Quick Newb question

[yoitsjimmy08]

I've been experimenting with this for a couple weeks and the first part of my process is soaking the metals in 50:50 ratio of nitric and water and i let it sit there and bubble. One of the tutorials said that after bubbling ceases, the foils you see floating around is "in theory" your pure gold.But you add the hydrochloric so you can purify it even more. I was wondering if you could just skip hydrochloric and precipitateing process, and just let the foils dry and melt to have a lower karat of gold. Such as 20 instead of 24. And could I sell this lower impure gold?

Thanks, I'm loving the forum it's helped me a lot.

 

[element47.5]

"The metals" --- what is "the metals"?

 

[qst42know]

Quit so near the finish line?

Not all gold buyers will pay full value for a button of questionable purity, and rightly so. You are far more likely to get a safe for the buyer price.

 

[yoitsjimmy08]

The metals are the cpu chips at the bottom of the nitric and water. I'm going for gold. This is the tutorial I go by. I'm talking about the very first part when he soaked gold in nnitric and water to clean copper.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread812741/pg1

 

[NobleMetalWorks]

How far you refine whatever you are recovering, in this case Au, is up to you. You can do whatever you would like to do. But here are the issues with doing what you are proposing.

You will not get as much for your Au

If you refine to 20k only, then the person you sell it to is going to get their 22k tester and say it's below that, then their 18k acid test kit and tell you that it tests for 18k and pay you out on that. Unless you take it to someone who has an XRF, but then they will probably tell you for that small amount they need you to pay for XRF, or settle on an acid test.

If you deal with the same people over and over, they will get it in your head that you cannot refine higher purities, they will assume you are allowing yourself to be ripped off on the value of your gold, because you don't care. This is specially the case if you are selling to jewelers, which in the future might be interested in doing other work for you.

If you are just doing this as a hobby, it seems like you would want to take it further just because it's done out of interest and passion, if you are just selling what you produce as a business, then really you should take it a little bit further, you are almost there, and make it high purity.

Consider this, if you don't feel like proceeding further in refining, If it really holds no interest for you, and you just want to get it done as fast as possible, why are you doing this?

Scott

 

[nickvc]

I'm going to add my own thoughts on this.
If your refining as a hobby then I feel you should try to be as professional in your approach as possible or you will not get that feeling of success that you can produce as good a product as all those large commercial refineries with all that equipment and years of knowledge.
If your refining to make money then you can take a different view, well I can, I have access to cheap fast assays and will not get paid anymore for 9999 gold than 14k so I can't see the point but if I didn't have that access I'm afraid I would be aiming for 999 so I know exactly what I'm trading and exactly what I'm been paid.
Been sloppy in your recovery and refining will cost you money unless you melt and assay every batch you sell, and that for many isn't cheap, so if you intend to trade your metals rather than store them you need volume to cover the assay costs or simply refine it properly!