Home built centrifuge - gold concenrates from IC's

[rusty]

Gravity fed filter to polish my gold chloride, the filter paper will filter out to 5 microns.

Still have to drill my holes into the bottom, i use a short piece of ABS for a template to mark the filter paper were I'm going to cut. When cutting, cut just on the outside of the pencil line so that the paper makes a nice snug fit.

Later on I'll take a piece of steel pipe then make a die to cut my filter papers to the correct size.

To hold the filter in place, I'll cut a slot the same diameter as the ABS into some ply board, you'll note that I have glued some scrap pieces of ABS onto the pipe, this will hold the filter from falling into the pail.

 

[skippy]

Rusty,

I just talked a little bit about the filter i built in the thread about pretreating chips. If you can put a few pounds of air above your liquid things go a lot faster, especially once the head pressure from the liquid decreases. It might help,and sometimes I find the more time I have the more impatient I am. When there's other things to do, I'm content to throw a wick in the bucket, and come back in a couple days. If I have nothing else to do, I want my solution now! :lol:

 

[rusty]

Rusty,

I just talked a little bit about the filter i built in the thread about pretreating chips. If you can put a few pounds of air above your liquid things go a lot faster, especially once the head pressure from the liquid decreases. It might help,and sometimes I find the more time I have the more impatient I am. When there's other things to do, I'm content to throw a wick in the bucket, and come back in a couple days. If I have nothing else to do, I want my solution now! :lol:

Skippy, I very often use wicking for large dirty sample, the wick works very good.

I did my rough filtering last evening, multiple coffee filters then let my gold chloride settle out overnight now it's time to polish that using a 5 micron filter. And there's a reason I choose gravity or forced filtration.

After my gold precipitation, I'll follow Harold's wash recipe to a " T "

From the many gold buttons I've seen, not many pass as fine gold. I'm shooting for a crystalline finish with a nice pipe on my wee button.

 

[srlaulis]

Rusty, are you going to show us the final cleanup of the 10.25 pounds of concentrates?

 

[rusty]

Rusty, are you going to show us the final cleanup of the 10.25 pounds of concentrates?

That is the plan, I''m planning to precipitate the gold tomorrow so that my partner Pat is able to watch her gold appear from a liquid.

2/3rds of a Canadian gallon ( 160 fluid ounces ) nice and clear.]

The hydrometer reads SG 50 on the gold chloride and the leach outside has gained from SG 70 to SG 80

 

[rusty]

Pat is still waiting for her gold to appear.

Ok guys what went wrong after the SMB addition, no gold or to much chlorine.

 

[ericrm]

Rusty ... what does stannous chloride say?

 

[rusty]

Rusty ... what does stannous chloride say?

Says that I've wasted my time.

 

[ericrm]

by the way ic have given me a lot of that kind of fun too ...

im pretty sure you didnt trow away your leached material, right?
if the gold was there in the beginning it should still be there.

i will return reading the post and edit my message later

on one of the picture you have a blue bol and what looklike to be gold powder in it ,have you taked a sample of just the yellow powder to make sure it was gold?if not do you have acces to some? and can you confirm with AR/stannous chloride that it is actualy gold?

what did you actually leach ? you talk about finger/chip/burned ic/pulverized ic. be specific

how did you removed base metal? did you only do hcl/cl on everything?

i see that color of solution changed maybe you just need to wait a little longuer.

 

[srlaulis]

Rusty,

I'd say too much chlorine could be the issue. You may want to heat the liquid to under a boil for about an hour and test with stannous again. I believe the access chlorine may interfere with your test, but if I am wrong, someone please jump in.

Steven

 

[ericrm]

srlaulis
i speak for myself, chlorine often refrain precipitation of gold and make stannous result disapear after a little time but i never had chlorine stop a stannous test.

 

[rusty]

Rusty,

I'd say too much chlorine could be the issue. You may want to heat the liquid to under a boil for about an hour and test with stannous again. I believe the access chlorine may interfere with your test, but if I am wrong, someone please jump in.

Steven

Give the man a cigar, wished i knew more about chemistry.

Anyhow with a small addition of SMB the sulfur dioxide reacted with the chlorine turning my liquid to that nice apple green which I suspect indicates there's platinum in solution the as well the gold. Palladium along with silver had it been present would have been removed during the nitric wash.

