Help me get my gold & I'll never try again w/o studying lots

[Rreyes097]

So here's the scenario. First I took my scrap jewelry and I made shots with it. Then I took scrap jewelry which consisted of 9 carat 10 karat 14 karat. I melted it with nitric acid not diluted overheat. Was left with lots of metal that didn't look like gold. Nevertheless I filtered it took the solid material and put AR to it. This is where the problem started. Stannis test showed no positive results for gold. Hi then try to use urea period and drop with SMB. Nothing dropped. I save solution to hopefully get gold out of it although I did get rid of some of the filtered solid material it wasn't metal but it was something solid. Not sure what other information I can provide, if you have any questions to help me I would be happy to answer. Just so you know I have been working with the AP method ,reverse electroplating I've used each method a few times and thus far feel fairly confident with them. I refine using AR. Im no problem by any means but I did feel confident enough that I can do this but I of course failed in doing so. So any help would be appreciated and I know I need to study more if I'm going to start a new method. I'm a bumbling fool that jumped into this new method without doing what I normally do and study. :-(

 

[nickvc]

Slow down.
Can you post pictures of your solution and the solids you assumed were not gold.
Also did you get any reaction when you added your urea or SMB?
If you started with gold it's got to be there somewhere, we now have to find out where it is.

 

[Rreyes097]

Thanks for your willingness to help me. I'm totally bummed out that I may have lost some or even all of my scrap gold. I have attached a few pictures. One is of the chunks of the metal after being put into hot undiluted nitric acid. The others are of the solution itself. And to answer your question, no there wasn't any reaction when putting in the smb or urea.

But here's where I think I really messed up. After the nitric acid and the aqua regia. wash I filtered the solution there was some gritty chunky stuff that I washed off of the chunks of metal, this I fear may have been gold? I hope not. Well any help is definitely appreciated.

 

[solar_plasma]

Don't throw anything away, assume all solids to be probably being gold. Test your test solution with some kind of standard gold solution before you believe what it shows when testing the solutions.

Only a quick aid. Since I haven't processed jewelry yet, I will leave it to those who have practical experience with it. Processing jewelry is very well described in Hoke btw.

 

[nickvc]

You said you made shots of your scrap jewellery, did you add more silver to inquart it?
If not the silver in the alloys may well be stopping the reaction by forming silver chloride if you put it in AR without using nitric to remove any silver and base metals.

 

[Palladium]

Recover on copper wire, filter to capture all solids, combine all solids, incinerate, inquart, reprocess.
How much did you start with and what yield was you expecting?

 

[g_axelsson]

So here's the scenario. First I took my scrap jewelry and I made shots with it. Then I took scrap jewelry which consisted of 9 carat 10 karat 14 karat. I melted it with nitric acid not diluted overheat.

First of all, Rreyes097 , we dissolve metals in acids and heat is used to melt metals.

I think your first mistake was to use concentrated nitric acid. It is slow to react with metals. Diluted 50 percent with distilled water is a lot more reactive than concentrated.

Since I've never tried to dissolve low carat gold in pure nitric I don't know exactly how it looks, but I suspect it looks a lot like inquarted gold in nitric. When the base metals dissolve it will probably start to look like brown clumps. If you have more than 6 carat gold (Your gold was a mix of 9 - 14 carat) the gold will shield the base metals and the reaction will stop, only base metals at the surface will dissolve in the nitric.
If the remaining base metals contains over a certain amount of silver you would get a lot of problems with the AR. Only gold at the surface would dissolve and then the silver forms an impregnable silver chloride crust, halting all further dissolving of the gold in the aqua regia.

Any solid particles after melting carat jewellery and aqua regia is highly suspected silver chloride encrusted gold. It sounds to me that you have thrown away a lot of your gold.

This is why we always put our old filters in a burn pile. Anything that touch gold chloride solution or could have traces of solid gold in it goes to the burn pile. Once in a while it is incinerated and the ash is treated to recover the misplaced gold.
We also use a stock pot for cementing any precious metal before treating the waste. Read up on it, my first recovery of the stock pot yielded a gram of gold and some pgm:s.

Göran