Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)

[patnor1011]

Never tried that. I guess too much nitric spent. You need to reduce that ash somehow, hard to say how it will react with nitric. Also too much waste created.
Water is much much cheaper.
I do it pretty much like previous poster said, I use smaller bucket in bigger one and run water till it go off clear. Agitate from time to time. I pan only concentrate.

 

[Imran]

Thanks roy and pat. Gonna try your method patnor by using 2 buckets. It sounds awesome.

 

[patnor1011]

It is easy. Put all ash to smaller bucket. Put this smaller in bigger one. You can place everything in small thing used for baking cakes and everything in sink. Let water go to small bucket, when it fill it will carry mud and fine ash as dirty water in bigger bucket, from there in cake tray and from there into sink. If any value go for some reason from small bucket it will end up in bigger or cake tray. When water clears I then agitate material in smaller bucket again and wait till it clears. In this way I get rid of about 80% of material and only bigger pieces and gold will stay. You can pan this concentrate or maybe you can ground it bit more and wash again. If you are careful and slow there is poor chance anything will be lost.

 

[solar_plasma]

After removing ashes and base metals I am soaking my flatpacks since days if not weeks in HCl/chlorox and still get no positive SnCl2. Well, I have it outside at 15 degC and only stirring trice a day, guess that's the prob. This is no crying for help, the gold cannot escape. Just one more example that the processes often sound much easier, than they are.

edit: another possibility is, that I hadn't washed enough after HCl and before incinerating and now the gold is hiding in the HNO3 solution....this would be very stupid :lol:

 

[patnor1011]

Can you tell me what you did exactly and take a picture of what you have?

HCl/Cl is not recommended for this type of material. It is good on foils or powder, for wires AR is much better suited.

 

[solar_plasma]

HCl/Cl is not recommended for this type of material. It is good on foils or powder, for wires AR is much better suited.

It's a heavy fine sand that forms a concrete cake that is not easily stirred up, so the liquid has no good contact to the gold fibers. AR would have been my next choice.

Steps (every step got one or a few days):
incineration of 1,2 kg flatpacks, ramchips, ic, black tops of n/s-bridges (with small amounts of Sn, but mostly cut)
washing the light ashes off, always waiting some minutes before pouring off
trying to pan without succes, after 4 hours I had more gold in a probe that wasn't panned - wisely I haven't thrown anything away
HCl, dissolving basemetals, especially Sn,solution got green like diluted CuCl2
Washing by decanting and filtering till the filtrate looked clean
NaOH, possible AgCl should form AgOH, solution got blue like when Cu++ react with NaOH forming soluable Cu complex
washing till no colour
incineration again
HNO3, solution got slightly blue like Cu(NO3)2, some drops of HCl in a probe didn't form any AgCl (no white cloud)
washed til no colour
HCl/Cl

2 days ago I added about 10 pieces of cutted ram fingers with only a little copper and assumed cemented gold on them from an old failed process, wanted to see, if it would dissolve or even cement.
The fingers are slowly dissolving and the solution got very slightly green. The fingers show no visible cementation. Since it still smelled of chlorine, I added more HCl today for about 8 hours ago. Now, it has got more green. I test SnCl2 tomorrow.If still negative - after what you said, I expect it will be negative - I will pour off most of the liquid and add nitric for estimated 2g (max.5g) gold, unless I read other advices. Alternatively: wash first and start with clean AR (covering with HCl 33%, adding 1ml HNO3 65% in maybe 3 portions about every 30min).

 

[patnor1011]

Hmmm.
It is maybe that you did not incinerate between HCl and HNO3 washes.

Anyway, when I encounter this thick sand then what I do is that I dry it completely again and incinerate second time. That will help to reduce it to finer particles which are washed with water again. In that way you can reduce concentrate to half.
At this stage when you just take bigger pyrex dish and swirl material inside with water you must see gold wires and powder accumulated on bottom and on the middle.

 

[solar_plasma]

It is maybe that you did not incinerate between HCl and HNO3 washes.

Yes, I have incinerated between HCl and HNO3.

Anyway, when I encounter this thick sand then what I do is that I dry it completely again and incinerate second time. That will help to reduce it to finer particles which are washed with water again. In that way you can reduce concentrate to half.
At this stage when you just take bigger pyrex dish and swirl material inside with water you must see gold wires and powder accumulated on bottom and on the middle.

Ok, I'll do that before AR. Thank you!

 

[Geo]

i have been washing as much light ash out as i can with water and drain. i then run it through a bucket of AP solution letting the air stir the ash.since the base metal is exposed on all sides, it only takes a day or two to remove whatever metal the magnet wouldnt pick up. it seems to be working good and making the dissolution a lot cleaner.

 

[patnor1011]

I remove all undesirable metal with sieve and magnet first, then rest is dissolved in HNO3. I am talking about reducing that silt like heavy sand.
I just incinerate it again, ground up in mortar and pestle a bit and then wash with water again.
It can be repeated as many times as you want or till most of it is gone.
As you proceed you will see more and more gold being visible.

 

[tamlove]

Gosh I spend my first 6 or so posts defending myself and appologising because I goet nailed for spelling and so called text lingo and because some guy and other members get offended if I didn't respond correctly towards a safety warning. Well this is not what a forum is about its about asking and learning and staying on the topic and if possible provide info that's usefull to others I'm sorry that I wasted the precious forum space it might've cost some money to post my posts witch got me nothing but a rude welcoming to the forum and even tho I apologised and took back what I said I still get attitude from sum1 I've never even had a single conversation with( butcher) so goodluck to everyone with all your projects. I love urban mining its a passion to me and not a hobby ill. Have to do it without help since its quite obvious I won't get any here.so as this is my last post I say farewell
. And as stated over and over and over before by many many users: stay safe safety first stop posting ( as I was told by panther ) cos if ur new on a forum and u don't know someone it seems apropriate to make them feel like they don't know what their doing or stupid as panthers comment clearlly implied. Sorry for the lingo if any and again soryy for wasted space on the thread. Goddbey all.