Here's a short video of the reaction, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr_ToWwCUPI&feature=youtu.be

I did not stir the liquid but let it naturally dissipate the chlorine, there was no smell, then I let it set for 20 minutes before adding more SMB. This time we have a gold flush.

 

[rusty]

After decanting the HCL / Bleach leach, once again washing the dreggs into the filter saw that there is some values left over that this leach is having trouble with.

Rather than add more acid and bleach made a switch over to a more aggressive leach - AR.

Coffee crafts a love hate relationship, mine cracked. Luckily there's no loss of values. The AR and crud was transferred into a crock pot, the AR is a beautiful green, probably one of the platinum sisters - platinum.

 

[skippy]

Sorry Rusty, that green says nickel to me, not platinum or palladium. It may be masking the colour of gold in solution, and or you still may have gold in your cons.
I know we'll get to the bottom of things, if you incinerated a tonne of decent computer circuit boards (am I right?) you have likely 3-10 oz of gold lurking in the various materials you have.
Don't do anything rash and if you feel like you're lost give us a run down on exactly what you've done so far as far as what's gone in to this batch, how it was washed, was it hcl boiled, nitric boiled, etc. You might need to reincinerate some of your materials, do nitric leaches again, hcl leaches, and then hit it with AR again. Depending on the temperature that you did it at, I think you might have melted significant values into your metallics in your incineration.

You've got so many variables in this complicated leach of a complicated material from a complicated process, that if you are expecting a grand slam on your first swing, you're expecting a miracle! Anyways once again, we'll get to the bottom of this

 

[rusty]

Sorry Rusty, that green says nickel to me, not platinum or palladium. It may be masking the colour of gold in solution, and or you still may have gold in your cons.
I know we'll get to the bottom of things, if you incinerated a tonne of decent computer circuit boards (am I right?) you have likely 3-10 oz of gold lurking in the various materials here.
Don't do anything rash and if you feel like you're lost give us a run down on exactly what you've done so far as far as what's gone in to this batch, how it was washed, was it hcl boiled, nitric boiled, etc. You might need to reincinerate some of your materials, do nitric leaches again, hcl leaches, n and then hit it with AR again. Depending on the temperature that you did it at, I think you might have melted significant values in your incineration.
You've got so many variables in this complicated leach of a complicated material from a complicated process, that if you are expecting a grand slam on your first swing, you're expecting a miracle!

I'll have my eyeballs tomorrow, fresh stannous.

What I should have said is that the obvious values left behind from the acid bleach leach are from the platinum group.

 

[rusty]

Sorry Rusty, that green says nickel to me, not platinum or palladium. It may be masking the colour of gold in solution, and or you still may have gold in your cons.
I know we'll get to the bottom of things, if you incinerated a tonne of decent computer circuit boards (am I right?) you have likely 3-10 oz of gold lurking in the various materials you have.
Don't do anything rash and if you feel like you're lost give us a run down on exactly what you've done so far as far as what's gone in to this batch, how it was washed, was it hcl boiled, nitric boiled, etc. You might need to reincinerate some of your materials, do nitric leaches again, hcl leaches, and then hit it with AR again. Depending on the temperature that you did it at, I think you might have melted significant values into your metallics in your incineration.

You've got so many variables in this complicated leach of a complicated material from a complicated process, that if you are expecting a grand slam on your first swing, you're expecting a miracle! Anyways once again, we'll get to the bottom of this

Your right nickel in chloride is a nice apple green, and every solution showing green in color should be suspect of holding values.

Dissolve nickel in sulfuric acid as a sulfide and the color is much different, I would have supplied a picture but that particular sample is currently covered with a layer of ice. Instead will give this URL with a number of pictures, http://www.public.asu.edu/~jpbirk/nickel/nickel_two.html

The large lot of cons did come from a ton of scrap, I can see know that the centrifuge is not enough to separate the heavy fractions and that a shaker table is needed to polish the fractions in the concentrates.

I'm debating with myself at the moment wither to build a shaker table or purchase this cool reactor off of ebay.

The reactor equipped with the stirring apparatus would get around the problem of leaching those metals that tend to hide under a layer of other heavy fractions in the leach while the table would eliminate those heavy fractions before being introduced into the leach.

