Making copperas

[bcgold]

Buy Ferrous Sulphate and save yourself the work.

Yes I made my own just to see how easy it was and yes it's easy but see how cheap the pure product is, and it's not worth the hassle.

I live in a very rural area that even the couriers will not deliver and the nearest agent is forty five minutes away, the thing with ferrous sulfate it will oxidize when exposed to air.

The one time I was in Winnipeg bought a large sack of it and it was already brown. 3.5 hours to the peg to return a $20.00 bag rotten ferrous sulfate not going to happen.

I did manage to clean some up a bit with dilute hcl which cost me $15.00 for each 4 liter jug, my sulfuric acid cost me nothing as the farm has a large stock pile of old battery's.

The impurity's are easily filtered out using the right cloth, I have a fire retardant cloth used in curtains which is made from fiber glass which is impervious to sulfuric acid.

I tried using some SMB that I had but found out this afternoon that five years in storage rendered it useless, thus the call for making my own copperas.

 

[anachronism]

Good point about the oxidation.

Top tip - buy the wet stuff. 8)

 

[prospector_pete]

Welcome to the forum glondor. Hoke is available as a free download in my sig link. Also note the search box in the top corner. :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

I'm just messing with you man. :mrgreen:
I've heard them mention the steel from transformers before but not sure about the nails. It is a good question though. I haven't used any yet i'm still learning the smb route. It does come in handy for testing. Someone should do a good vid or pdf on it.

when i perfect making mine , i will do a video and put it on my channel

 

[prospector_pete]

that sounds great harold . very easy to understand . im going to try it

 

[prospector_pete]

my first attempt at making copperas , how did i go ?

 

[butcher]

Looking good, looks like you have been spending your time wisely.

 

[Shark]

Looks a lot like the ones I made. Now we would like to see them in use,

 

[FrugalRefiner]

Excellent! Now store them in a tightly capped container with a few drops of diluted sulfuric acid and they will last a long time.

Dave

 

[prospector_pete]

i must have made it wrong , it doesnt work .
th AR tested really strong for gold with stannous . when i put the crystals in the solution went black and thats it . it no longer tests positive for gold but nothing has happened . its not clearing up and theres no gold . i even tried putting some water in with a few drops of sulfuric and letting it mix with the crystals , then i poured it in but still no change

 

[butcher]

Not knowing what you have done or been doing, I suspect your gold solution the problem, and not the copperas crystals.

How pure of a gold solution are you talking about? Approximately how much gold are you expecting from this solution, Is this gold in a fairly pure state being refined?

Or is the bulk of solution base metals with a trace of gold in the dirty solution in some attempt to recover the gold by dissolving it with the base metals?

When you say it tests strong with stannous chloride, what are you referring to?

You said the solution no longer tests positive for gold, and you believe your tests showed positive before, well then the copperas did its job of reducing the gold (it worked).

The amount of gold could have been very small and your stannous test was not false, you may just need to let it settle overnight and use a magnifying glass to see the gold powder...

Or your tests of gold previously with stannous was invalid (false positive from copper reduction and overuse of SMB...), and there was no gold to reduce or very little gold in solution.

How many grams of gold did you dissolve, did you dissolve a bulk of base metals with a trace of gold?

Do you have a standard of a known content gold solution, to test your reagents such as testing and reducing agents with?

The copperas looks good, I would suspect the mystery lies elsewhere.

 

[prospector_pete]

ok i treated gold coated pins , about 500 grams. first i soaked in hcl to remover solder , tin.....
then i thoroughly washed , then soaked in nitric on heat for hours , i kept adding nitric till there
was no more reaction . then i totally drained and filted the nitric , and i added the remains to another
filter i had with foils from fingers . so all up i should have atleast 600 grams. i thoroughly washed it
all till there was no colour in rinse water . then put it in hcl . heated it up , and added the tiniest bit of nitric ,
in totaly after several small additions i think i would have put about 10 mil of nitric. i filtered it , put sulfamic acid , tested it and got an immidiate black/purple stain . a very strong result. by strong result i mean that sometimes the stain slowly appears , but this was immidiate and very dark.
this is only a portion of my AR , i still have lots left. i only put crystals ina small amount incae this happened.
and the only thing i can think of is i didnt double the quantity with water.
the remaining AR has been heated till it reduced to a syrup and has been rehydrated in hcl

 

[prospector_pete]

this is what it looks like after sitting for 7 hours . ive just switched it all to a bigger beaker and added more than twice its volume with rain water

 

[prospector_pete]

 

[jarlowski1]

What was the color of the solution before you added the copperous? And just out of curiosity why did you add rain water?

 

[butcher]

looks more like you are attempting to get some gold from a solution loaded with copper or iron...

You may have some gold in that base metal solution which you can recover, I would just use copper to cement the gold from the base metals solution.

You are not refining gold at this stage, you are trying to recover gold from this base metal solution...

 

[prospector_pete]

it started out as a deep yellow solution . somewhere along the line it went green . i dont know why .
and i use rain water because its falling from the sky like theres no tomorrow . and i figured why buy mineral free water when its being thrown at me for free.
isnt rainwater good to use ?

by the way , i appreciate your advice and input . thankyou guys

 

[prospector_pete]

i ended up getting it to drop the gold , i put more crystals in and i put it on heat

 

[jarlowski1]

Thats good, sometimes reactions can be delayed. Rain water is not clean it can also have dissolved metals in it. It can also be slightly acidic. The reason why is because we as humans pump dirty contaminated exhaust from factories and cars into the air and it gets absorbed and mixed with the natural cycle of evaporation and falls back to earth as contaminated rainwater. Distilled water is what most here will use since it is really cheap. I pay less than a dollar (usd) per gallon (3780 ml). You just have to find a place that sells it near you. Some factories produce it as a byproduct (they use steam for all sorts of things, the steam condenses, they can collect this and sell it if it works out that way for them). Anyway glad you got your gold back.

 

[prospector_pete]

Thats good, sometimes reactions can be delayed. Rain water is not clean it can also have dissolved metals in it. It can also be slightly acidic. The reason why is because we as humans pump dirty contaminated exhaust from factories and cars into the air and it gets absorbed and mixed with the natural cycle of evaporation and falls back to earth as contaminated rainwater. Distilled water is what most here will use since it is really cheap. I pay less than a dollar (usd) per gallon (3780 ml). You just have to find a place that sells it near you. Some factories produce it as a byproduct (they use steam for all sorts of things, the steam condenses, they can collect this and sell it if it works out that way for them). Anyway glad you got your gold back.

awesome , thanks for letting me know . i thought rain water was as pure as it gets . and thanks for your input

 

[Shark]

For dropping gold, I usually heat my solutions, both the gold and my precipitant. I get to maybe a medium heat by my hot plate settings. With the gold in a beaker twice the size of the solution I add the precipitant to the gold very cautiously and slowly as it can cause a run away reaction and spill over if there isn't enough room. It can be very violent if you get to hot or mix them to fast. With coppera's, the remaining solution will usually take on a darker color compared to SMB. The less gold in solution the longer it will take to see the gold reform and settle out.

Don't forget to show us your button when you get around to melting it.