I don’t have enough experience to help with this issue but I would suggest getting a couple pics of the solution both after it is settled a has the separate layers and after stirring as that might help some of the more experienced members see what you have going on.
Purple Rinse Water
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Martijn
Well-known member
Questions, answers and helping (new, inexperienced, or old) members is what this forum is all about. Also guiding new members into the process of understanding the matter and learning from the vast amount of info available here, which can be quite overwhelming.
The H2SO4 helps drop tiny gold particles when the solution is hot.
So study and research and before you try to experiment or copy a process, suggest it here first to check your plan or prevent strange reactions to happen.
We will also give you an indication if we feel you're ready to perform your suggested steps before you endanger yourself and the ones around you.
Martijn.
Geo
Well-known member
This may sound weird but does the solution have a sweet smell? Does the rinse water smell sweet? You may have to warm it to smell it. If it has a sweet smell, it will be lead. Lead makes a purple color when lead chloride is diluted with water if there is tin involved.
So was it the wine or the plumbing that lead (no pun intended) to the fall of Rome?
I have read about the gasses and the fact that some of the chemical reactions can make results in which the material is actually explosive. That is the reasoning for me to do the chemical parts of the process outside, I do not have a fume hood so open air outside is much safer than performing some of the processes in an enclosed space. I do miss the availability of a sink with running water, but I keep a garden hose with a nozzle close by bot to wash stuff off and just in case an accident occurs and I get something on me.
Martijn
Well-known member
Recommended? Where? By who? Please do share.
Martijn
Well-known member
The HCl, plus a little copper chloride to jump-start the reaction, will eat away all the base metal. It takes a week or two at room temperature, depending on how thick the base metal is. Warming it speeds the reaction, but I'm never in a hurry so I just let it do its thing in our boiler room, where it's very hot anyway, and gets ventilated heavily. If you don't have a ventilated boiler room, but have hot summer sun, you can save energy by sticking the beaker in a make-shift greenhouse. In summer sun, it'll hit about 150F or higher in any enclosed space with transparent glass/plastic covering and a dark-colored floor.
You'll be left with gold foils/fragments and a concentrated solution of copper/tin/nickel chloride (mostly copper). You pour that out (filter to catch the fine gold particles that get stirred up), wash once with a little clean HCl (adding water for the first wash will cause formation of insoluble tin oxychloride and precipitate copper (I) chloride which is rather insoluble in water), and then once or twice with hot distilled water to get rid of base metals still in solution on the foils.
Then you add HCl again to the foils (and the washed filter with the gold particles), just enough to make a layer of liquid over the foils, and then add bleach a tablespoon-full at a time (or more if you have a LOT of foils, let's say if it feels like you might have an ounce or more), heat gently with swirling. If all the gold doesn't dissolve, add a little more bleach and stir some more (thin gold foils should dissolve within 15 mins if there is sufficient chlorine being generated in the HCl-bleach reaction). If they still haven't dissolved completely, add a bit more HCl and a little more bleach.
Once dissolved, you should have a nice pale yellow-orange-ish to DEEP orange-colored gold chloride solution (depends on how concentrated it is). Simmer this slowly outside for a few hours, but don't let it boil, (in direct sunlight it works even faster) to drive off the excess chlorine. Then you can cool it down and drop the gold with SMB. The drop should work very well, since there's no chance of sneaky nitrate anywhere in the solution.
Thick gold, such as jewelry, doesn't dissolve well with this method. It's VERY slow and you have to keep playing with the solution all day to get it to completely dissolve. Thick gold requires either AR, or Sreetips method of alloying the gold with the right mass ratio of silver, then dissolving the silver and base metal contaminants with pure nitric or sulfuric acid.
Ha! I don't have to worry cuz I have no brain to poison!
is one of the places that mentioned sea salt. Another place mentioned it because he did not want to add the iodine and anticaking agents to his vinegar mixture. So, I went and got some sea salt from Walmart. From the experimentation I have done since it seems to me that it is a fallacy because the method only gives you gold foils it does not dissolve the gold. But I suppose that if you are after other PM besides the gold it may influence the process. I am still reading Hoke and learning. Whatever you are doing, ***be careful*** I cannot stress that enough.
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There are no other values in fingers than Gold.
AP is the process for that.
Any process using Vinegar will create almost the same toxic elements and then some, and working much slower than real HCl.
Martijn
Well-known member
Maybe sreetips aka kadriver can post his conclusion on the vinegar process here on grf? Its a video of 7 years ago.
Did you watch part 2 and 3?
About the fallacy, there are recovery processes and refining processes.
The first give concentrated, but still dirty gold foils or cons or black cemented pm's, the latter will refine your gold to high purity.
