Greetings from Western Canada

[zito]

Hello everyone. As the title says, I'm from western Canada. I work in scrap metals, and have done so almost my entire adult life. I started out as a "yard ape" at an auto wrecker, and worked my way up to do pretty much everything else there at one time or another. One of those jobs was overseeing the removal and selling of the choice valuable pieces of cars bound for shredding, such as catalytic converters. This started my interest in the recovery and refining of PMs, in more of a "how do they do that?" manner as opposed to doing it myself.

I no longer work at the wrecking yard, and instead make my living buying and hauling/selling scrap metal for myself. Everything from steel to cast iron to car bodies to non-ferrous metals, as well as batteries and converters. Converters are currently what I do most of my business in and have been for some years, and my "how do they do that?" interest has been gradually changing over to more of an interest in possibly doing it myself someday.

My biggest interest in regards to this forum though is gold refining. I've been interested in electronics recycling since the early 2000's, and I've accumulated ten years' worth of dismantled E-waste. When I started, electronics were basically recycled by shredding them with cars, appliances, etc. I dismantled what I accumulated, and sold off the steel, copper, and aluminum while keeping the rest. I looked into selling the boards and CPUs and such, but it's not really easy to do that in Canada without paying a pretty steep cost penalty, at least not in my experience. So I've just been hoarding.

I've been a member for some time, and was actually lurking for a while before that. As I said, my interest has gradually turned more from just observing into attempting it myself. I had previously looked into refining myself and purchased a number of CDs, e-books, and such; but those, instead of making me more confident about the attempt, actually scared me off. Thankfully I never bought a system from Shor, even if I was tempted for about five minutes! Reading vague instructions on using potentially fatal chemicals made me realize I had nowhere near enough info to attempt anything. Now, however, after reading here for a fair while, I'm looking forward to attempting this myself eventually.

I just want to say a huge thanks to this entire forum, for making all this fantastic information freely available. It's entirely due to this fact that I will eventually be attempting anything.

 

[butcher]

zito,
I think maybe it is time you finally took that step to get your feet wet.

Drag out some of that memory, and cut those card fingers off, fix you up a strainer bucket about a gallon size (drilling holes in the bottom) with a lid, in a little larger bucket about a gallon and a half size, go down to the hardware store, pick up some HCl acid, stop by the store for 3% peroxide, and get those gold foils off of the fingers, when you have a jar full, you will be ready for the next step of refining them.

You can do this, you just need to take that first step.

Here you are studying like you should before you begin, and we are always telling every one not to begin before they study.
I know you can handle this just fine.

 

[joem]

Where are you located?

 

[zito]

Where are you located?

I'm in Calgary, AB

 

[zito]

zito,
I think maybe it is time you finally took that step to get your feet wet.

Drag out some of that memory, and cut those card fingers off, fix you up a strainer bucket about a gallon size (drilling holes in the bottom) with a lid, in a little larger bucket about a gallon and a half size, go down to the hardware store, pick up some HCl acid, stop by the store for 3% peroxide, and get those gold foils off of the fingers, when you have a jar full, you will be ready for the next step of refining them.

You can do this, you just need to take that first step.

Here you are studying like you should before you begin, and we are always telling every one not to begin before they study.
I know you can handle this just fine.

Thanks for the encouragement! I'm actually now just waiting for warm weather, as I will be doing this outside. Thought spring was finally here last week with 16C above, but today it was -13C with three inches of snow. Just a little while to wait yet.

 

[resabed01]

Don't let a little cold weather discourage you from refining. AP works fine outside in the cold, it just slows to a crawl. Black plastic 5 gallon pails work good for capturing the suns heat during the day. Acid solutions won't freeze unless they are really diluted with water. I do all my incineration in the winter plus I have several HCL leaches and one 4lb batch of fingers in AP going at the moment.

 

[zito]

It's me that doesn't work so well in the cold . I still have to set up a working area; I'll definitely need warmer weather for that. I've waited this long to start, a while longer won't matter to me.