Keyboard mylars smelting

[kjavanb123]

Thanks all, I will report my analysis on slags, and yields on simar batches both chemical process and smelting.

Regards
Kj

 

[Anonymous]

Kevin has invested a great deal of time & money in this - it not a hobby for him - therefore Kevin owes it not only to himself but to his clients as well to figure out if he is suffering a (substantial) loss - & if so why &/or where

Kurt

I agree completely Kurt which is why I'm always blunt with him. I dearly want him to succeed and that takes a structured, analytical approach with hard data and a well defined process.

 

[Smack]

LazerSteve had a post on incineration of mylars a long time ago with good explanation on how to do it. It might be the better way to go.


http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=711&p=6388&hilit=mylar#p6388

 

[Anonymous]

He sure did but Kevin is smelting them.

 

[nickvc]

He sure did but Kevin is smelting them.

Well what can I say. The offer of cheap assays is still open, just doing the same process again will only reveal what it yields not what's actually there, if the fluxing or heat is off then gather a few grams more.
Kevin I'm trying to help.. The fact your man has done this for however long doesn't mean he has got it 100% right, you want more customers so give them a great deal, make sure you recover at least 95% of the values and charge for the effort, giving poor returns will kill your business in days!

 

[upcyclist]

My smelting operator has been doing this with anode slimes, jewler sweeps and minerals for more than 25 years and I have seen his work with my materials before, back then we even re-melted the slags, but that only produced trace amount, like 600kg slags and lithrage from many smelting, only produced 1g gold, which tells me we got 99% of gold there was in our furnace.

I've seen you express similar logic before, Kevin. I would like to offer a critique, and in the friendliest way possible. When you say you got 99% of the gold present on the first try, that's not quite correct. You got 99% of the gold you recovered on the first try, vice the second.

I'll give you an example, but I'll use myself as the example because you have more skill than I do, and it's easier to make fun of myself

I'm going to process ten AMD 486 chips. We'll say my methods stink (probably true), and I get back 0.5g of gold. So I take all of my waste materials and reprocess them, only getting 0.06g the second time (we'll pretend I can actually collect and measure something that small). From my numbers and your logic, I could say that I have a 90% recovery rate, because I collected 90% of 0.56g the first time around. But if we look at the expected yield for 10 of those chips, we know that I should* have gotten 1.08 grams.

In the end, I really only had 46% recovery (0.5g out of an expected 1.08g). But if I only compare the first take to the second take, it looks like I did much better. I exaggerated the numbers for effect--I'm certainly not saying you lose half your PMs. What I am saying is that your "success rate" does not take environmental and procedural losses into effect. The other posters have suggested reasons for this; I'm only pointing out the logic.

Hope that helps,

--Eric

*data according to Tzoax's display, may not be 100% accurate. I'm just using it as a theoretical expected recovery.

 

[nickvc]

Nice post Eric, we are all trying to help Kevin and sometimes it feels like we are just been critical, with precious metals people get really odd, they want all the values less charges not 90% of the values less charges or worse.
Kevin this is your living get it right or you will go down still saying yes but my results say this, assay your fluxes and keep your customers or ignore my comments and lose them, it's easier to admit you haven't recovered the full values and will sort it than say it's all that's there from my results when they know different. This is not about cents but dollars and you need to prove you can deliver, trust is easily lost and hard to gain, one slip maybe, two your out!

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

Thanks for your comments and analysis. I take pride in what I do, and I treat all my clients lots as if they were my own. I will take note on all of your comments and advise and will report back.

Regards
Kj

 

[NoIdea]

Evening All - the pyrolysis of mylars can produce lower yields than expected, some of the silver/silver oxide becomes mobile in the gas phase and will be lost through the exit end of your reactor, I did this once and found the silver had seeded, into a weird looking blob, at the coolest point of the exit hole, how much I had lost is unknown. I am not sure how to over come this when doing just mylars, I do mine with other stuff that needs pyrolysis, and I make sure the mylars are at the opposite end to the exit port, hoping any seeding will occur on the other material present.

Regards

Deano

 

[kjavanb123]

Hi Deano,

Nice to have you back. So that explains why the yields I got is drastically lower than expectes from the same materials.

I never gotten a chance to smelt another batch. I have used cyanide on commercial x-rays used by gas company with excellent results.

Regards
Kj