 

[jimdoc]

You don't even need to post here, just study and learn.
If you do choose to post, there are a few rules you need to follow, and you need to have respect.
If you can't follow the rules without causing a disturbance, well like you said, goodbye!
Any safety warnings are a blessing, attitude because of them doesn't make any sense at all.

Jim

 

[butcher]

tamlove,

I am sorry you have had a rough start, We do have rules, and attitude towards members is just not cool here, no one is trying to run you off, I personally would like to see you stick around and learn, and share with others what you learn, but part of that is following our forum rules, there is nothing against you in these rules, and asking you to follow them was nothing against you personally, the rules help to keep the forum running smoothly, it is really not hard to follow them, and doing so will make the forum a good place for you to learn, and a place you can enjoy learning at, which is what I hope you will do, stick around, follow the forum rules, and have fun learning, and become one of our finer forum members.

I think we could become good friends, if you could just stick around (and just follow the guidelines adopted by the forum to keep it running smoothly), I do not know you but would like the chance to get to know you, and nothing I have said to you so far was personally against you, but it was against the behavior you acted on that was not conducive to a good forum, and was against our rules.

The choice is yours my friend, and what ever you choose I wish you luck and happiness.

P.S. stick around be good and make friends.

 

[solar_plasma]

@tamlove

Everyone has tried to help you. What will be the best help is something you (like everyone) often don't know by yourself, when you need help. If you knew it, you wouldn't need help.

In this topic I haven't even asked for help, because I knew, I know the process, or the various processes, since everyone does it a bit different, in theory, and I know, I just have to read them again and agáin, follow the routines like testing, doing everything proper, then I will figure it out. I did not expect any help. That I suddenly got it, is a gift. A gift, that will save me much time. It#s not me to decide, when someone else wants to give me a gift. When it comes, I just say thank you and do like I've been told - even if I can't see the whole meaning! I know, they know, what they talk about.

So stop feeling bad, just read, what we told you and you will understand, like everyone here once understood. I think no one has been harsh or offending. If you feel so, we can talk about it.

 

[some888]

hi!
I followed this topic and my personal opinion that economically it really makes no sense to process the ashes.

I had nothing to do over weekend and decided to have a fun
so far I get some amount of different chips
* burned them
* separated ash from silicone chips and metal parts (including pins) by simple means of filtration

Yes it looks like there is some gold plating (not pure gold for sure) in silicone chips and pins

but what do you really do with ashes?

I thought that it will be useless to start processing it in AR or even at first HCI +filtration problems
because of too much chemical crap it it.
Ok I decided to dilute whatever possible in water at first (quite many things actually dilute in water)

So after boiling ashes and decanting solution for the whole of the day I finally had a look at what remains.
Certainly it does not look like a golden mine, and it's even hard to imagine what amount of gold it may contain.

but for now it is more or less ready for whatever acid
I'm still thinking that probably will spend more on acid then recover any gold from there

Did anybody recovered anything significant from the ash?
if yes how much? - for example if from 2 kg of just ash you will get about 2g of gold you will certainly loose more then gold is worth + the time spend - unless there are other precious metals

any Ideas?

thanks

 

[Geo]

a gram of gold per pound is good numbers. if your time is worth more than that, i recommend you find some different material to work with. on average, i may work 2 - 3 hours a day 4 - 5 days a week and might reclaim and refine $300 - $400 per month of my own material. i am disabled and cant work a manual labor type job anymore and so this suites me just fine. i have no doubt that if i needed it badly, i could do up to $1,000 per month if i really worked at it. thats just the gold as i am putting everything else up in storage as i go.

 

[some888]

gram of gold per pound is good numbers

do you mean ashes? or the whole chips?
in any case it looks way too optimistic especially if we are talking about ash

in my own case when I look at the remains of ashes it looks more like a my garden soil then anything worth recovering )

P.S or anybody knows (from his experience) really smart way to process the ash ? )

 

[Geo]

a pound of chips (raw).

as with anything we deal with, some are better and some are worse.

 

[some888]

a pound of chips (raw).

as with anything we deal with, some are better and some are worse.

thanks for your answer - it's what I thought

I'm still interested in approximate gold yield in ashes
I'll give a try myself anyway, but to find the yield I will need some considerable amount of ash
Seriously doubt I will have so much since I'm not really keen to start refining gold on any serious level, but the whole process is quite fun and it is exiting to get some gold out of scrap ( and who knows maybe will earn few bucks 8) )
Another option to process "washed" ashes together with pins and silicone chips but then gold yield in ashes will be unknown (well, if there is any worth mentioning)

I'm asking about just the ashes because for me it looks really most troubled material for gold refining.

Correct me if I am wrong but I do not think it reasonable to process "raw" ash straight in AR or even HCI and the way I did (boiled and decanted) it is really time consuming (and boring)

 

[solar_plasma]

What exactly do you mean with "ashes"? What I call ashes, is the light material,that has to be washed away and it is useless. The gold fibres from bondings are heavy and get concentrated in the residue.

The yields are discussed and proven many times and can go up to 5-6 g/kg (black tops of n/s bridges) of raw chips. So I don't really understand your question. How much gold you get from it, or if you get gold at all, depends on your skills.

If it is worth processing? That depends on your equipment, what you expect and what your motivation is.