refining white gold

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au-artifax

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 5, 2013
Messages
82
Hello and thanks for looking. I am refining another batch of karat gold jewelry and decided to throw in some white gold mixed in with yellow gold. I am heating the Aqua Regia like normal, but white metal flakes are floating around and will not dissolve. The bulk of the white gold jewelry is dissolving, but the coating just will not go away. What would this metal be and is it worth saving? Is it rhodium? If so, how do you dissolve it and can it be refined also?
Well.... Anything you can tell me would be great, and in the mean time I will just go about the process as normal, filtering as I go. Thanx!
 
Rhodium plating is used to plate silver and white gold jewelry. it is most likely the flakes you see. rhodium does not like to dissolve in AR even when warm.
 
Hey au-artifax how is the head
Um i am not 100% positive but as i was kinda
Skimming through your posts you never mentioned
Any karat jewelry batches or processes
So how do i know you know the process and your
Not youtubin

I give you there are a thousand ways to skin a
Cat but to help you i really need to know what you
Have done
You say heating the AR as normal,whats
normal to you (just below a boil,little bubbles,
Until you get actual steam expl otion big bubbles
That harold talks about, or maybe just in the sun
For a day) im sure most of our normal varies

What really bothers me is you mention
nothing of inquarting or shoting

Are you just droping your gold directly into
AR did u melt your white gold with silver

It is very difficult to refine karat gold with just
Dropping it in acid
The karat gold is made strong for humanitys
Harshness
There are alloys that are mixed with the gold
These alloys protect the gold from dissolution
In your AR
You need to melt silver(easiest) or a base metal
And bring it down to a minimum of 6k for complete
Dissolution
Any ways I doubt you're going to get very many
replies without providing more information
Hope this helps
Steyr223 rob
 
The shorter of the replies actually gave me more information. In my original post I mentioned white shiney flakes of metal floating around not dissolving while everything else was. Regardless of the karat, size of bubbles, to-inqaurt-or-not-to-inquart, ..... hot aqua Regia was not dissolving this metal. It was not a precipitate from the reaction; it was simply not reacting, having come OFF of the underlying karat gold. Also, as I was able to keep dissolving more gold in the solution while the flakes kept floating around, suggests that my solution was not saturated with gold yet. There was no left over sediment at all after the reaction was finished except the white whiney metal flakes and a few specks of gold that would not dissolve after the nitric was spent.
So my questions remain as far as if there is anything of value in my filter. Is it worth saving, and can it-should it be refined in the future?
 
If you didn't inquart then your silver will be silver chloride and it will be trapped in the filter paper with the Rh foils. You should ALWAYS save your filter papers for later processing for values.
 
I know you're stuck on the silver, but why. There was no silver.... No silver chloride.... Nada....none....

I asked about the flakes. Well to detail my progress so far, I took a fresh batch of SnCl and ran tests. There was some slight pricipitation over night of a fleshy colored pinkish sparkly sediment along with the flakes on the bottom. I filtered them out, washed them with a little ammonia water just to be able to say absolutely no silver chloride, then tested the then again acidified material.

What I got on the paper test was an orange color with some of the precipitate and SnCl and when I heated it it turned a dark shade of pink... A little reddish even. Then just stirring the solution with a pipette dipped in SnCl.... Not even a drop worth, and set it out in the sun, the solution when I returned was the same dark pink color. Initially it was kinda hard to discribr...a dark orangy yellow ....that would have been on the Brown side if it had gotten any darker.

Now what I have read so far suggests that I have a mixture of rhodium metal and rhodium salts (chloride).

Does anyone have any other suggestions (besides silver....as it would have turned into the all very familiar silver chloride.). In my limited experience I have not seen that much Ag in 10k gold....it's usually less expensive fillers like copper to keep it darker and other cheaper metals. I did throw some 14k in at the end just to saturate the Ar with gold and use up all the nitric. OH....THAT REMINDS ME.... I have to do a thread on what I would call "mechanical" passivation. I actually ran a repeated experiment to verify I was not dreaming this up. Look for it in the procedures section.
 
Also, I was wondering if there could have been some rhodium sulfate in the solution with the Rh and RhCl3, because I did add some H2SO4 during the dissolution process. That was before I washed the sediment though. The solution took on an immediate pink red tinge which I poured off before washing.
? Ideas?
Do any of the other PGMs act this way?
 
i would filter and precipitate the gold normally and reclaim the gold powder. evaporate the left over solution to about a third of what it was and cement with copper. if the solution is nice and clear, you can use zinc. of coarse this is not refining but reclaiming. if you intend on continuing with large batches of jewelry, collect the flakes and cemented powders. unless it was a really large batch, it cant be more than a few tenths of a gram. save until you have enough to warrant the time and chemicals to refine it.
 
au-artifax said:
I know you're stuck on the silver, but why. There was no silver.... No silver chloride.... Nada....none....
Click to expand...

