Out-quarting gold ?

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KalleMP

KalleMP

Active member
Joined
Oct 5, 2015
Messages
35
A strange though occurred to me. What if one were to in-quart gold alloy with gold instead of Silver raising the fineness.

Is there a karat value reached when it is practical to dissolve the gold (and base metals) leaving the silver behind?
Could one make a practical workflow that would not require nitric?

Obviously one would need enough fine gold on hand to do the alloying.
 
stella polaris said:
What would solve gold and base metals but not silver?
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I read here recently that HCl and H2O2 fail to dissolve Silver but does dissolve Gold and I suppose some other metals. I was wondering if the opposite selectivity culd be used to remove gold instead of Silver.
 
That is mentioned in Hoke I believe.

Adding gold to reduce the percentage of silver to a point that will not interfere with dissolving the alloy.

Does not seem the best option, but if you can not get nitric would probably work.

Personally I am unsure how well HCl and H2O2 dissolve solid gold. I would prefer to use HCl and a nitrate salt which is usually more available. The normal chloride contamination of the nitrates would not be an issue in this situation.
 
snail said:
That is mentioned in Hoke I believe.

Adding gold to reduce the percentage of silver to a point that will not interfere with dissolving the alloy.

Does not seem the best option, but if you can not get nitric would probably work.

Personally I am unsure how well HCl and H2O2 dissolve solid gold. I would prefer to use HCl and a nitrate salt which is usually more available. The normal chloride contamination of the nitrates would not be an issue in this situation.
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I have not tried HCl/Peroxide on solids myself, but the ones that have, says it is very slow.
On other than powders and foils it is completely fine.

There may be a use for this procedure but it seems a bit off track.
At least for direct use I think there will be too many unknowns to use as is.
Which means we might be better off doing a ordinary in-quartering.
 
KalleMP said:
A strange though occurred to me. What if one were to in-quart gold alloy with gold instead of Silver raising the fineness.

Is there a karat value reached when it is practical to dissolve the gold (and base metals) leaving the silver behind?
Could one make a practical workflow that would not require nitric?

Obviously one would need enough fine gold on hand to do the alloying.
Click to expand...
It can work. It's a matter of the karat of the gold, but of the percentage of the silver. Get the silver below 10%. But there will be some gold tied up in the silver.

Dave
 
Yggdrasil said:
I have not tried HCl/Peroxide on solids myself, but the ones that have, says it is very slow.
On other than powders and foils it is completely fine.

There may be a use for this procedure but it seems a bit off track.
At least for direct use I think there will be too many unknowns to use as is.
Which means we might be better off doing a ordinary in-quartering.
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I haven't tried it either because I was under the impression that elemental Ag would catalyze most of the Peroxide?...I don't know that for sure, but that was my impression.
 
Yggdrasil said:
We were talking about Gold, Silver is an excellent catalyst for decomposing Peroxide.
Not very suitable I’d believe.
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KalleMP said:
Is there a karat value reached when it is practical to dissolve the gold (and base metals) leaving the silver behind?
Click to expand...

Your correct....I probably should have been more detailed in my post. I was referring to any Ag that may already be alloyed with the gold, decomposing the peroxide during the dissolution of the gold.
 
Wouldn’t make much sense to do it that way. Gold is too expensive and what you would be adding would already be in a state that could be dissolved as is. The whole point of using silver to inquart is that silver is relatively inexpensive and the process is much more efficient since you can recover and refine it alongside the gold.
 
You can use sterling to inquart with and then process your silver as well as your gold. The math may need some adjustment allowing for the copper in sterling, but it gets you ahead of the silver refining at the same time.
 
Another way to pull carat scrap apart is with the sulfuric cell. No need to inquart and spend more nitric.
Melt and pour an anode, Strip in concentrated sulfuric with the aid of some added electrons.
Dilute the slimes into water after settling and decanting off the reusable concentrated acid.
Heat it for a while in the weak battery acid strength solution to dissolve any base metals that were in the alloy (save the weak dirty acid for future leaches) Leach the bit of silver out with a little bit of HNO3, and proceed to AR for the gold.
If you have no nitric, you could use HCl / H2O2 or HCl /Bleech for that and leave the silver in the solids to reduce with iron later on.
Very few filtering steps needed in between, just decant and rinse.

