( our first batch) My brother had decided to refine gold and watched many Youtube videos and followed instructions. We purchased some (shore chemicals) and desolved the gold in Ar The videos made it look easy. just through in boards and precipitate gold (not!!!) every thing went really well until precipitation. You see the thing we have learned since then have shown us a lot about this, any ways back to the story so you can understand what we did so we can get the help we are seeking. We had at that time no real understanding as to what Urea was actually suppose to do we were unable to precipitate the gold. Now it was back to the drawing board and that is when we decided to attempt precipitation with aluminum foil we. This worked and we knew we had a lot of impurities in the gold and a lot of other metals in it as well. Once we got the mud we decided to re process the gold again, using the same process, after some study we were armed with new things to try. We were unable to precipitate. We then left it alone for awhile we even tried magnesium to precipitate and we believe that it did the same as the aluminum . We did some more study on the matter. It was around this same time we came across this forum and discovered how to get gold foils from pins and it was here we discovered hokes book. When reading the book and reading the forum we discovered the HCl and bleach method. we also discovered the Ap method and then tried these methods to get our foils and made our own nitric acid. we used the HCl method to dissolve the pins and things went well and have since been able to get the gold out of the first batch and were then able to dissolve the gold mud in the same process. Now we were ready to precipitate the gold and we did precipitate the pins with out a hitch on 3 occasions. Feeling confident we decided it was time to precipitate with the mud we dissolved in the same way. Now is when the problems begin, again. we put the SMB in and it looked like it was going to precipitate well and instead the color of the liquid turned brown like it should but nothing dropped we then used copper to drop the gold this worked and in the mean while we had the other gold ready to melt and did this and came out with gold. mean while the other problems began with the original mud a white substance developed in the solution with the mud and made it impossable to decant it but we finnally did decant some and got it dried. this mud was brown like is should be until it dried and then some of it had a black powder underneath it and some just simply changed colors from brown to black and grey we attempted to melt alittle of this and it blew the torch out just as it reached melting point. My question is what is this powder and how do we get rid of it or is it too late to save this batch and should we just junk it and move on with the knowledge that we have learned here and in hokes book? 
please help us we have been working this for the last 2 almost 3 months if you find any info lacking in this post we will be glad to answer them.
please help us we have been working this for the last 2 almost 3 months if you find any info lacking in this post we will be glad to answer them.
