Gold dropping with Pt

[finland173]

I have couple disassembled hdd drives and i thought could it be one way to drop gold from solution and produce pure gold?

Tried it and seems to work and produce nice little gold glitter

 

[Impster]

Looking at the reactivity chart gold would drop Pt out. Wouldn't it?

 

[finland173]

Looks like there is two kinds of reactivity charts. Some with Pt before gold and some opposite. Looks like i have to check out that dropped stuff is really gold

 

[NobleMetalWorks]

I have couple disassembled hdd drives and i thought could it be one way to drop gold from solution and produce pure gold?

Tried it and seems to work and produce nice little gold glitter

Your post is very confusing, so I'm just taking a wild stab at what you are suggesting you are doing.

I am assuming that you took apart a computer hard drive "HDD" which stands for Hard Disk Drive. I am also guessing that you are using the hard drive platters, or the silver disks that you took out of the hard drive and dissolving them in your pregnant solution?

Depending on what type of hard drive platters you are using, there may or may not be platinum in the plating of the hard drive platter, but even if there is there is very little. You would only drop so much as you dissolved into solution, there is too little platinum on a platter, even if the hard drive platter has platinum, to drop any gold out you might see.

Also, the platinum would not dissolve in an Aqua Regia solution unless the temperature was hot enough to do so, which would not be the ideal situation for dropping gold out of solution.

But more importantly, and this relating to the previous post, the Reactivity Scale works against you as Pt will not force gold out of solution, but rather only dissolve into solution until the solution was pregnant and could not dissolve any more metal. You would then have a solution with whatever metals you dissolved into solution before, the Au you have in solution and whatever you were able to dissolve of Pt if you had Pt to dissolve into solution, and only if the solution of AR were hot enough to dissolve the PT.

The HDD platters so far as I know are all made of Al (Aluminum), and plated with other metals. The Al would dissolve into solution, and would force the gold out of solution, but only if the AR was able to attack the surface of the platter, and then the Al underneath, or unless the plating, if it had Pt and/or plating that protected the Al from being attacked, had scratches or was scored deep enough that the AR could attack the Al underneath.

Scott

 

[Impster]

Thank you for the explanation.

 

[finland173]

Yes i used one of those round things.
Solution was months old and very lean because it was rinse water from paper filter from previous gold extraction.

Setup was that i put liguid in coffee pot and then i place disk half in liguid. 5 min later there was all over little yellow particles that were visible by eye
Round hdd plate have still mirror finish so it didn`t dissolve at all

 

[butcher]

The coating on the harddrive disks can be of several different compositions depending on manufacture age...
Common metals in the carbon based coatings are cobalt nickle and iron, some use chromium along with other metals. nickle phosphorus is common.
some drive do contain a very small amount of platinum in the coating. but not enough to recover profitably. selling disk for aluminum content would bring more profit.
The disk is mainly aluminum sometime with a little magnesium added to the alloy, glass or ceramic, finding one made of stainless steel would not be unheard of.

The carbon based coating would protect the metal coating from the acids, the coating can also protect the aluminum disk from acid unless the coating is broken or cut where acids could get under this coating.
If acids were to be used to attack the coating because of the carbon based material, the foils from this coating would need to be incinerated.
Although since there is no reason to attempt recovery of these metals this is a mute point.

Gold basically will not displace platinum from solution, (nor will platinum displace the gold), both of these need a strong combination of acid and oxidizer, aqua regia, HCl and chlorine gas, to get these noble metals dissolved into solution as salts of these metals, normally as chloride salts, the acid and oxidizer putting both into solution, although gold being much easier to put into solution than platinum which normally takes Heat unless finely divided. Both of these salts will stay in solution as chlorides, gold salts will not displace the platinum salts in solution, dissolving more gold will not displace platinum (or platinum displace the gold)...

finland173,
It looks like you are wasting your time, I am also concerned that you are risking your health and the health of others around you.
May I suggest that you forget trying the things your doing now, and spend your time and effort more wisely, in a way that can profit you the most, by educating yourself, studying is where you will learn what you need to know, to be able to profit, and work safely, you will learn where to find values, how to recognize them and how to treat them for recovery and refining, this subject is vast and has a treasure trove of information which can become profitable to you when you study it...
The education you can gain is worth much more than any metals you could recover in the next ten years, education is where the real values are, because without that education your just wasting your time doing dangerous things, and most likely loosing any metal you may have had a chance to recover or refine through basic ignorance of this subject.

Put away your acids and begin your journey to getting gold and other valuable metals, put away the acids and study... That is where you gain the knowledge and understanding to get the gold.

 

[Impster]

Thank you Butcher for the explanation.

 

[butcher]

Impster,
Recovery and refining of the precious metals is a very vast subject, it can seem simple to the unskilled in the field, and in reality it can be somewhat simple, but it can take years to learn and get good at, actually you can learn about it for the rest of your life and never know everything about it, this is one thing I love is you can never learn it all and there is always something new to discover.

Spending time to learn the basics, and gaining an understanding of the processes before you begin, put you in good shape for a successful situation when you do begin the work, trying something you have only breiefly studied or seen in some video is just about a guarantee of failure, because you do not understand many of the small details, details that can mean the difference in getting gold in your melting dish or loosing it with no idea of what happened.

Safety is something we cannot learn enough about, I have been studying this for years and am always amazed to learn more of some dangers I did not realized existed, learning to treat your waste (or reuse it wisely), can be one thing that can keep you from harming others unknowingly.
these toxic solutions can make a hazardous waste dump of the very place you live, and without educating yourself you could be slowly poisoning yourself without even knowing it.

The forum is basically a gold mine, and you can freely mine for this much valuable information for free, gaining skills and an education that can help you profit for many years to come, study is not a waste of time it is basically the most profitable thing you can do to gain these precious metals.
All the while learning a skill that can be very enjoyable.

Study my friend, and gain that valuable education, that is where you profit, not by dissolving junk in acid.

 

[Impster]

Thank you Butcher, I agree with everything you said. I have been reading these forums for a couple years now and still learning.
And yes safty has to come first, no amount of gold is worth a life.