it`s too late, i`ve already washed it and i didn`t lose the gold, i guess i`d rinced it so many times (a dozen or more) the nitric was in too small a quantity to mean anything, unless it`s dissolving as i`m writing this :mrgreen:gold4mike said:
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It's quite possible that the remaining nitric was negligible. You can find out for sure by testing the HCl rinse with Stannous Chloride. If you haven't made any yet should do that right away.
A good habit is to test EVERY liquid before you neutralize/discard to make sure you're not losing any values anywhere.
A good habit is to test EVERY liquid before you neutralize/discard to make sure you're not losing any values anywhere.
Geo
Well-known member
solder is a combination of lead and tin.i suspect what you had left was the tin which is reacted upon by hcl acid readily.going from nitric to hcl or hcl to nitric is tricky unless you want to make AR.dont dump your wash till you test with stannous.if gold is found precip with a little sodium metabisulfite.as mentioned before you can go from one to another but its easier to know which step to do first.i use AP on some of my pins(i do about three pounds at a time) with a air pump from a fish tank as a bubbler it takes 7-10 days to strip them all.i dont digest the whole pin,just enough to release the gold.any that still has gold goes into the next batch.really theres no need for the peroxide unless you want to jump start the reaction.using hcl to strip pins removes the problems you have with using different acids.
i`m starting to familiarise myself with these abreviations, where can i find them all, ap doesn`t tell me much to be honest and right now i`m learning with nitric but i don`t think its cost eficient. is ap hydrochlauric and peroxide :?: and if it is this bubler system you use sounds cost eficient but how in the world do you sort the gold from the sludge you have left :?:Geo said:
Yes, AP is Acid Peroxide, HCl and Hydrogen Peroxide. Use the 3% Peroxide you find at the drug store, WalMart, etc.
I use a small fish tank air bubbler with an air stone. I've found that the blue air stones hold up better than the black ones. Some forum members simply use a sealed plastic tube with many small holes drilled through it to make the bubbler.
There shouldn't be any sludge remaining from AP, just some undigested metal. If there is any black powder amongst the undissolved pins it might be gold that has dissolved (from using too much peroxide) and then cemented as the pins put more copper into the solution.
You can swirl water around through the remains to free up the gold flakes and pour through a coffee filter to catch them and any black powder. Leave the undigested pins behind and they can be included in the next batch.
Again, ALWAYS test your liquids before disposing anything.
I use a small fish tank air bubbler with an air stone. I've found that the blue air stones hold up better than the black ones. Some forum members simply use a sealed plastic tube with many small holes drilled through it to make the bubbler.
There shouldn't be any sludge remaining from AP, just some undigested metal. If there is any black powder amongst the undissolved pins it might be gold that has dissolved (from using too much peroxide) and then cemented as the pins put more copper into the solution.
You can swirl water around through the remains to free up the gold flakes and pour through a coffee filter to catch them and any black powder. Leave the undigested pins behind and they can be included in the next batch.
Again, ALWAYS test your liquids before disposing anything.
Geo
Well-known member
AP is acid/peroxide or hydrochloric acid + peroxide.it is the preferred method of processing fingers and there shouldnt be any sludge left over from the fingers,as for the pins if they have no solder there isnt any other byproduct.if solder is present you will make lead (II) chloride crystals which looks like white sand and just like before it is water soluble and can be removed with hot water.callicom said:
it seems to me like this process even if it takes 7 to 10 days is very cheap once you have built the original set up. if i understand right this hydrichlauric -peroxide solution is poured on the pins and bubbles up to ten days in the original solution which then is decanted for the gold, if i was to process 3.5lb of pin with nitric to burn out the base metals it would probably 150 bucks if not more. this seems to obviouly be the way to go. is there a post with pics and fine tuning of this process :?:
It's the same process many of us use on "fingers". Look for the link to LazerSteve's website in his signature. You can watch his AP video for free on his website.
I use the Muriatic acid from Lowe's - they call it concrete cleaner - and it costs me somewhere around $6-$8 per gallon. They also sometimes carry it in the Pool Chemicals section.
I use the Muriatic acid from Lowe's - they call it concrete cleaner - and it costs me somewhere around $6-$8 per gallon. They also sometimes carry it in the Pool Chemicals section.
