-
Please join our new sister site dedicated to discussion of gold, silver, platinum, copper and palladium bar, coin, jewelry collecting/investing/storing/selling/buying. It would be greatly appreciated if you joined and help add a few new topics for new people to engage in.
Bullion.Forum
GF watch bands
- Thread starter Ede
- Start date
Help Support Gold Refining Forum:
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
Well-known member
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2024
- Messages
- 129
can you explain this reverse-aqua regia procedure for a few of us? i'm imagining a heated nitric solution, while slowly adding HCl?
Tthe watch bracelets alone are close to 30lbs. I had been working a little on separating the white bracelets thinking they were mostly stainless, however I have been coming across some of these white GF ones so that presents another challenge of separating, especially since some of them are sized sections without end pieces to verify. Also, the smaller pieces are harder to hold to remove the caps. It is possible to sight ID the white GF ones by the nature of the finish, but I would prefer not to.
Also, in one container of smaller parts, I am coming across, screws, nuts and little watchmaker parts made of iron that I have been trying to separate. Is that a good idea to do this? This truly may be too big of a job for me to de-cap. Any hobbyists in Illinois? I prefer not to ship?
Also, in one container of smaller parts, I am coming across, screws, nuts and little watchmaker parts made of iron that I have been trying to separate. Is that a good idea to do this? This truly may be too big of a job for me to de-cap. Any hobbyists in Illinois? I prefer not to ship?
