Newbe needs help saving mix

[Linden]

Hi my name is Linden , I'm new to the group. I am interested in both recovering e-waist and recovering natural gold from the earth (prospector). Like others I started a journey with only partial information thinking I was educated enough to extract gold from e-waist. I have downloaded Hoke's book and have started reading. I know now that I only knew enough to be dangerous. I need to educate myself a lot more but I need to save my mixture if I can. Here is where I am at: I started with 5.5 oz. of fine green circuit board material with gold flicks in it which I recovered from boards using just hydrochloric acid. I did not weigh the gold but estimate about a half ounce. I also added about a half ounce of scrap 10k jewelry. I used an Aqua Regia mix of 3 parts hydrochloric and 1 part nitric acids to dissolve the gold. I now have a gallon of very dark amber liquid. The ph is 8.5 and the stannous chloride test shows high AU content. I took 1/2 cup of this liquid and tried to balance the ph using urea. Once there was no reactions there was a white-gray sludge building up in the bottom. Filtered some of this and used sodium metabisulfite on both mixes and nothing is dropping out. At the same time I took about 1/2 oz. of crushed ore (95% AU) used the same Aqua Regia mix on the ore. Neutralized it with urea without any trouble. Diluted it to a pale yellow added sodium metabisulfite until the mix quit reacting. Filtered off the black powder in the bottom (looked kind of like iron filings) put it in a crushable and melted it into a button of gold. I know I screwed up. What can I do to save my mix while I'm educate myself better?

 

[nickvc]

Welcome to the forum Linden.
I will give you kudos for realizing you have started to run before you could crawl, many fail even that.
We advise not to mix types of scraps as it can and likely will cause problems but that you will learn why in time , hopefully not with too much pain involved.
When neutralizing nitric it’s better done warm to encourage better dissolution of the solids , that said we tend to encourage the use of sulphamic acid rather than urea these days, I always used urea but that’s another story.
My advice is to use some copper sheet or flattened copper pipe to cement out the values and be sure to establish a stock pot to capture any values mixed, once cemented filter off the waste solution into the stockpot and retain any solids for later treatment.
Hoke is good for the basics and even some very advanced chemistry so read once then read again and if some points make no sense post and ask we will respond , you have a long but hopefully interesting journey ahead but the one phrase I love is you can’t lose your values unless you throw them out.
Good luck in your journey and I’m fairly sure you can master what you want to learn and look forward to seeing your progress.