Geo
Well-known member
i can post a few pics later as i don't have any on file.i use a 5 gallon bucket and place the plastic tube in the bottom and then place the pins on the tube to anchor it to the bottom so it doesn't float up,use enough tube to place the pump safely above the level of your acid to prevent back flow of acid into your pump.for your 3.5 pounds of pins i would recommend at least 1 gallon hcl to loosen most of the gold plate (3 gallons would most likely digest all base metal).i would only add 1 pint of peroxide to start the reaction,after that the bubbler will add all the oxygen the reaction needs.if you use a stone there's no need to worry about the tube floating,if you melt the end shut and drill a few holes it will float.this process produces alot of fumes so don't do this indoors or in a closed space without ventilation.in the video your shown to use a bucket with holes drilled in the bottom inside another larger bucket to contain the reaction.this is viable for fingers as it helps with the recovery of foils and cleanup,but pins are so small this bucket within a bucket doesn't really work too well.the green liquid produced is copper chloride.if you add even minute quantities of water it will produce copper (II) chloride,a white powder that is insoluble in water and will trap your foils,but not to worry,a small amount of fresh hcl will dissolve the white powder.
that sounds prety simple,i`ll go to tho store tommorow get the stuff and proceed with the pins i have left and the fingers and all. i put one of my processors in nitric and i was expecting the pins to fall off and most of then are still on, should i try the processors in the ap :?:
Barren Realms 007
In Remembrance
Geo said:
You can use the same bucket setup for doing pin's that you use fingers for. You can go to home depot or a paint supply huse and get a paint strainer that set's inside of a 5 gal. bucket and cut the screen large enough the fit in the bottom of your inner bucket and it will keep your pins inside.
You would be best served to let the reaction finish till all of your base metals are digested. Other wise you take a chance of loosing some of your gold plating still mixed with your undissolved pin's.
callicom said:
GSP
viewtopic.php?f=60&t=350&p=2916&hilit=glued+sand#p2916
Good questions. Anyone answering these questions will give different answers. Everyone develops their own system, depending on their own conditions, equipment, etc. One method is not necessarily the best, Try to pool everyone's ideas together and find the way that suits you. Keep in mind, however, the goals: don't lose any gold; do things to get maximum purity; think safety. Here's the way I do it.
What's the best containers to use.
I prefer 4 liter beakers for dissolving and use a watch glass to cover it. In case of breakage or spillage, I place the beaker in a 5 quart, white, flat bottomed, Corning Ware dish and put the dish on the hotplate. For 5 ozs, or less, you can use a pyrex, 10 or 12 cup, replacement drip coffee pot. The best is the one with a stainless steel ring holding the short plastic handle, only at the top. Don't get the type where the bottom of the handle is attached. It will burn.
After dissolving, I transfer the solution to a clean, white, 5 gallon plastic bucket. I add 3 times the volume of tap water that I have acid plus about 60 mL of battery acid per each gallon of acid. These two additions will drop out any silver or lead that is dissolved in the acid and these will be removed by filtering. Stir the solution. The long straight part from a plastic clothes hanger works great.
I sit the bucket on a table or a bench. I place a piece of 2" X 4" underneath the back edge of the bucket. This tilts the bucket towards you and allows the solids to settle in one spot on the front bottom of the bucket. I put the lid of the bucket and allow the solids to settle overnight,
What is the best way to decant my solution w/o disturbing the gold sediment after percipitating?
There are three ways to do this. I do all three, depending on what I'm dealing with. More often than not, I siphon. No matter which one I use, I always end up filtering the entire solution. Super clean solutions, before precipitating, is necessary for good gold purity. This goes fast, however, if you first use one of these methods to get a gross separation of the liquid and the solids. Decant, dip, or siphon off the liquid. Filter the liquid first and then filter the solids plus the remaining liquid last. If you were to try and filter the entire thing, without first separating the liquid and solids, it would take forever.
(1) Decanting. You can carefully pour off the solution into another bucket. This is the fastest way. When you tilted the bucket, the solids settled together in one pile. Before pouring, put the receiving bucket inside a plastic tray with about a 7 gallon capacity (WalMart), to catch drips and spills. Put the tray on the floor. When you pour, keep the pile nearest the bucket you are pouring into. In other words, try not to disturb the pile. Go slow and steady. Keep an eye on the solids. Just before the solids start to go over, stop. After pouring, there will be a slight film of solution, where you poured from, at the rim of the bucket. Either have a friend rinse this gold bearing film into the receiving bucket or, rinse it back into the bucket containing the solids. If there are drips remaining anywhere on the outside of the bucket, wipe them off with a piece of paper towel. Save this and any other paper towels you've used to wipe up spills that contain PM's. Eventually, you can burn the towels and recover the values. It's actually better to have 3 separate buckets to save PM laden towels - gold, silver, and Pt group.
