Hello Everyone

[Anonymous]

Hey everyone Im a new guy and just made some new guy mistakes that I was wondering if anyone could help me with. I have been studying this stuff for a while and decided to finally give the pile of boards in my garage a try. I put my AP solution together and started it to work on about 2 kg of fingers. Then after a few hours I decided I needed a different container so I switched it but then I had to add more AP to cover the fingers. Well my garage floor cleaner jug looks and feels the same as my HCl jug. After about 6 hours of nothing happening I realized my mistake. I was able to recover the gold foils that were in the solution but I don't think Im going to get any AuCl3 that was in there. So I washed the fingers thoroughly and started at the beginning. Now they are coming along nicely. The gold foils that I recovered out of my Floor cleaner/HCl/H2O2 solution now had my attention and I couldn't just leave them alone. I washed them in the HCl as per Steve's video (very well put together video by the way) and decided to give the HCl/Cl a try. Its been about and hour and the foils haven't completely dissolved but I think they are getting there. I just added more Clorox and the reaction started up again. My real problem is that my precipitant wont be here for a couple days. I know that I should have had all of my reactants before I started but I also didn't think I would be ready till tomorrow at least. I went to every store in my town and there is no one that sells SMB or Ferrous sulfate(small town). The only thing I could find was aluminum sulfate. Does anyone know if this will work. I don't stand to lose very much gold by trying it but I figured I would ask around first. A simple search of the forum didn't turn anything up. Thanks for all the help everyone has given me already, this forum is awesome.

I just thought of one more question too. Below is a picture of a CPU that I accidentally broke open while trying to pull it off the board. I was planning on doing some more research on how to get the gold out of these because I have a fair few of them. When I broke it open though I couldn't help but wonder if there was some sort of PGM in there. I searched the forum and someone else said that there was only a very small amount of PGMs in electronics but I figured I would get a second opinion. Any help on how to recover gold from these chips would be awesome too. Once again thanks for the help, you guys are awesome. Dont laugh too hard at me.

Tony

 

[Harold_V]

No help on the broken chip----I didn't process much e scrap.

As far as your solution is concerned, it does no harm to wait. Filter just before precipitating, which will insure the solution is free of (solid) contaminants. If you find some gold self precipitates, simply add a few drops of bleach and give it time to dissolve once again.

Remember-----you don't lose your material, regardless of what you do to it, as long as you don't discard anything. You can always recover values by some means. All is rarely lost.

Welcome to the forum.

Harold