Slow processs, but works fine for me.

I don't have piles of sterling that need processing, thus killing two birds with one stone is not needed for me.

As soon as you apply for a permit and go semi proffessional, you can buy the good stuff as a buisiness.

All together refining without nitric will be a challenge.

Martijn.
 
For very low carat gold you may need to "out-quart".
I do like the term. Go for 18K in stead of 6
I have had succes with 14K yellow gold, and it ate through that watch case like a hungry beast. An 18K leftover piece from making my wedding band was gone without any problems. Never tested anything lower than 14K.
 
cejohnsonsr1 said:
Wouldn’t make much sense to do it that way. Gold is too expensive and what you would be adding would already be in a state that could be dissolved as is. The whole point of using silver to inquart is that silver is relatively inexpensive and the process is much more efficient since you can recover and refine it alongside the gold.
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Remember his problem is lack of affordable nitric. In his case, the out quitting can work as long as he has plenty of relatively fine gold.

Dave
 
FrugalRefiner said:
Remember his problem is lack of affordable nitric. In his case, the out quitting can work as long as he has plenty of relatively fine gold.

Dave
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I don’t recall the part about not having access to Nitric (affordable or otherwise), but cementation still won’t work for the reason stated. There are other ways to dissolve gold that would probably also dissolve the copper. The problem then is to precipitate the gold, but not the copper. I may be mistaken, but I believe iron sulfate will do that.
 
cejohnsonsr1 said:
I don’t recall the part about not having access to Nitric (affordable or otherwise), but cementation still won’t work for the reason stated. There are other ways to dissolve gold that would probably also dissolve the copper. The problem then is to precipitate the gold, but not the copper. I may be mistaken, but I believe iron sulfate will do that.
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Yes.... Ferrous sulfate (copperas) is very selective for reducing gold, leaving the copper behind.
 
Thank you all for your replies.
This was more of a thought experiment due to the idea that some things will dissolve silver if there is a lot and some things will dissolve gold if there is no silver to block it.

Take away here is that Hydrogen peroxide may not be idea in the presence of silver.
10% silver is considered low
Hoke has mentioned it so not a totally crazy idea
Needing the fine gold on hand is usually going to limit the utility
 
Nitric Acid alone will not dissolve gold if the concentration of Au, in any form of alloy with base metals or silver, exceeds 33% - that is why the process is known as inquartation. Gold concentration by mass has to be brought down to ideally less than 40% to make it react with HNO3.
 
Anil said:
Nitric Acid alone will not dissolve gold if the concentration of Au, in any form of alloy with base metals or silver, exceeds 33% - that is why the process is known as inquartation. Gold concentration by mass has to be brought down to ideally less than 40% to make it react with HNO3.
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Not exactly, if the Gold concentration goes below 25% (a quart, hence quarting) the alloy will not be protected by the Gold anymore and can be dissolved in Nitric.
 
Anil said:
Nitric Acid alone will not dissolve gold if the concentration of Au, in any form of alloy with base metals or silver, exceeds 33% - that is why the process is known as inquartation. Gold concentration by mass has to be brought down to ideally less than 40% to make it react with HNO3.
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Nitric acid alone will not dissolve gold no matter what the concentration of the gold. As yggdrasil said, the usual target is 25% gold (a quarter). In actual practice, it will work with a little higher level of gold, but then there is the chance that a bit of base metal will still be trapped within the structure of the gold.

But this thread is about the opposite process, that of increasing the concentration of the gold high enough that any crust of silver chloride when going directly to AR does not prevent the AR from getting to the gold. As has been said, the 2 obstacles are having enough fine gold sitting around to increase the gold level, and knowing there may still be some gold trapped in the undissolved silver chloride after the AR dissolution.

Dave
 

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