My first AP, check my math?

[Captobvious]

So I guess the lesson I need to take away from this is to be patient eh? Good to know

I'll keep this updated as the week progresses so that in a year from now I can laugh at myself :lol:

 

[bswartzwelder]

The last batch of printed circuit boards I did had no components (ever attached from the factory). I started the air pump added the HCl and H2O2 and let it work. I have a lid on the outer bucket with a brick on it to keep other things out like rain. Left it undisturbed for about 2 weeks and when I came back, everything was stripped and ready to continue processing. I do not us an airstone in the bottom of the bucket. I run the airline tubing from left to righ, then back. From there, I run the airline tubing north and south. I tie the airline tubing to the bottom of the bucket and punch holes every inch or two with the end of a paper clip heated with a lighter. I also heat the end of the tubing and crimp it shut. Worked like a charm. Very little stuff around here works really fast, so be patient. Sounds like you're on the right path. Good luck.

 

[jmdlcar]

Captobvious,

First off I don't want make you mad and if I do SORRY. If I had about 5 pounds of fingers and it was your first time with AP I wouldn't have did 5 pounds the first time it would have a lot less to learn how then go full speed. I hope for you everything works out. If I ever get a lot of scrap I will only do a pound or less at a time for a while then I will do more.

The fingers I have did I use 2 cups of 31.45% Muriatic Acid (Smart brand) and less then 1 ounce of 3% hydrogen peroxide (Wal-Mart) and that was 8 ounces of fingers cause that all I had.

You have a good day and always work and be safe cause you only have 1 life to live.

Thanks
Jack

 

[Captobvious]

Captobvious,

First off I don't want make you mad and if I do SORRY. If I had about 5 pounds of fingers and it was your first time with AP I wouldn't have did 5 pounds the first time it would have a lot less to learn how then go full speed. I hope for you everything works out. If I ever get a lot of scrap I will only do a pound or less at a time for a while then I will do more.

The fingers I have did I use 2 cups of 31.45% Muriatic Acid (Smart brand) and less then 1 ounce of 3% hydrogen peroxide (Wal-Mart) and that was 8 ounces of fingers cause that all I had.

You have a good day and always work and be safe cause you only have 1 life to live.

Thanks
Jack

Nah we're cool everyone learns different, some of us learn in harder ways than others. Personally I tend to go all in when it comes to projects of mine, sometimes it's a blessing, other times it's a curse :lol:

 

[Captobvious]

nothing new to report, day 3 and no change, liquid still very clear(barely a green tint unless agitated then it goes dark for a short while until it settles again), no flakes appear to have come off the fingers.... thinking about adding some more 3% H202 tomorrow when I get paid. Also considering in addition to that removing about half or more of the fingers from the AP.

Thoughts?

-edit- I haven't decanted the current mix into another bucket yet to check for salts/foils yet, and probably won't at this point until next week when my dentist can make this tooth stop throbbing... put simply I don't trust myself in the garage lab until I'm no longer jacked to the hilt with Vicodin just to be able to not be in agony.

 

[Captobvious]

Day 4, all I can say is W00T! Solution is a much more normal AP green color upon opening the bucket and without agitating, upon pulling the inner bucket to inspect it, it became obvious that things were beginning to work. Some fingers were bare, others were starting to flake off, so I'm thinking I'll just leave things well enough alone for a few days aside from stirring the fingers. :mrgreen:

 

[Captobvious]

Day 7

There's still a lot of gold on the fingers, this is just going sooo much slower than I anticipated. If this was your batch what would you do at this point?

 

[kkmonte]

I'd keep my bubbler going with the fingers, maybe just put back half of the fingers to do at once, and agitate it as often as I could.