Table would cost next to nil to build as I have the time and most of the stuff needed laying on the floor of my shop, then I think the reactor with it's list of many potential uses makes it more versatile and would be fun to play with.

The reactor is jacketed and uses hot water to heat the contents, my waste oil boiler costs next to nothing to run, over the winter it heated my shop, the house is electrically heated our last energy bill was only $200.00 during to colder month $300.00 tops. When I've finished buying toys will plumb some of that hot water to the house for heat.

Back to the problem at hand, the cons from the 10.25 lbs is going rather slowly because of the overlaying heavy fractions and it requires constant stirring which the wife refuse to do and if you've ever tried to train a Jack Russell you know that these dogs do not participate in doggy type tricks.

Which leaves me to the tedious task, on occasion I go out and give it a stir, then also I'm not using heat.

 

[butcher]

Why not just fix up a stir table small fan motor mounted under the table with a hard drive magnet glued onto a spinning plate mounted to motor shaft, get a cow magnet seal in heat shrink tubing.

Wrap around heating blanket,to warm the solution.

My vote is that shaker table getting ready for that mining adventure later.

Reaction vessel it is nice, but you can put one of those together any time, with a few pieces of glass ware.

 

[necromancer]

Why not just fix up a stir table small fan motor mounted under the table with a hard drive magnet glued onto a spinning plate mounted to motor shaft, get a cow magnet seal in heat shrink tubing.

Wrap around heating blanket,to warm the solution.

My vote is that shaker table getting ready for that mining adventure later.

Reaction vessel it is nice, but you can put one of those together any time, with a few pieces of glass ware.

Butcher, this is a great idea.

would you post instructions ??

 

[rusty]

Why not just fix up a stir table small fan motor mounted under the table with a hard drive magnet glued onto a spinning plate mounted to motor shaft, get a cow magnet seal in heat shrink tubing.

Wrap around heating blanket,to warm the solution.

My vote is that shaker table getting ready for that mining adventure later.

Reaction vessel it is nice, but you can put one of those together any time, with a few pieces of glass ware.

By the time I sourced out the various bits of glass ware needed then shipping and hassles over possible breakage i figure buying the turn key reactor properly packaged is a very good buy.

The 20 liter reactor would be good for processing legs and pins in large volume, extract the values then cement the copper which my scrap yard will purchase as number 2. So it's not all about gold.

I may build the table anyhow just for something to do, the files below are a good read with instructions to build a table.

 

[butcher]

I thought I did describe it, and drew a picture of it in the description; you just have to read what I wrote above, and close your eyes to see it.

If your imagination does not work like mine maybe this will help.

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&biw=1024&bih=570&sclient=psy-ab&q=home+made+chemical+magnetic+stir+motor&oq=home+made+chemical+magnetic+stir+motor&gs_l=hp.12...1382.30513.0.46460.43.39.2.1.1.2.1481.14610.0j15j13j1j1j3j3j3.39.0...0.0...1c.1.7.psy-ab.n3w5Qw4amlk&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.44158598,d.cGE&fp=459c9234ee5565df

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FMTWMvDs5e4

http://www.instructables.com/id/Self-Stirring-Mug-using-Lego/




Here is one more idea, you can use your imagination on.
Seeing the spinning liquid made me think of, a the spinning liquid can act like the centrifuge, heavier material will accumulate in the center at the bottom of the vessel, what if we could fix the magnet on a suspended shaft, and have a catch basin in the bottom center of our vessel to catch these heavier values like fine gold, maybe even a funnel with a dump valve.
What I am thinking, of is something similar how the centrifuge or blue bowel, works,
Something like the old mining trick of the five gallon bucket where you drill a 2”hole in the bottom center for a plastic plumbing cap to sit in, add the screened fines with water in the bucket, stir the heck out of it with a stick a couple of times, (a paint stirrer on a drill also works for the stir stick), and spinning action of the water separates the powders by density, and the centrifugal action deposits the fine gold in solution in the plumbing cap in the center bottom of the bucket, gold being heavier fills the plumbing plug cap first then lighter sand settles on top, and after gold other sand in the bucket settle you reach down under the sand remove the plastic plumbing cap, letting the water and sand drain from this bucket into another bucket, then panning the fine gold powder that collected in the pluming cap.