ragood
Member
I did an experiment where I melted a 1.6 gram 10k gold ring with about 6 grams of copper, resulting in an alloy of about 10% gold and 90% base metal, mostly copper. Then I put it in HCl and a little 3% hydrogen peroxide with an aquarium bubbler to generate CuCl2 to etch away the copper. After 3 days, I checked on it and there were brown chunks in the beaker that broke up easily. I let it run in the CuCl2 with the bubbler for another day then rinsed the brown chunks in distilled water and dried off the remaining water on low heat. The weight of the brown chunks after drying was 0.72 grams. There should be 0.67 grams on pure gold in the 1.6 gram 10k gold ring, so it appears that the CuCl2 dissolved most of the base metals.
I plan to use HCl and bleach to dissolve the gold and then precipitate it out with SMB.
Has anyone recovered karat gold with this method? Did I need to alloy the gold down to 10% or would the standard 25% gold alloy work? I reasoned that a larger proportion of copper would make the CuCl2 work better.
I plan to use HCl and bleach to dissolve the gold and then precipitate it out with SMB.
Has anyone recovered karat gold with this method? Did I need to alloy the gold down to 10% or would the standard 25% gold alloy work? I reasoned that a larger proportion of copper would make the CuCl2 work better.