What I have are various kinds of materials that came from a gold evaporator and have been covered in gold. I have framing metal which appears to be a sort of stainless steel. I have gas lines which seem to be a soft steel, along with brass connectors. There is a large copper or brass pot where the gold was melted and evaporated. And I have glass panels with gold fingers adhered. Some of the glass panels I can just scrape the gold off with a razor, but others the gold is under lamination of some unknown polymer.
For the glass panels, I ground them down to fine powder and figure I can use the HCl + bleach method just like the PCB board-tutorials. Get the gold in solution, filter out the glass, and precipitate by adding copper?
All other parts I used a file to file the gold off. The filings likely contain everything from steel to brass to gasket material. The question is: Can I use the same HCl + bleach method to dissolve the gold, steel, brass, then filter out anything that didn't dissolve, then precipitate out the gold and copper by adding more iron? Then (once the iron solution is discarded) dissolve again in new HCl + bleach solution with the intention of using copper to precipitate the gold?
My understanding so far is that copper will precipitate gold and iron will precipitate copper (and gold). Is this right?
What about the other metals in the steel? (Cr, Ni, Mn, etc) Do they not go into solution? Or do they remain in solution to be discarded? Or do they contaminate the final product?
For the glass panels, I ground them down to fine powder and figure I can use the HCl + bleach method just like the PCB board-tutorials. Get the gold in solution, filter out the glass, and precipitate by adding copper?
All other parts I used a file to file the gold off. The filings likely contain everything from steel to brass to gasket material. The question is: Can I use the same HCl + bleach method to dissolve the gold, steel, brass, then filter out anything that didn't dissolve, then precipitate out the gold and copper by adding more iron? Then (once the iron solution is discarded) dissolve again in new HCl + bleach solution with the intention of using copper to precipitate the gold?
My understanding so far is that copper will precipitate gold and iron will precipitate copper (and gold). Is this right?
What about the other metals in the steel? (Cr, Ni, Mn, etc) Do they not go into solution? Or do they remain in solution to be discarded? Or do they contaminate the final product?