(2) Dipping. I don't use this method much when working with buckets. I use it a lot when working with open plastic drums. Often, it is difficult to raise a heavy drum high enough to completely siphon it. So, I keep it on the floor and siphon it into an empty plastic drum sitting next to it. When half of the solution is siphoned, the solution level in the 2 drums will be equal, and, therefore, the siphon will stop working. I dip the other half of the solution out with a neat scoop that I cut from 1 gallon plastic jugs.
With the bucket still tilted, carefully dip the solution out, and into the filter, with a 1 cup Pyrex measuring cup - the type with a handle. To keep from disturbing the solids, use this technique. Turn the cup sideways and slowly immerse it part way. As it fills, slowly turn it upright and, at the same time, bring it out of the solution. If you do it right, the solution surface will hardly make a ripple. As you get near the bottom, you have to be more careful and fill the cup less and less each time. To keep from dripping solution all over, hold a bucket lid under the cup, with the other hand, when moving the solution to the filter. When safely over the filter, remove the bucket lid. When finished, rinse off the lid and the cup into the filter. When the liquid is completely finished filtering, start filtering the solids.
(3) Siphoning. Proper siphoning can remove the most liquid without disturbing the solids. This makes the filtering go faster because there are less solids to filter. And, the solids are what clogs the paper and slows down the filtering. I don't use gloves when siphoning because the tubing is harder to manipulate. Of, course, I always have purple hands. I do recommend that you use gloves. The thinner the gloves, the better, for this operation. Practice the siphoning a few times to get the hang of it. Put a little sand in a bucket of water. Tilt the bucket, let the sand settle, and siphon off the water.
This is a little harder to explain without pictures. Put a clean bucket inside a plastic tray and put the tray on the floor beneath the tilted bucket on the bench. Get about a 4' length of 3/8" ID clear, flexible, plastic tubing from the hardware store. With this size tubing, a full bucket will take about 5 minutes to siphon.
These instructions are for a right handed person. Reverse them if you are left handed. Fold the tubing double so that the ends meet and are together. Fill the tubing with water to the brims of both ends of the tubing. Stand on the right side of the buckets. Hold the ends of the tubing together in your left hand. Keeping the ends at the same level, hold the right end in your right hand and put your left index finger over the left end, to seal it. Keeping the left end sealed, lower it to the bucket on the floor, until your hand is partway inside the bucket. And, here's the tricky part. At almost the same time, put the right end about an inch into the solution and release your left index finger. Actually. the left finger release should occur about a half second after you stick the right end into the solution. If the solution flows, release the left hand completely and allow the tubing to hang in the lower bucket. If it doesn't flow, start over.
As you're siphoning keep an eye glued to the end of the tubing that's in the liquid. Try to keep the tubing only about an inch deep in the liquid. This is hard to see if the liquid is dark colored. I usually color about 1-1/2" (measure it) of the end of the tubing with a red Magic Marker. Black is OK but you can see the red better. This enables you to determine how deep the tubing is in the liquid. The marker will wear off after a few times and you will have to redo it. It's hard to hold the tubing steady and keep from disturbing the solids. To remedy this, I put the very edge of the tip of the tubing against the front side of the bucket, while keeping it about an inch deep. As the liquid level goes down, slide the tip down with it, against the side of the bucket. As you approach the solids, reduce the depth of the tip in the liquid and, with your left hand, slowly tilt the bucket a little more towards you. .
I repeat, keep your eyes on the tubing. If the tubing comes out of the liquid, for only an instant, the siphon will break and you'll have to start over. After siphoning, rinse the tubing, inside and out, into the top bucket along with the solids. The best thing to use for rinsing and, for filling the siphon tubing with water, is a lab type, plastic, squeeze type, squirt bottle with a long spout. The spout points sideways from the lid. I have also seen these in sporting goods stores. Joggers use them.
Can excess urea affect the way gold percipitates?
With no urea, the Storm (sodium metabisulfite) reacts with the excess nitric before it starts dropping out the gold. With too little urea, the same thing happens. If you don't have any excess nitric to start with, you don't need urea. That is my approach and I've covered how to do it on several other threads. With a lot of extra nitric and no urea, you may have to add several pounds of Storm before anything happens. With way too much urea, the excess will sit on the bottom and won't dissolve.
