I was actively refining gold a couple of years ago, had a couple of ounces under my belt and and then life got in the way (father's health crashed, and I got a new job and moved cross country...) I'm getting set up again to start collecting and refining now that the dust is settling in my new house. I've got my fume hood mostly complete and have started looking around for good sources of scrap.
My seed money to get going again is stored in this large pickle jar. Back in the spring of 2022 when I stopped refining, this was about $6k in gold. I left a reaction to sit (cold) after my father had a medical emergency and after a couple of weeks, the gold went colloidal and would not precipitate out with sodium metabisulfite.
Fast forward a couple of months and I got a job offer to move across country, so my whole refining operation got broken down. It was a mad scramble to clean up and sell the house, so all my filter papers and partially refined stuff got tossed into this jar and away we went. I'm stunned that the jar survived the 1400 mile journey without breaking/spilling, so here we are.
You can see quite a bit of gold has settled out to the bottom, but there is also colloidal gold in suspension in this goop (along with a lot of dissolved copper, silver and sodium metabisulfite).
I was thinking my best course of action would be to wash and remove any remaining filter papers, filter out any solids in my buchner funnel, boil off the remaining liquid to a crusty solid, melt it, and then refine with nitric/aqua regia as per usual.
My concern is about creating copper salts that might burn or even spark and become explosive. Will the sodium metabisulfite just burn off?
Open to ideas, thanks for considering.
My seed money to get going again is stored in this large pickle jar. Back in the spring of 2022 when I stopped refining, this was about $6k in gold. I left a reaction to sit (cold) after my father had a medical emergency and after a couple of weeks, the gold went colloidal and would not precipitate out with sodium metabisulfite.
Fast forward a couple of months and I got a job offer to move across country, so my whole refining operation got broken down. It was a mad scramble to clean up and sell the house, so all my filter papers and partially refined stuff got tossed into this jar and away we went. I'm stunned that the jar survived the 1400 mile journey without breaking/spilling, so here we are.
You can see quite a bit of gold has settled out to the bottom, but there is also colloidal gold in suspension in this goop (along with a lot of dissolved copper, silver and sodium metabisulfite).
I was thinking my best course of action would be to wash and remove any remaining filter papers, filter out any solids in my buchner funnel, boil off the remaining liquid to a crusty solid, melt it, and then refine with nitric/aqua regia as per usual.
My concern is about creating copper salts that might burn or even spark and become explosive. Will the sodium metabisulfite just burn off?
Open to ideas, thanks for considering.
