Silicon Valley Scrap - Toll Time
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Topher_osAUrus
Well-known member
snoman701 said:
Hah, I wish.
I have been quite busy getting this stuff knocked out and the other toll that i got.
The foils from the pronged pins. Ended up being tin in the alloy.
So, i filtered, roasted, ended up taking 6 hcl leaches, then i sent it to ar. After ar, i rough filtered after allowing to settle overnight. Added sulfamic to remove the minute amounts of extra nitric. Fearing excess lead that wasnt converted to sulfate form, i added a good bit of sulfuric. Let it sit, then did a final filter before ppt.
Flakes from the cylinder pins.
Easy to do, but, little to recover
The mud from the processors, sims, pins after washing before redissolving and precipitating.
The ar run of the pronged pins immediately after smb addition.
I have more pictures of everything. Including the button of the first half of stuff that I ran for this gentleman.
I will try to post up more shortly and further details. Wasnt a whole lot new to add since the majority of the work was just babysitting the digestions and adding nitric as needed. Let me say, dissolving everything is NOT the way to go, and I would have been much better served to run most through the sulfuric cell, or a cyanide based leach. But, as I am not set up for the latter right now, I chose to dissolve it all! (idiot!)
Yes, that is a wifebeater in a collander to filter the foils. I ran the solution through multiple times to get all of the baby flakes. The next day, (to ensure nothing made it through) I ran it through a charmin plug.
Topher_osAUrus
Well-known member
One more pic before i get back on the road and head home to work a bit, before i have to do daddy daycare.
This is a pic of the 2 buttons, big one is from nasa scrap.
Medium one is from first powders from the silicon toll
Pics of the bottoms, as the tops weren't the prettiest bells at the ball. But, I get 90-92% locally regardless if its 99.99% or 98%, so, if they tell me to sell local, I dont expend the extra resources to rerefine unless its mine.
12.7 and 7.8 after the flux removal.
I was rushing to get the silicon scrap done, and didnt let the fines settle, so from the first half there is probably another gram or 2 that will be added to it.
The downfall of refining. Rushing is never a good thing, and usually ends up with losses (misplacements) but, its never truly lost.
I was really expecting it to be significantly higher... Significantly
But, stockpot had nothing on the bottom. Filters didn't either. Nitric buckets have no flakes or black mud at the bottom, so I guess the bottom of the beaker is what it is.
This is a pic of the 2 buttons, big one is from nasa scrap.
Medium one is from first powders from the silicon toll
Pics of the bottoms, as the tops weren't the prettiest bells at the ball. But, I get 90-92% locally regardless if its 99.99% or 98%, so, if they tell me to sell local, I dont expend the extra resources to rerefine unless its mine.
12.7 and 7.8 after the flux removal.
I was rushing to get the silicon scrap done, and didnt let the fines settle, so from the first half there is probably another gram or 2 that will be added to it.
The downfall of refining. Rushing is never a good thing, and usually ends up with losses (misplacements) but, its never truly lost.
I was really expecting it to be significantly higher... Significantly
But, stockpot had nothing on the bottom. Filters didn't either. Nitric buckets have no flakes or black mud at the bottom, so I guess the bottom of the beaker is what it is.
Topher_osAUrus
Well-known member
This is the bottom of the beaker of the soldered pins, post nitric dissolve. Few pieces of stainless that are mingling with the foils. Oddly enough, these had quite a few good pins in there. By "good", I mean that after base metal removal, the pins maintained their shape instead of turning into little bitty gold flakes.
After this picture, I rinsed out as much of the spent acid as I could, then added a bit of dilute sulfuric to see if it would dissolve the remaining base metal. It seemed to do the trick, as well as alleviate some of the metastannic problem. ...just some, there is still a LOT, so it is getting dried and roasted now.
This is the microwave stuff. I wasn't really sure how I was going to go about the recovery phase of this process. Since I had used about 12.5L of nitric already with all the other stuff, I decided to just throw this material in the nitric "stock pot" and let it work a few days. Seemed to work well, ended up removing the gold from probably 75% of the material. The rest will be picked through and I will try a fresh, hot, dilute nitric run on it. If that fails me, I will cross that bridge when I get there.
The majority of that which has not been cleared of its foils seems to be on stainless.
Last night, before closing up before bed. I decided to clean up the pyroceram catch pan that I religiously use between the burner and beaker. After the past few days of nitric dissolving, there had accumulated more than a few spots of copper nitrate that had dripped off the watchglass when taking it off to stir or add more acid. I took the beaker off the hot catchpan, and put it on another one. I used my squirt bottle and gave a few squirts of water so I could wipe up the blue mess. Well, stupidly I left the paper towel on the hot pyroceram piece.. ..while my attention was on the beaker and new catchpan, I see an orange glow out of my peripheral... Holy crap, the paper towel is on fire!. ..even though it was halfway wet, the little acid was enough to get it goin.
Luckily I was out there to immediately catch it and get it put out, had I not been, well.. I'd rather not think of that situation. ...all I know is that I wont ever allow that situation to happen again.
Let my stupidity be a warning to the wise. Nitric is a VERY powerful oxidizer, and it doesn't take much to make bad things happen.
Yeah dude...slow down on the nitric! hehe
Seriously? 12.5 liters?
I've ran my stainless parts by doing a reverse AR. 1:1 Nitric / Distilled H20 warm (not hot), add HCl dropwise until gold is gone...I literally do this very slowly, and purposely do it when I am not sitting there watching it. You'll still have plenty of free nitric left after the gold is gone, so I then use that for other recoveries.
I've got a couple of really heavily plated aluminum parts...I love these things. I've just had them sitting in a beaker for a few days. I add a a few mL of nitric every couple of days and the plating just falls off as the nickel base is digested. I actually had to scratch it pretty deep as the gold was too thick to allow the nitric to penetrate.
Seriously? 12.5 liters?
I've ran my stainless parts by doing a reverse AR. 1:1 Nitric / Distilled H20 warm (not hot), add HCl dropwise until gold is gone...I literally do this very slowly, and purposely do it when I am not sitting there watching it. You'll still have plenty of free nitric left after the gold is gone, so I then use that for other recoveries.
I've got a couple of really heavily plated aluminum parts...I love these things. I've just had them sitting in a beaker for a few days. I add a a few mL of nitric every couple of days and the plating just falls off as the nickel base is digested. I actually had to scratch it pretty deep as the gold was too thick to allow the nitric to penetrate.
