelmetalle-aus-abfällen-zu-gewinnen.
If you contact me through this forum, I can give you a bonus code with around 25% off, for a limited number of copies, but at this very moment, I myself have not seen the printed book yet.
So bear with me, I am not too much into the commercial details.. I am just happy I finished my part almost in time.
Auf Wiedersehen,
Marcel
PS: There will be an ebook version! But this one will take some more weeks, because it will be very richly filled with many additional functions and information like videos, wikipedia articles etc. So not just a simple PDF and more information on C.M. Hoke. The ebook is free with every purchase of the printed book.