 

[butcher]

Give us some pictures of the solution in a jar, looking at it maybe we can tell something by the color. it should be a lighter green if very dark or almost brown it may need more oxygen, I do not see white salts of copper I chloride with your gold so I guess you are OK on HCl, speaking of HCl are you using regular HCl or that new green stuff?
How cold is it where you copper II chloride leach is at night and days? If it is very cold the leach slows down, it will work but very slowly, you can heat it if you wish, Or just let it work and wait, you can build a box for the bucket to sit in with a light bulb in the box, if you do this you must build it to be fire safe, and electrically safe, and make it so it will not overheat anything, a thermostat can be added if you wished, there are several other ways you can heat the solution a little, somewhere around 80 degrees would be enough heat. Pumping air in with a fish tank air pump and small hose with the end plugged and small cuts in the tubing or holes drilled with a hot wire, will not only supply air but can help to circulate the solution. Patience is a lesson you will need to learn in recovery and refining. Gold is a very patient metal it takes patience to get.

 

[Captobvious]

Butcher, is pretty much AP Green from what I can tell

Using the cheap (10 gallon rated but was the smallest I could find lol) fish tank airpump I got from the pet store

and with the pump off

Not sure if that answers the color question or not...

Your questions on temperature make me believe the slow recovery is being caused by that more than anything. Temperatures around here this past week were around 30-35F for the highs and 10's to 20's for overnight lows, I'm working out of an uninsulated garage so add maybe 5 deg when the sun's beating down on the room helping out, plus no wind...


Holy crap I can't wait for Spring to finally get here! I really don't want to buy yet another tank of propane for the garage heater (already gone thru 4 of them this winter)

 

[butcher]

It is hard to tell from the picture but it looks too dark, it should be a light green color so you can see through it easier, when it has enough oxygen it is a lighter green and clearer, it looks like using a little 3% peroxide, and warming it up a little will help speed it up.
If you have a whole bucket of fingers your trying to dissolve a lot of copper, if the solution darkens when saturated with copper I chloride dissolved in solution, the reaction slows down, you want it to be copper II chloride, no reason to heat a whole shop to get one bucket warmed up a little, the light bulb and a box is not the only way to warm it up, but probably a little easier than other methods.

It is hard enough for the solution to undermine the gold plating, warming and a healthy copper II chloride solution should speed it up a little, it is normally a slow process but from what you have stated your is just much more slower than it should be. The bubbles I can see is stirring the solution that is good, I do not know if you have many small bubbles that leave more oxygen in solution, or large bubbles that just pass through solution so fast trying to get to the surface that they are leaving little oxygen dissolve in the liquid.

 

[Captobvious]

It is hard to tell from the picture but it looks too dark, it should be a light green color so you can see through it easier, when it has enough oxygen it is a lighter green and clearer, it looks like using a little 3% peroxide, and warming it up a little will help speed it up.
If you have a whole bucket of fingers your trying to dissolve a lot of copper, if the solution darkens when saturated with copper I chloride dissolved in solution, the reaction slows down, you want it to be copper II chloride, no reason to heat a whole shop to get one bucket warmed up a little, the light bulb and a box is not the only way to warm it up, but probably a little easier than other methods.

It is hard enough for the solution to undermine the gold plating, warming and a healthy copper II chloride solution should speed it up a little, it is normally a slow process but from what you have stated your is just much more slower than it should be. The bubbles I can see is stirring the solution that is good, I do not know if you have many small bubbles that leave more oxygen in solution, or large bubbles that just pass through solution so fast trying to get to the surface that they are leaving little oxygen dissolve in the liquid.

I'm planning on when I get a chance to get a fresh hose line for the air pump to do the coil method in the bottom of the bucket. Basically as I understood it, you seal off the end of the hose going into the bucket, then pierce the line with a pin every inch or sofor a couple feet of line, coil that int he bottom of the bucket and then you have instead of the one end bubbling up hard, you have 50 or so ends bubbling up.

I'll put in another cup of Peroxide and see how that goes as you suggest and hopefully that'll speed things up a tad.

Thanks for the input

 

[Captobvious]

Ok so I added another cup of 3% H202, I removed a sample to check color, and yes it seems very dark

To give a little better perspective on just how dark green it has gotten here is the inner bucket pulled up just enough to keep the fingers about a little under an inch under the surface of the mix.

