Hello. After taking the tin of the mobile phone boards with hcl, I removed the coatings on the board with hno3 and filtered the coatings. My question is this. Can I melt the coatings in the strainer directly in our blowtorch? Without doing a job
Mobile phone
- Thread starter Gokhan09
- Start date
Help Support Gold Refining Forum:
war_child
Well-known member
Hello Gokhan. I'm pretty sure you can melt just about anything with a big enough blowtorch. You can probably melt your gold foils into a button as well, but the gold may not be pure. If you are looking for 99.9%+ fine, you will probably have to refine it.
If you are keeping the gold as a souvenir & you are going to post some nice pics here, it would look nicer purified, in my opinion. If you are going to sell it, it might be better to leave it impure. As I have been reading on the forum, I have come across a few different posts dealing with people selling to jewelers and refiners. Please research it, but I believe a lot of jewelers do not require 24k purity and can't even test for such high purity. Those places may only pay for 18k or 22k max. So, I suppose what matters most is: what is the purity of your gold foils. I'd be interested to know.
If you decide to melt the unrefined gold, you should do some more research here. You may need to add some kind of flux, or perhaps use a smelting process, or even cupel the gold, I don't know. Maby it is as easy as adding heat and borax. I really have no clue when it comes to any of those processes, but I would bet it has been discussed on this forum more than once. Search the topic to see if there is any help or clues while you wait for a more helpful response.
Either way, please share the results and some pictures if you can.
Have a good day!
mike
If you are keeping the gold as a souvenir & you are going to post some nice pics here, it would look nicer purified, in my opinion. If you are going to sell it, it might be better to leave it impure. As I have been reading on the forum, I have come across a few different posts dealing with people selling to jewelers and refiners. Please research it, but I believe a lot of jewelers do not require 24k purity and can't even test for such high purity. Those places may only pay for 18k or 22k max. So, I suppose what matters most is: what is the purity of your gold foils. I'd be interested to know.
If you decide to melt the unrefined gold, you should do some more research here. You may need to add some kind of flux, or perhaps use a smelting process, or even cupel the gold, I don't know. Maby it is as easy as adding heat and borax. I really have no clue when it comes to any of those processes, but I would bet it has been discussed on this forum more than once. Search the topic to see if there is any help or clues while you wait for a more helpful response.
Either way, please share the results and some pictures if you can.
Have a good day!
mike
Gokhan, we have a little bit of a language barrier, but I think we can work through it.
If I understand you, I believe you soaked your mobile phone boards in HCl to remove the solder, which is mainly tin. Did you remove all the components like aluminum, integrated circuits, SMDs, etc. before you put them in the HCl?
Then it sounds like you put the boards in HNO3 to remove the "coatings". I'm guessing that you mean the gold plated traces and fingers on the boards? If so, we refer to them as "foils".
You probably dissolved some gold at this point. I hope you've saved all your acids and anything that didn't dissolve. There will always be some HCl residue, even after rinsing, so you formed a little bit of aqua regia and dissolved a bit of gold. It may have cemented out on the base metals, or it could be in your solutions. It may not be worth chasing this time, going directly from HCl to nitric isn't a good practice.
When you say "melt the coatings in the strainer directly in our blowtorch", I'm hoping you mean you would like to take the foils that you caught in your strainer, put them in a suitable melting dish or crucible, and melt them without any further refining. Not that you want to try to melt them in the strainer.
You can melt the foils after straining them and rinsing them, but they will not be very pure. One of the reasons many members refine is so they know the purity of their gold when they sell it. If you don't know how pure it is, you have to rely on your buyer's skill at testing and their honesty. If you've refined your gold, you know how pure it is.
As war_child mentioned, many buyers like the cash for gold places or some jewelers may not be able to test very pure gold accurately and will limit the amount they will pay you. So some members intentionally keep their gold below 22kt for this reason.
I hope that all makes sense.
Dave
