GF watch bands

[Ede]

Anything I should do before sending these to my refiner? I imagine the white are stainless and since these bands are older, the yellow to be gold filled.

 

[eaglekeeper]

Have you talked to your refiner and asked if they require any type of separation/preparation of the material. That sure looks like a lot of labor to remove the non-precious material.

 

[Martijn]

I hate these spring watch bands. Full of human grease and dirt and lots of (iron) springs in them. I would send it off untouched, they are a pain to clean or take apart.
Five washes in an ultrasonic cleaner and still not clean, the caps lock dirt in them and the springs keep it from escaping.
The grease could yield a buck extra if left in there when you turn it in at the scrapyard..
Some of these caps could be gold filled, but you have to be lucky and search through the lot.

 

[4metals]

These are a perfect scraptype for “reverse aqua regia” which will passivate the stainless steel and dissolve the gold.

 

[Shark]

Throughly incinerate them first, then sonic clean them. I have done several pounds of them and despise taking them apart. A gold cell or as 4 metals mentioned, reverse AR.

 

[snoman701]

These are a perfect scraptype for “reverse aqua regia” which will passivate the stainless steel and dissolve the gold.

Seems like it, but in practice, it's not that straightforward. I've tried more than once. There's a lot there that will react with the nitric, so you have to do a pre-reverse AR clean. Then it becomes a question of whether all of those watch bands have enough Chromium to stand up to reverse AR. If even one loses passivation, it's likely you'll lose passivation on the batch.

The most efficient way to do these continues to be swearing at them while peeling the caps off.

I've probably got 20 lbs of them saved up for when I'm stupid enough to try to recover them.

Before you think about melting them and sending them off for assay, just make sure YOU melt them. A boss sent a batch off to metalor. He got them back in a blob of sorta melted but still identifiable watch bands.

The other way I have considered, but haven't yet been stupid enough to try is to break them down in nitric, then tumble the remains. The stainless watch band parts will stay together, the rest will break down. Then running through a sieve should be very doable. Gold filled / other crap will go through the seive, the stainless will stay in it.

 

[Shark]

Geo had a way of doing them that broke down the stainless. I don’t recall the exact method but it used to be on the forum someplace. It seems he used some form of sulfuric but I wouldn’t swear to it these days.

 

[4metals]

I have successfully used reverse AR on stainless steel bangle bracelets that had a tiny square of gold inlay that had a diamond set in each inlay. It worked effectively. The watchbands may, or most definitely will, require manual labor to cut off the gold filled caps etc. Any commercial refiner that receives these will melt them with a ton of copper to get a bar and the resultant bar will be very low grade. And very low grade translates into not profitable.

This type of scrap translates into sit in front of the TV, turn on Netflix, and binge watch something while you manually snip and pry off the good pieces.

 

[Shark]

This type of scrap translates into sit in front of the TV, turn on Netflix, and binge watch something while you manually snip and pry off the good pieces.

Been there and done that. Not much fun and hard on the hands but does work very well. As much as I don’t like doing it, I still use this method more often than not.

 

[snoman701]

This type of scrap translates into sit in front of the TV, turn on Netflix, and binge watch something while you manually snip and pry off the good pieces.

Hence the reason my bag continues to accumulate them. They are a "really rainy day fund". I had one customer bring me about 3 gallons on a refine for them. That job was the last time I did them for someone else without them decapping them prior.

When I tell people what I'm willing to pay for the watchbands whole, they generally decap them themselves. It's funny to me too, because they aren't really making all that much money.

 

[Master Nater]

These are a perfect scraptype for “reverse aqua regia” which will passivate the stainless steel and dissolve the gold.

can you explain this reverse-aqua regia procedure for a few of us? i'm imagining a heated nitric solution, while slowly adding HCl?

 

[Ede]

This is certainly time-consuming to remove the caps. There has to be a quicker way. It seems that most bracelets are 10 K 1/20th GF.

Anyone in Illinois want to help? Please PM me.

 

[Ede]

The bracelet on the left has the caps that are gold filled and the one of the right is plated. The photo comes from the mercury refining website. If anyone else has any tips on separation, that would help I’d greatly appreciate it.