daiene1979 said:
I am already reading hoke by the way.
It was just an idea.
That you're reading Hoke is really a good thing. That will help you understand my comments, which were intended to be constructive, not critical.
The reason I thought about it is because in my mind the aqua regia is strong and would just eat everything faster(let me know if I am wrong), so I thought cleaning the base metals after would work the same way.
Unfortunately, that's not very good logic. There's more than a few reasons why ----which you will come to understand with time, and with reading Hoke's book, but in a nut shell, when you attempt to dissolve values with base metals, while it works, it has limitations (when silver is involved), plus when you dissolve all of the base metals with the values, drag down becomes a problem. It also makes little sense to process large volumes of solution when volume can be drastically reduced. The product isn't of high quality in most instances, and there's nothing to be gained, anyway, in that regardless of which method one chooses, everything gets dissolved, anyway, so you're much better served to eliminate the base metals first, before dissolving the values. When you don't, and you don't maintain the proper balance of free acids, values get cemented on base metals, which can be the source of lost material if you don't understand what is happening.
When you have read Hoke to the point where it makes sense, you will have a much better understanding of why we process as we do. It's not because other methods don't work---they often do. It's because the preferred methods yield the best quality with the fewest problems, and generally are equally as safe, if not safer, than other methods.
I encourage you, and all newbies, to learn the basics before you start experimenting. I can't think of much that is a greater waste of time than trying to re-invent the wheel, especially when one doesn't have a clue about how the wheel works in the first place.
Harold