Inquartation calculator

[mlgdave]

Yes golden child I do see that And I am fortunate enough to be able to do that. I am basing my 54.93 grams of placer gold at 80 percent. Thanks for the input!

Mlgdave

 

[goldenchild]

Yes golden child I do see that And I am fortunate enough to be able to do that. I am basing my 54.93 grams of placer gold at 80 percent. Thanks for the input!

Mlgdave

Do you still want a spreadsheet then? I can whip one up for you if you'd like.

 

[mlgdave]

well a spreadsheet would help, as I will likely use this method a lot. help me understand something that either im missing or im not understanding.
On page 135 of Hoke even though shes talking about dental wastes and iridium recovery she talks about inquarting UP using brass, zinc, copper etc etc to lower the silver to less than 10% before using an AR solution. Does this type of inquarting add difficulties or dragging down of unwanted metals when precipitating?

I do have the gold to use, but if im thinking outside the box then why not use brass as she suggests?

mlgdave
ps..and THANKS for the offer to do a spreadsheet for me! Im not an excel guru

 

[Harold_V]

then why not use brass as she suggests?

Brass has the potential to contain lead----which should be avoided at all costs. You also risk using bronze, introducing tin. There is no greater nightmare for the refiner than to include tin when it isn't necessary. It makes filtration impossible.

Financially, far less nitric is required to digest silver than other elements----so there's more than one reason to stick to silver for inquartation.

Harold

 

[goldenchild]

well a spreadsheet would help, as I will likely use this method a lot. help me understand something that either im missing or im not understanding.
On page 135 of Hoke even though shes talking about dental wastes and iridium recovery she talks about inquarting UP using brass, zinc, copper etc etc to lower the silver to less than 10% before using an AR solution. Does this type of inquarting add difficulties or dragging down of unwanted metals when precipitating?

I do have the gold to use, but if im thinking outside the box then why not use brass as she suggests?

mlgdave
ps..and THANKS for the offer to do a spreadsheet for me! Im not an excel guru

I've never inquarted with anything other than Ag, (Cu and Au once or twice to experiment)and Harold will have much more knowledge about dental wastes, but this is what I can offer. If you inquart using brass, zinc or copper you might as well just digest it with nitric to recover gold sponge. Zinc is highly susceptible to nitric and even straight HCL.

Usually its more trouble going straight to AR than it's worth. This is because if the base metal isnt digested 100% then the gold will cement out. Can you imagine inqurting with zinc? Copper, silver and gold will all be cementing out at the same time. Only until the zinc and copper portion of the alloy is completly digested will the cementing stop. And then you will be left with silver chloride to contend with. Besides that copper, zinc and bronze are all worth good money and better saved to sell as scrap. Back then these metels weren't worth much. Unless you plan on recovering zinc and copper silver is best to use. Or in your case AR

 

[mlgdave]

Thanks guys, I will stick to inquarting up with AU, I love all that im learning and I just love the fizzy little bubbles AR produces on nice clean gold.

Yes a spreadsheet would be great as I said before, I appreciate the heck out of it. I am seemingly now doing a batch every 2 or 3 days

mlgdave

 

[samuel-a]

Dave

Here is an Inquarting Calculator for you to use whenever you need it:

Gold Inquarting Calculator

I've checked the results time and again and the script is OK, I work with this calculator when need to inquart scrap gold, i suggest you bookmark it :idea:

 

[goldenchild]

Here is the one I promised. Let me know if anyone wants anything else added.

View attachment gcCalculator.xlsx

 

[mlgdave]

Thanks Goldenchild, I will try a 111.40 gram batch this morning, I think its about 85% pure Au, and since its placer I am sure that the impurities are Fe, Cu, Ag, and maybe some Pt. I am calculating base metals % to 0.09 I am calculating that I will need 293.33 gram of pure Au (If I understand correctly this spreadsheet I get to take 111.40/.85 to give me 94.69 grams which means I will add 199 and change.............
I will report back in about 2 or 3 hours, im gonna go melt/shot and put in AR!

Thanks!

mlgdave

 

[goldenchild]

The formula I used to calculate the Au inquartation was off. I realized it when playing with the spreadsheet a bit today. Here is the revised version. Now the percentages should both be input in the .07 format. "Pure Au in grams" means how many grams of pure Au you will have to add to your starting scrap weight. Just to be safe can someone double check my excel formula?

=IF(AND(C11<>0,C12<>0,C13<>0),((C11-(C11*C12))/C13)-C11,"")

mlgdave. To make your 111.4 grams of 85% pure scrap have a base metal value of 9% you only had to add 74.27 grams of pure Au. Sorry about that. And sorry to anyone else this messed up. Attached is version 2.

