Melting Nighmare, Time to Ask for Help.

[jayrock72]

I have been playing in the refining hobby for years. I finally have a nice process for getting nice batches of gold from scrap. Yesterday, I lost over 1.5 ounces of quality gold trying to melt it.

Here's my simple process.

1. Seasoned my crucible with BOrax
2. Heated gently with MAP gas torch.
3. Added gold flakes.
4. Covered with Borax
5. Heated slowly until molten.
6. When it colled it looked like just a lump of charcoal.
7. Very cmall amounts of gold still fused in the Borax in the bottom of the dish.

What am I doing wrong?? Please help....I just feel like I am SO CLOSE! Its devastating!

Thanks,
Jay
:?:

 

[Lou]

You didn't lose it unless you spilled it and wrote it off.

You need more heat. If your gold is pure, you don't need much borax. We only use a slight glaze of it in our silica crucibles.

 

[jamaicanyute]

This happened to me before, i ended breaking the crucible into little pieces searching for my gold button. Anyway, what kind of scrap did you get the gold flakes from, jewelry scrap, or E-scrap ?

Ryan

 

[Geo]

if it were just gold and borax, it would be a nice,clean gold button. you said "gold flakes", can you tell where and from what you got these flakes from. if you have charcoal in the melting dish, you didnt have gold. sounds like organics. if you are reclaiming foils from electronics, they have to be refined before melting to have pure gold. you can melt gold foils but it will be contaminated. study the forum more, especially how to deal with gold foils. try the guided tour link in lazersteve's signature line.

 

[jayrock72]

All of my material came from various gold plated items, some 24k jewelry, some CPU's, gold plated watches.

I have been using the Klean Strip and Peroxide stripping method.
Then refining down with Nitric acid and heat (from Hokes book)
Washing throuroughly.
In my estimation, this method should produce, at minimum 14 karat flake.

Here's a samply of what I started with.

 

[ericrm]

this obviously need to be refined
you probably still have iron in your pin

can you put a picture of your dish and button

edit that is realy a bad job (you need to know it ), i said needed to refine but the truth is ,that to me your still need to recover your gold from all that ...

you clearly have copper and iron ,with mean you still have every metal in between.

Then refining down with Nitric acid and heat (from Hokes book)

how do you think you refined this?
i dont know if i understand you correctly but youve put everything in ap(witch isnt that bad..)
than you removed the ap and put everything in nitric?if soo you have dissolve some gold...


what chemical do you have acces to?

 

[Geo]

from the picture, you have whole processor legs in that mass. they contain iron and nickel. im fairly sure theres other base metals present.you should study aqua regia as a process. C.M.Hoke's book "refining precious metal waste" is a free download from the forum. even though it doesnt cover electronics, it does cover the basics on refining. it would be a good place to start to understand the correct way to process that kind of material.

 

[jayrock72]

Yea, I've read Hokes book cover to cover, it tells me to participate the gold from the aqua regia method using Copperas, Iron Sulfate....lost the gold there too. It didn't precipitate down...the water never cleared up from the "green" color after aqua regia, which indicates the presence of Nitric, but after evaporating it back down several times with the hydrocholoic acid, but still...no gold. Thise chems are very expensive, no thank you.

I am to the point where I don't need 99.99% purity. Even with some organics in my final produce, shouldn't I still get something that resembles metal? Not charcoal?

 

[ericrm]

your comprehention of what your doing is clearly the probleme here and i tell you that on a very friendly way. you think you know what your doing but your not.

you dont participate gold from solution
you cannot lost gold, it is there or not, gold dont disapear
having a green solution doesnt mean you have nitric.

even if you dont need 99.95% gold ,if you have a lump of charcoal and no gold metal beed, your not even at the point where you have karat gold.

restart at the beginning
do you have stannous chloride?

 

[jayrock72]

No offense taken, but it is not productive to tell me that I am clueless as to the process and not offer suggestions for improvement, that is what I am here for.

The answer is no, the chemicals I am using are:
Sulphuric Acid
Hydrochloric Acid and Nitric Acid

Then the ferrous sulfate to percipitate the DIUSOLVED gold back down out of the AR solution....

All of this is Hokes Bool 101...a lot of my base material is verified 14 - 24k gold plated, so I KNOW there's gold there....

 

[jayrock72]

Stannous Chloride, Purple of Cassius, is this not used to test whether or not there's gold in the solution?

 

[jayrock72]

how do you think you refined this?
i dont know if i understand you correctly but youve put everything in ap(witch isnt that bad..)
than you removed the ap and put everything in nitric?if soo you have dissolve some gold...


what chemical do you have acces to

Keep in mind, I am basing my methods on Hokes book.

In Hokes, If you read on how to prepare cheap scrap (such as gold plated spectacles) prior to AR treatment it tells you to:

1. mix Nitric Acid with a little water, and releat until the brown fumes stop.

2. Than rinse thoughroully into a pitcher of clean water and let sit over night.

3. And I quote from the book "you have almost pure gold at this point"

This is my process exactly as perfomred (after stripping of the gold with Muratic Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide for about 3 days).

I'm no chemist, but from the above referenced steps, should this not at least produce low grade gold? I don't want to have to disolve the gold to get it back....it has never worked.

 

[Geo]

if the AR solution has free nitric, the gold will not precipitate. if you followed her instructions, and you had no gold to drop, there can only be two possibilities why the gold didnt drop. (1) there was still free nitric in solution, (2) there was no gold in solution to begin with. ferrous sulfate is just iron dissolved in sulfuric acid and then evaporated to its crystal form. a green AR solution can mean a couple of different things. the first thing that comes to mind is copper contamination though it could be iron, depending on the color. the green will not clear up from dropping the gold. sometimes it takes awhile for the gold to drop. depending on what you had in solution. some people process a few ounces of pins or a handfull of gold plate and expect to see a large drop when the actual percentage of gold may be a light dusting on the bottom of the flask by the next day.

 

[ericrm]

im very happy you take no offence, and about the unproductive we will see later, after you made yourself stannous chloride and a standard AuCl3 test solution. this is my suggestion for improvement :mrgreen:

 

[Harold_V]

Here's a samply of what I started with.

From that you expect to recover more than an oucne of gold?

You clearly do not understand what you're doing. So long as that is the case, you will suffer from disappointing yields, and will never achieve a level of purity that should be achieved, even by one with little experience.

What you have chosen to do is look for your lost wallet where the light is good, not where it is lost. If you hope to improve, you must change your attitude and follow the guidelines set forth in Hoke's book. If you find them excessive, lower your expectations. Come to terms with the idea that you are NOT refining, that you are, indeed, effecting a recovery operation at best. You are melting all manner of garbage, expecting the end result to be gold---and that's simply not going to happen.

One of the most disconcerting experiences I had when I refined for gain was processing the type of material you have shown, but for a customer. He had painstakingly removed the plating from pins, then stored the resulting gold flakes in a small container. He had failed to dry the material, but considered the weight of the contained water as immaterial. The pound of submitted material yielded under six ounces of gold. He was incensed, and would have no part of understanding that his material wasn't all gold. Sounds very familiar, doesn't it?

Harold

 

[drtyTshrt]

The brutality of inexperience is the most entertaining aspect of the experienced.

You can just feel the frustration from the perceived entitlement.