If you use refining processes on raw e-waste, you will encounter lots of problems. Like losing your gold to internal copper traces in pcb's and components or creation of metastannic acid.
Or silver chloride mixed in with pm powders.
First separate. Then refine. Also reffered to as 'trash in, trash out'.
Martijn.
Did you watch part 2 and 3?
About the fallacy, there are recovery processes and refining processes.
The first give concentrated, but still dirty gold foils or cons or black cemented pm's, the latter will refine your gold to high purity.
If you use refining processes on raw e-waste, you will encounter lots of problems. Like losing your gold to internal copper traces in pcb's and components or creation of metastannic acid.
Or silver chloride mixed in with pm powders.
First separate. Then refine. Also reffered to as 'trash in, trash out'.
Martijn.
Hello Martijn I have seen and watched a lot of Streetips videos as well as a lot of other videos. My first experience with recovery was using the weak HCL made by adding Sea salt to vinegar. I had lots of vinegar and all kinds of time and that is why I elected to try this process. I trimmed probably 20 memory sticks of fingers and also found gold circuitry in the printheads of an HP 2800CP wide printer (plotter) that I own. I no longer used the plotter so I decided to sacrifice the printheads to see what developed. My first refining was done using strictly the vinegar process for recovery with the fingers and print head circuitry. Interestingly enough the vinegar/sea salt solution softened up the print head circuitry mylar (sp) so that I could separated the layers of mylar to obtain just the gold circuitry. Once recovered, washed, several times and placed in a clean melt dish and melted, it resulted in about 1/2G gold bead that tested at between 9 and 14 K so I am guessing about 12 K. My reasoning is that no change on the test stone at 9K and the scratch disappeared at 14K. At this point in my experimentation I am still recovering gold using both the AP and the vinegar type recovery processes just to see what happens. I have made the observation that there is a lot less fumes using the vinegar but the time frame is a lot longer. I have started to do the AR process on the gold I am recovering at the present time. It is interesting that this process will dissolve a lot of gold. I plan on adding recovered gold to it until it will not dissolve any more gold then SMB drop it to see what happens. Still in the process of reading Hoke and experimenting. I have an interesting development of the recovering of gold plated pins that I have yet to figure out. I did not use electrolysis as I am still building this process to try) but I simply soaked them in acid (HCL) and hydrogen peroxide, (don't remember I may have added a little nitric to it) ending up with a black colored liquid that looked like it had mercury floating on top of the liquid. I let this sit for about 2 days and it did settle out to a black layer of sediment and clear liquid above it. I was able to decant the clear liquid cleanly. Interestingly enough the mercury looking stuff remained in the jar. After letting this sit for a couple of days, a layer developed on the bottom of the vessel I decanted the clear liquid into that looks like silver slivers, some of them (but not all) looking like leaf clusters that looks like almost radial clusters of 5 leaves. I am thinking silver chloride, but I way be wrong. I have lots of material to experiment with because I have been building, repairing, and messing around with computers since about 1990 and I do not throw things away. Sorry this is so long winded, but that is how I am. I will try to get my camera to focus well enough to get some photos of these slivers, If I am able to get a clear image I will add the photos to this post.
Martijn
Well-known member
That's also a good way to get a feeling of how much premixed AR will dissolve. How much nitric went in there?
Look on the forum for the different types of e-waste and how to treat them.
Try not to experiment too much, you'll end up with a lot of waste or jars of solutions 'for later'.
Stick to proven processes, start with small tests and suggest your plan here before you try it.
Do you know how to treat your waste?
https://goldrefiningforum.com/posts/40800/
Look on the forum for the different types of e-waste and how to treat them.
Try not to experiment too much, you'll end up with a lot of waste or jars of solutions 'for later'.
Stick to proven processes, start with small tests and suggest your plan here before you try it.
Do you know how to treat your waste?
https://goldrefiningforum.com/posts/40800/
Mixture was 2:1 HCl to Nitric, HCL was 31.45% the Nitric was 69.8%. I know of several ways to treat the waste and after treating it will be dumped into a 1000 gallon concrete tank where it will be mixed with all our sink and shower waters and the flushed waste waters from the bathrooms. I am not ready to treat and dispose of it yet and so far I have less than 1 gallon of "waste" liquid I am trying to decide what to do with. As of yet, I do not consider it waste due to the color of it.
Well, I have some pictures of the silver looking slivers I mentioned above. Someone (I do not remember who) mentioned that lead can form crystals that look like needles,, that may be what I am seeing. I will try to upload an image and hopefully someone will be able to determine what I have. I have not decanted or tried any type of recovery on them as of yet.
