Renstilsken,
enjoy yourself and have fun,and be safe. But study, study, and study some more, that is where you are going to get the true gold, education is your treasure map.
This is why we strongly suggest such things as reading Hoke's book and her getting acquainted experiments, the safety thread and dealing with waste, the general reaction list, and guide to the forum, and when you're ready, start working on simpler materials at first like memory fingers, Karat gold, or sterling silver, this way you gain the basic principle and skills to build upon...
Experimenting is where we learn, and yes we do learn from our mistakes, but it is smarter to learn as much as you can before you start making those mistakes, or else that is all a person will do is just make one mistake after another without getting anywhere productive. If we educate ourselves first we can learn to do it right and continue to educate ourselves... If all we do is make mistakes without studying first, that is all we will learn, is how to make more mistakes getting us nowhere. Where safety is a big issue we may not have a chance to learn much, if we harm ourselves doing things which we do not even know the dangers that are involved in what we are attempting.
I can guarantee you will proceed faster in your goal becoming a refiner if you slow down and study, it will open up a whole world of possibilities, you will make less costly and dangerous mistakes. With these skills you are learning to become an inorganic chemist, you do not do that by just blindly mixing things in a beaker and seeing what happens, or seeing your mistakes and then asking questions of what went wrong and how can I fix it. you should have already studied and known what could possibly go wrong and corrected your thinking, and the experiment to avoid as mush as possible of anything going wrong.
The total experiment is not a mistake and when some minor thing goes wrong you have the education to figure it out and correct the minor problems. You learn from those minor mistakes in the experiment not that the whole experiment itself was a total mistake.
You would study everything you can find out about the reaction, study its dangers and how to avoid them, then when you were ready you would try it out on a small scale, or even do several pre-experiments, then after collecting data you would go back and study more...
Gold fever is dangerous especially in what we do here, it makes people lose their common sense, trouble is with gold most of us get the fever. It happens to most all of us at one point, usually when we first begin. This may be the first thing to overcome. Then we can settle down and actually get someplace learning more about gold and these valuable metals.
Have fun and keep it safe.
