Gold won't dissolve in HCL/CL

[futurama140]

I searched around here and google but I couldn't find anything about this problem.
I ha a button of pretty dirty gold (kovar in it, i pulled it out of the cucl2 too early) as some of you may know from another post of mine, and I chose to try and dissolve it with the HCL/CL method as described here on the board, but after a week now, the flattened and vaguely broken up button is not dissolving as far as I can see in the solution. I have stannous chloride (i think it's good but i dont have any way of really testing it but the hcl/cl im currently using), and the tests are producing no color. Does anyone have any clue what might be going wrong?

I have no heat on the solution (so I don't drive out the chlorine),
the mixture was 1 part sodium hypochlorite laundry bleach and 2 parts 31% muriatic acid, as I read elsewhere here. every couple days i've added maybe a tablespoon more bleach to about 2-3 cups of liquid.

 

[FrugalRefiner]

HCl / Clorox is useful on powders and very thin material like the foils from fingers. It doesn't do so well on thicker materials like a button.

You added too much Clorox at the beginning. It should only be added in small increments.

Since your buttons contained a lot of base metals, any gold that dissolves is probably cementing back out because of those base metals.

You would probably have more success trying poor man's AR. Alternately, you could remove the lumps, rinse them off and dry them, then hammer them as thin and flat as possible.

Dave

 

[nickvc]

As Dave has pointed out HCl/Cl is not the best route for solids so you may need to try and dissolve the base metals or some of them before attempting to dissolve the gold but whichever route you choose I think it's going to take some time before you can recover the gold, poormans as suggested by Dave might well be viable route to take but make sure you dissolve all the material, certain elements can be very hard to dissolve so use your eyes to ensure that all the gold and other elements are gone.