View attachment gcCalculator.xlsx

 

[mlgdave]

ahh no big deal, it looked good adding the 197.13 grams! lol, the AGcl in the bottom is super snow wite and fluffly looking, I probably have about 30 mins left. Heres the piks so far!

I am so so so so addicted to this new hobby of mine (well I guess its not a hobby anymore) im still having a hard time laying down at 1030 pm to go to bed, its an expansion of my part in the gold business, I never thought i would EVER melt placer of ANY size....lol, i am NOW converted!

mlgdave

 

[goldenchild]

I am so so so so addicted to this new hobby of mine (well I guess its not a hobby anymore) im still having a hard time laying down at 1030 pm to go to bed, its an expansion of my part in the gold business, I never thought i would EVER melt placer of ANY size....lol, i am NOW converted!

mlgdave

Once you drop your first bit of gold your'e addicted for life.

 

[mlgdave]

uh, yea, im starting to get that...........lol, I was actually BIT when I was 11, also wrote that story somewhere, ill have to find it, it was published in the ICMJ about 7 years ago

mlgdave

 

[4metals]

I found the spreadsheet which disappeared. It totals karat scrap as you buy it and gives running inquartation totals. View attachment karat buy running totals.xls

I also found this one, if you put the gold price in, it tells you how much it is worth per pennyweight, and if you follow along the red row to the price you want to pay it tells you what you will profit. Great quick reference if you have to haggle to get some scrap.
View attachment scrap jewelry buying margins.xls

 

[Harold_V]

im gonna go melt/shot and put in AR!

Better stop and read Hoke first. You have things a little screwed up.

Harold

 

[mlgdave]

im gonna go melt/shot and put in AR!

Better stop and read Hoke first. You have things a little screwed up.

Harold

Ok, now you have me scared, Hoke is where I got the idea to begin with (or so i think?) Page 135 she talks about if you have gold with silver up to 12% to melt UP with another metal to get silver to less than 10%.........I did that, it digested in AR beautifully, its nice red color and I will treat with sulphuric to get rid of Pb and then dilute and precip............or do you still say I need to read Hoke?

mlgdave

 

[nickvc]

I think Harold is viewing this as an inquartation process which is usually the method advised to obtain high quality gold with the added advantage that any PGMs are dissolved in nitric and cemented out with the silver but with some gold alloys direct dissolution in AR is possible and speeds the processing. If your dealing with scraps containing white gold or any PGMs I'd be tempted to stick to adding silver to reduce the gold content to around 20% and then dissolving in nitric, the cemented silver can be used many times over helping to increase the amount of PGMs which can then be recovered through a silver cell. If your going to follow the AR direct route always add copper after dropping your gold to cement any PGMs present.

 

[mlgdave]

thanks Nick, now im not so scared, I will do that and I just did this to see how it went, I do have a lot of recovered silver from my first 5 batches and have some Karat scrap to do, so I will do just that!

mlgdave

 

[Harold_V]

Ok, now you have me scared, Hoke is where I got the idea to begin with (or so i think?) Page 135 she talks about if you have gold with silver up to 12% to melt UP with another metal to get silver to less than 10%.........I did that, it digested in AR beautifully, its nice red color and I will treat with sulphuric to get rid of Pb and then dilute and precip............or do you still say I need to read Hoke?

<<chuckle!>>

Ok, I see where you're going with this one. There's two approaches, and inquartation tends to apply to the one I had in mind (quartering, or lowering gold content to 25%) by adding other metals, then digesting in nitric *before* dissolving the values. That's the procedure I used (always) and preferred, for more than one reason. One of the good ones is that you remove base metals as well as most platinum and palladium in the process, leaving behind primarily high quality gold with just traces of silver, copper, zinc and pt. metals (assuming they are present).

I'm a little surprised at the resulting color of your solution (although I suspect the picture, above, is not from this lot of refining)----which should have a green tint, assuming you didn't do the preliminary nitric process. Is there something I missed? That was my concern at the outset--that you talked about melting, shotting and going straight to AR.

Harold

 

[nickvc]

Oz put up a post about how he uses silver to collect and concentrate any PGMs he encounters in his refining and uses the colour of the cemented silver to judge when it's time to put it through a cell. If your going to refine as part of your living every cent counts and recovering any PGMs you encounter may well prove well worth the effort in time. If you have rings with platinum heads I would suggest cutting them off them and keeping them until you have a reasonable quantity and add them to the PGMs you get from your cell.