How do I filter my aqua regia acid.....Can coffee filters be utilized
There is a good discussion of filtering on several threads and this thread, especially. With coffee filters, lazersteve's setup would be best. With lab type filter papers, mine would probably be better.
viewtopic.php?t=251
do I use urea before Filtering?
Interesting question. I don't use urea any more and haven't really thought about this question. Either way would work, although most people do it after filtering. However, if you are heavy handed, add an excess, and have undissolved urea sitting on the bottom, it would be better to filter after adding. Of course, how do you know in advance that you will add too much urea? Were I to start using it, I would probably add it before filtering.
this is good info,thanks for the good description , i could see it all being done. after you dropped the lead and silver do you recuperate the silver or is the silver not worth the trouble (small amount). i havent used the shore yet, what i have now is gold flakes in a brown powder with some plastic sitting in clean water, this came from dissolution in pure nitric to get rid of base metals, when i get enuogh of this i want to ar this and filter out the plastic then drop the gold. the dissolution in pure nitric is too expensive so the rest of my pins will be done in ap as described by geo, with this batch i`ll use your advice on decant-siphon-dip and i`ll add this mud and flakes to the rest to ar. do you guys do the pin and fingers together :?: thats what i`ve been doing but pullin out the plastic a piece at a time is time consuming so i`m thinking of seperating the free pins from the plastic with fingers and treating them seperatly using a paint plastic filter for the plastic fingers. seems like if i dissolve all the good stuff out of the plastic and if i`m able to have most of it in the filter it will be much faster to seperate the foils from the plastic :!:
dtectr
Well-known member
If the plastics survived the initial processes without degrading, forget about taking them out - you'll never get all the gold either out/off of them. Once all the base metals are removed, you'll be left with gold powder/foils.
When you dissolve the gold powder/foils, the auric chloride (liquid) will simply rinse out of the remaining plastics. After a thorough rinsing, throw the trash plastic away - you have your gold.
just my dos centavos.
When you dissolve the gold powder/foils, the auric chloride (liquid) will simply rinse out of the remaining plastics. After a thorough rinsing, throw the trash plastic away - you have your gold.
just my dos centavos.
Geo
Well-known member
dtectr is right,don't worry about mechanically separating the plastic because when you digest the gold you will filter the solids out anyway.if you have never done the process of dissolving gold with AR before i would suggest not using it this time but instead use hcl+chlorox to dissolve the gold.the chemistry behind this process is too lengthy to describe all at once but is a little less complicated to do than AR imo, and less expensive too.again simply because there's no need for multiple acids. you use hcl to separate gold from base metals and then again to dissolve your gold.take your foils and powders and place in a glass container or porcelain container(which i prefer because its white and i can see when all my metal is dissolved) for a few grams up to 1/2 oz of material add about 1/2 cup of hcl acid and stir.then with a measuring device(i use a glass dropper with a rubber bulb) add a few ml's of chlorox at a time each time wait till the fizzing stops and stir,solution will turn green each time you add chlorox but will go clear quickly.look at the solution each time you add chlorox to see if all material is dissolved.when all the metal is dissolved filter through a couple of coffee filters that you have wet using just water.your solution should be a yellow color when you are finished.when you filter all of your solution rinse your filter with water till all the yellow is rinsed out of the filter.let it sit for a day to let excess chlorine evaporate before precipitating with SMB.the name of the yellow solution you will have made is Auric Chloride,which is simply gold dissolved in chlorine.not sure whether anyone has told you or if you already knew about it but a spray bottle with a finger pump is kind of a must have with any of this(i have several)and keep them all full of distilled water as not to add minerals to the solution.dtectr said:
this is the first i hear of this and again this seems a whole lot less expensive than the process i`ve been studying (ar) i`ll be sure todo this, thanks a lot for your help it`s realy apreciated. when you mention the spray bottles it`s to rince the filter from the outside so as to keep the junk inside the filter, and that rince is added to the auric chlauride solution before dropping the gold or is it to keep the fizzing down or is it incase you get some acid-clorox on you or all of the above :?: the smb is sodium metabisulfite :?: if thats what it is i got some from a wine making supply store, they use it to wash the bottles, this should be sufficient right. i also have a bottle of sodium bisulfate (a instead of i) is this a similar product as smb :?: also tommorow i`m going to buy about 30 to 40 pounds of main boards, i told the guy i would give 4.30 $ a pound like pc board sort (i think i have the name right)does on his web site, i hope i`m doing the right thing
