Hello from Australia

[jason_recliner]

G'day everyone from Melbourne, Victoria.
After watching several Youtube videos of gold recovery, I asked myself "how hard can it be"?

I joined your forum today after a few weeks of non-member reading. And after making some pretty serious mistakes with my long and hard collected computer parts.

I've used HCl + H2O2 to pre-strip parts. I've made my own Poor Man's Aqua Regia with HCl + NaNO3. I had to make my own NaNO3 from NH4NO3 cold packs. I now have several batches of murky brown, emerald green and bright yellow acids. Which is at least progress in the right direction. But all with probably orders of magnitude too much acid in them, so I have learned. I have also learned, the hard way, not to leave a jar of brown powder on the back deck to evaporate dry, in an area possums will knock it over and lose 90% of my hard work.

With a much better understanding now about how to do it right in the first place, I've still plenty more CM Hoke reading to do before I dare ask recovery advice. But I will pose this, because I want to get my hands on some Stannous Chloride and neither budgetary or general chemical availability are brilliant. Does anyone know a common or household source of Tin? I am pretty sure food tins have no real tin in them.

 

[solar_plasma]

Does anyone know a common or household source of Tin?

You can just take some solder, dissolve and filter. Test it with a standard gold solution. You will find a lot of threads about this using the search function. Never try doing anything without working stannous test available, without it you are blind and deaf while reducing your gold.

 

[jason_recliner]

The lead's not a problem? I suppose it doesn't matter how contaminated a test solution is. Thanks for the tip.
Edit: I'd still prefer to find some clean tin, if I can get it.

 

[nickvc]

Jason welcome to the forum.
Spend your time reading and save your precious material until your fully ready to recover it with a full understanding of the whole process, I did mean recover because for most escrap it's a recovery process first and then a refining one.
Look for lead free solder or just buy a piece of tin, fishing weights are quite often made of tin these days, google a source or two because as solar said stannous is your eyes when recovering and refining.
Good luck and get comfy with a tinnie or two and read and search for the information your going to need, once you understand the processes and in which order things are done it really is easy.

 

[butcher]

jason_recliner,

Welcome to the forum, you will find this Science of recovery and refining precious metals is a vast field, there is just so much to learn, and the better you work to learn it the better you will be in this field of work, you are at the beginning, at first things will get confusing there is so much to this field, you may even think it should be simple after seeing some videos and reading a little, but soon you will find the more you learn the more you will need to learn, you can spend a lifetime and never learn it all, but with study and practicing what you learn you will be well on your way to an exiting education in the science of precious metal recovery and refining, you are getting started in a very good area, with Hoke's book, take your time and study well, starting with the experiments in Hoke's book will introduce you to many of the reactions, some of which become problems in recovery and refining, getting a good understanding of the reactions will help you to understand why things are done in certain ways, it can help to keep you from problems and help to troubleshoot them if they occur.

you have begun a long journey into the science and art of recovery and refining, the first step to this long journey is study to gain a good understanding, as you gain this understanding you will be practicing what your learning, and getting hands on experience.

It is best to get the understanding through study and then gain the experience, than it is to get yourself into an bad experience with no understanding of the problem, then spending your time studying how to recover from a problem.




welcome to the forum,