So your running straight karat jewelry without inquarting and you are saying their is no silver chlorides?
 
I appreciate the information you are trying to pass on P, but the info you are relying on is just simply out of context. Isn't inquartation to assist in allowing one to defeat passivation? Well if the gold is dissolving then inquartation isn't necessary now, right!?.... And what falls out, falls out right?! Yes!!!!... I did dissolve karat gold without inquartation, but it was simply not needed, (not in context) to what would get the job done. When I get enough karat material that won't dissolve, then I will go through the extra time, energy and money to inquart .

Also, there having been a considerable amount of copper in the karat gold, the silver would have cemented out as elemental silver long before the process was completed. I would have seen that. And as a check I put a copper tube in the solution to check for possible silver, because yes I refine that too, as well as dropping out the copper in the end in a scrap bucket.

And still we are not addressing the FLAKES and the sediment I described. Through all the communication about what I am seeing, we can get off the "silver" thing now....please!
 
Thin rhodium flakes will dissolve in hot conc. sulfuric: http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1045

Test for rhodium:http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=16869&#16869
Click to expand...

Have you tried this? If not, could you please give a short explaination why - I like to learn.
 
the flakes are probably rh plating------weight the flakes and mix with ten times nahso4 powder--put in an oven for 3hours at 500centigrades .this forms a cake that is dissolved in boiling water---then ,you have a rhsulphate solution----if you want pure rh, you can cement this solution with zinc powder or with formic acid
regards
Arthur
 
Thanks aurthur and solar. I have not yet tried to dissolve the material in sulfuric yet. My first thought was that I didn' t want to see it disappear yet. We all have had enough times where we found out later that we have unknowingly threw values away. At some point, soon, that is what I will do. That will be, after all, another diagnostic measure. I would like to learn as much as I can about my suspected rhodium first.
Unfortunately Holke does not help much. She skirts (no pun intended) around rhodium and many of the other PGMs always promoting that we sell sell sell to a refiner to deal with, (but isn't that what we are here for?!).
Thanks also for the methods for creating rhodium sulfate and also rhodium sponge. There is plenty online regarding creating solution with the objective of plating jewelry, but not much on recovery and refining. Thanks, and if we could keep the thread going long enough, there won't be values lost, (c'Mon now...there are you guys out there that threw your rhodium huh?.... Admit it now!). :lol:
 
Your right ! This thread is about something else. God forbid i try and put some extra education in it for you. All i keep hearing is " I want my answer about about this question answered. " Carry on sir !
 
au-artifax, what some other members are trying you is, Karat gold usually has a certain amount of silver as the base metal alloy. even if you did not add silver, there will still be some silver present.
 
that we sell sell sell to a refiner to deal with, (but isn't that what we are here for?!).
Click to expand...

After all reading and learning I have come to the belief, that less is often more also in refining. Therefore I have decided for my case to wait with PGM's and only set my focus on silver and gold, - and here only certain methods, because every metal and every method costs space, special equipment and certain chemicals - last not least certain knowledge. Rhodium seems to be very, very special and strange, so if I were you, I would just keep it till I have more and would not spend more time and effort on it. Then you can still decide, if you want to become one of the few specialists on this item or just sell it. I don't know, if this is related to your question, just some thought of mine.

I am sure you didn't want to disgruntle anyone, but you do good in showing a little more gratitude,when those very helpful, experienced and knowlegdable men reply at all, - even if you think, you can't use the answer in that context. It is easy to leave the wrong impression in written language.
 
I also wonder how anyone could work with a batch of karat gold and not have silver involved.

White gold contains white metals to lighten its color, white metals used to form the white gold alloy are nickel, palladium, platinum and manganese, also copper, zinc or silver can be used.
Rhodium metal plating is also used on some white gold jewelry.

White gold jewelry can also be made from a gold-palladium-silver alloy or gold-nickel-copper-zinc alloy. The nickel alloy is most often encountered in older white gold jewelry most manufacturers, are moving away from nickel because so many people seem to be allergic to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_gold
 
I guess the point is, he knows the difference between white fine AgCl powder and strange silverish metallic flakes. Although you guys mentioned some interesting facts. I wouldn't have thought of that silver chloride drags down some gold. Good to know.
 

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