Metal Salts?

[goldenfrog]

Hi Guys,
Ok, here is what I did:
168 grams of both fully plated and partially plated pins from 1 mother board and 3 laptops.
Yes most were magnetic.
Tried a short cut and put in 150 ml HCL then 4 dropper fulls of Nitric acid to make AR.
(hindsight... don't take short-cuts.)
after it appeared all the pins had lost their gold, filtered out solution but it was very cloudy which I thought might have been silver chloride. so I added sulfamic acid to both denox and convert the silver and any other impurities to a filter-able solution. couple of days later seeing a nice separation of solids, so I filtered that (skipped testing with stannous *bone-head*) then added SMB to drop any gold in solution. not a lot happened so I let it sit overnight.
Next day Ive got a very white crystal precipitant.
(concluded the gold must have precipitated out with the other sludge) I put the sludge in fresh AR and got my gold out. (and of course put the semi stripped pins in AP to finish getting the rest of the gold I should have done in the first place)
My question is what to do with the salts? should I refine for any other PMs?
Are there any PMs that form salts like this?
id post the pic of the pretty green liquid with white precipitant, but I cant figure out how to post a pic

https://goo.gl/photos/Mn1FHc3YBtsprTzM6

 

[nickvc]

We do not know but as you mentioned stannous and testing there's your answer, dissolve the salts in water and test the solution :?:

 

[kernels]

AP is a copper etc solution (from the world of PCB manufacturing), not the right thing to use if you have mainly kovar pins. How much gold did you drop from a motherboard and a few laptops ? Have you read up on how to treat the super toxic waste you have created ?

 

[goldenfrog]

Oh yeah, I have been experimenting for awhile now. Waste was the first thing I made sure I could handle before generating any of it.
I have gotten fairly good at getting the gold powder to drop, but have not melted it yet to get an idea of exactly how much gold I have recovered.
I was thinking that was a good step... to decant off the spent AR then dissolve the salts to be sure I didn't salt-ify my gold. Just wasn't sure if good old H2O would be the solution or not

 

[goldenfrog]

AP is a copper etc solution (from the world of PCB manufacturing), not the right thing to use if you have mainly kovar pins. How much gold did you drop from a motherboard and a few laptops ? Have you read up on how to treat the super toxic waste you have created ?

I have been reading and searching for the best way to process the pins. Not a whole lot of agreement on the "best way". AP isn't the best and is very slow, but ultimately I think it will work. I have not had the gumption to try a sulfuric cell yet.. that being the 2nd most popular way.

 

[kernels]

Yep, sounds like you are on your way, it helps to fail fast so you can learn fast.

Yes, dissolving away a truckload of base metal for a small amount of gold is not great, but it will work eventually. The Sulfuric cell is now my go-to for plated items since I have not had much luck with Cyanide based solutions.

 

[goldenfrog]

ok, so, the salts are not dissolving in distilled water... does it need to boil?

 

[kernels]

What salts are you expecting ? Is this only the leftovers from pins in AR ? There is surely no Silver Chloride there as there is no reason to have silver on consumer PC motherboard pins. It might be time to upload some pictures so the users can get a better idea of what you are looking at ?