As a hobby I started stripping gold off of gold plated jewely and it started off pretty good. I use a salt and distilled water for the stripping solution and went through about 3 or 4 lbs of costume jewelry. After that is when I started hitting snaggs. I have about a half gallon of material and after bringing it to boil I added about 4lbs sodium meteshuplate, and this is where is got weird. The mixture turned a burgandy red and is gving off strong fumes. After letting it sit I test some of the run off for gold and it tested positive for gold, and after adding almost 6 more pounds of percipitant its still testing positive. HELP
New to this and I need help
- Thread starter svories
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patnor1011
Well-known member
pounds? :roll:
You wanted to use grams.
There is not much of gold in plated costume jewellery. I do not process that stuff but I would guess that there will be like 1-2g in a pound and even that looks too much to me. If you dissolved some gold from that less than 2 kilograms of material you may have from 3-5 grams of gold. (This is just guess, maybe wrong but somebody who do this kind of material can correct my numbers)
So you will need about 5 grams of SMB, it looks you used 550 times more than required.
Also it is hard to see few grams of gold in 2l of dirty solution.
You wanted to use grams.
There is not much of gold in plated costume jewellery. I do not process that stuff but I would guess that there will be like 1-2g in a pound and even that looks too much to me. If you dissolved some gold from that less than 2 kilograms of material you may have from 3-5 grams of gold. (This is just guess, maybe wrong but somebody who do this kind of material can correct my numbers)
So you will need about 5 grams of SMB, it looks you used 550 times more than required.
Also it is hard to see few grams of gold in 2l of dirty solution.
Geo
Well-known member
make sure of your spelling. its sodium metabisulfite, not metabisulfate.
svories,
Here are my thoughts if I understand your post correctly.
If you just used salt and water, to strip the costume jewelry, you would not have any gold in solution, (no oxidizer involved to dissolve the gold as a chloride), it is possible to have some base metal chlorides in solution, as costume jewelry can be made with a wide variety of base metals, many of which if you did get into solutions or salts would be very toxic at this point.
Sodium metabisulfite used to precipitate gold dissolved in solution (without base metals as much as possible in this solution), the SMB produces sulfur dioxide gas which is what precipitates gold.
This SO2 gas or sodium metabisulfate would not do any good on gold that was not dissolved.
In your process did you separate the solution from the powders, and these from un-dissolved costume jewelry, as the gold plating would be in powders, along with other base metal powders, the solution without oxidizers would have no gold (unless small flakes remained floating in solution), and most likely would only contain some very reactive base metal as chlorides.
From your post it sounds like you have a solution of reactive metal chlorides, mixed with other metal powders (including some flakes of gold plate), then added a sulfate salt in large quantity and just made a bigger mess from a smaller mess, now it sounds like you may have sulfate and chloride salts of metals mixed with a very small amount of gold flakes.
At this point I think dissolving what you could in water filter if possible and treat this solution for waste, if you can filter save the powders from the filter and what powder did not dissolve dry these and store in a safe place.
You can find how to deal with your toxic waste in the safety section.
You can also find a better way to process your material here on the forum.
Edit to add.
If you were using electrolysis with a saturated salt solution, then it is possible to put some gold into solution, in this case your gold is most likely just plated back onto the undissolved material, or cemented out as fine powder in this mess.
Here are my thoughts if I understand your post correctly.
If you just used salt and water, to strip the costume jewelry, you would not have any gold in solution, (no oxidizer involved to dissolve the gold as a chloride), it is possible to have some base metal chlorides in solution, as costume jewelry can be made with a wide variety of base metals, many of which if you did get into solutions or salts would be very toxic at this point.
Sodium metabisulfite used to precipitate gold dissolved in solution (without base metals as much as possible in this solution), the SMB produces sulfur dioxide gas which is what precipitates gold.
This SO2 gas or sodium metabisulfate would not do any good on gold that was not dissolved.
In your process did you separate the solution from the powders, and these from un-dissolved costume jewelry, as the gold plating would be in powders, along with other base metal powders, the solution without oxidizers would have no gold (unless small flakes remained floating in solution), and most likely would only contain some very reactive base metal as chlorides.
From your post it sounds like you have a solution of reactive metal chlorides, mixed with other metal powders (including some flakes of gold plate), then added a sulfate salt in large quantity and just made a bigger mess from a smaller mess, now it sounds like you may have sulfate and chloride salts of metals mixed with a very small amount of gold flakes.
At this point I think dissolving what you could in water filter if possible and treat this solution for waste, if you can filter save the powders from the filter and what powder did not dissolve dry these and store in a safe place.
You can find how to deal with your toxic waste in the safety section.
You can also find a better way to process your material here on the forum.
Edit to add.
If you were using electrolysis with a saturated salt solution, then it is possible to put some gold into solution, in this case your gold is most likely just plated back onto the undissolved material, or cemented out as fine powder in this mess.