Given what you say about a dark mix needing 02 or more peroxide to lighten things up I'll let is settle for a bit after adding the previously mentioned cup of peroxide and if there's no change I'll add another cup and proceed from there.

Unless someone has a better idea that is

 

[jmdlcar]

Hi,

When I use peroxide 3% I use very little just enough to get the process started. Here is how I do fingers and I found this in a message written by Steve and I add some.

As a learning process you can process a few hundred grams of finger boards in a quart sized mason jar. Make sure the fingers are trimmed close with minimal green board along the cut edge and no tiny spare parts or pins on the boards!

Do this in a well ventilated area away from metals items that can corrode easily.

1. Place the clean fingers in the jar so they stand upright (long ways) and fit loosely (not tightly packed).
2. Fill the jar up to the top of the fingers with 31.45% HCL (Muriatic Acid - Smart Brand) from Lowe's or Home Depot.
3. Add two caps full of 3% Hydrogen peroxide from Walmart or your local drug store.
4. Stir the solution with a glass rod to mix in the peroxide.
5. Wait one hour and observe the color of the solution.
6. If the solution is pale light blue repeat steps 3 through 5.
7. If the solution is emerald green, let it sit covered overnight (24hours), stirring occasionally if desired.
8. Using plastic tweezers, remove any finger boards that become 100% stripped of all copper (and gold foils) during the next 24 hours, spraying them off into the solution as you remove them. The foils all should be settling to the bottom of the jar, fight the urge to try to pull them out until you are done. Too much water is not desirable, so keep your rinsing to a minimum.
9. When all of the boards have been stripped, let everything settle and siphon off the liquid.
10. Rinse the foils with HCl and siphon with each rinse until the rinse acid is free of color.
11. Two rinses with clean water and then siphon with each rinse.
12. Process the foils with HCl-Cl in the same jar for highest purity.
13. 250ml Muriatic Acid 31.45% add Clorox Bleach (small increments). Used to dissolve gold foils.
14. Filter the yellow liquid into a clean jar. Use 2 coffee filter.
15. Use SMB (Sodium Metabisulfite) to drop the gold.
16. Stannous Chloride for testing for gold in the solution.
17. Three Rinses with Clean Water and siphon off with each rinse.
18. Warm HCL bath for 20 min. and siphon off HCL.
19. Three Rinses with Clean Water and siphon off with each rinse.
20. Put jar on a warmer heat tell powder is dry.
21. Melt it in to a nice button.

Jack

 

[Captobvious]

Just a follow-up to adding that cup of Peroxide last night. It definately seems to have helped, as when I stirred the mix tonight the surface of the mix immediately became covered in gold flake and upon inspection of the fingers noticed many of them laid bare or were half bare... so yes the peroxide seems to have helped :mrgreen:

 

[Captobvious]

Just want to say a quick thank you for the help figuring everything out up to this point, just wanted to brag for a sec if I could 8)

dirty, but mostly dried the foils I collected fill the bottom of this coffee pot, any weight estimates would be guesses on my part, others smarter with math than me might be able to figure it out but I'll wait til it's in powder and on a scale, these foils stick to EVERYTHING and don't like to leave where they're at without a fight lol

(perspective)

Here's the leftover stripped fingers, I did notice values still attached to some of them so I'll be sure to give them a real good rinsing and reprocess the ones with values in Caustic and put them back in AP to pull any remainder off in with the next batch.

I'll be proceeding further after I have a chance to collect some more supplies (after payday) not to mention it's snowing right now but next weekend it should be int he 60's! Finally will be able to get some work done again

Btw, to whomever suggested this, ty! I picked the only one left on the shelf at my local Wally-world and only $29 so not bad on the wallet either Can't wait to try it out once I get the remainder of what I need to proceed.

So guys, again, for every thread, for every link, for every argument, THANKS!!!