Nitric/water finger soak

[jay2000]

Hello all.first post for me on here,i hope you will humour my amatuer words,i have been processing fingers by lazersteves well constructed videos.
Full marks to the man for taking time and effort to produce these vids,my quistion is as i dont know the purity of the fingers(i would like to get final product as pure as possible),once fingers and black residue have been washed with water and hydrochloric, would a soak in nitric/water to remove any silver be an advantage , or am i better processing through to the smelting stage inquarting more silver and reprocessing.
Regards to all.

 

[bigjohn]

Jay, If you are doing just fingers you should wash the recovered foils/mud per the instructions steve gives. Next you would use hcl/cl (muratic acid and bleach) to dissolve your foils/mud and then drop with smb. Take some time to read around on the fourm and youll find all the info you need. There should be no silver if you are doing just fingers. Please read all the safty info provided here on the fourn before you start. The search box on the top right of your page will provide you with every bit of info you need.


Bigjohn

Edited for fingers to foils correction

 

[butcher]

jay2000,

Big John is correct, He gave some very good advice and you should follow his advice.

If you washed in HCl hydrochloric acid, rinsed very well, then tried a wash in HNO3 nitric acid, you would dissolve the gold or at least a portion, and wash it away.

Never use these two acids on same product you do not wish to dissolve gold.

If for some reason you do need to use both, an incineration in between acid will remove old acid or salts of that acid.

 

[jay2000]

Many thanks gentleman,i may have been too concerned about the carat content of my foils and lost sight of the process, Regards all.

 

[Harold_V]

It might be helpful for you to understand the reason for inquartation, which is discussed well in Hoke's book. In a nut shell, it is to permit the removal of base metals from gold alloy that contains enough silver to prevent dissolution of the gold by aqua regia. In such a case, the presence of silver protects the gold, and the presence of gold protects the silver and base metals, so the alloy can not be dissolved readily in acid (it can be dissolved with cyanide). By adding enough silver to reduce the gold content to 25% (quartering, or inquartation), base metals and silver can then be dissolved from the gold, leaving it behind in a solid, but honeycombed configuration. It can then be dissolved for purification. By the way, inquartation is an assaying procedure that lends itself well to refining.

Steve's DVD's are excellent, but don't avoid reading Hoke's book, where basic knowledge will be taught, making his productions all the more sensible.

Harold