Silver Chloride and Lead Sulphate mix

[Lou]

Convert the silver chloride to silver metal.
Melt with borax, add nitre (if no PGM), add some dry cupels to the melt for the lead.

Pour into book mold. Plate out the silver from the gold in Thum cell. Collect the anode slimes; dissolve them in aqua regia or whatever your preference is, add sulfuric (or sulfamic if AR was used), dilute by half with ice, decant, filter the insolubles and precipitate the gold. Least fumey and cheapest way of doing it.

Unless it's a lot of gold, in which case add more silver.

 

[Williamjf77]

Since you already have silver chloride with your foils, couldn’t you just dissolve the gold with the silver chloride and just filter out the silver chloride once the gold is is in solution?

If you carefully decant or siphon you could get the clean pregnant stuff through the filter first then add in the contaminated stuff which will take a while?

Anyway I had the same issue with gold filled even with nitric, only difference was my pregnant solution had the silver chloride in there, once I put the right filter to it it was no problem.

 

[Lou]

The more AgCl, the more difficult to rinse out.

 

[Jmk88]

Thanks Lou.

The items were in copper chloride for 3 weeks. I’m fairly sure it’s just silver I need to deal with.

Even if I can reduce the chloride enough to get to the gold I think I would be ok.

I’m going to buy a plaster mixer today.

 

[Williamjf77]

Did you put fresh HCl to to convert any Copper 1 chloride to copper 2 chloride?

I wonder if you could just convert the silver chloride mixed with the gold with the lye and sugar method,drain and wash , then just dissolve the silver out with the weak nitric.

 

[Jmk88]

I’ve had the 200g in some nitric for 4 hours. No heat.

I will transfer to a Büchner flask tomorrow and place on heat depending on how the progress is in the morning.

My initial findings are a clear solution with nothing but foils. I can see base metal on some of the items which are all copper based, or certainly non magnetic. I incinerated all material first.

I am a heavy smoker and I hate working g with AR or nitric, even HCL to be honest, anywhere but outside. So i will return when I have light.

I think I would like someone to take something from this, rather than just ramble.

Conclusion is, anyone thinking they can work with copper chloride and anything silver based can not.

To be clear, gold filled has a lot of silver. As base and alloys so it really isn’t worth even trying.

 

[butcher]

If I was working silver with a chloride I would use ferric chloride it works very well as a silver etch.

Did you put fresh HCl to convert any Copper 1 chloride to copper 2 chloride?

I wonder if you could just convert the silver chloride mixed with the gold with the lye and sugar method, drain and wash, then just dissolve the silver out with the weak nitric.

As mentioned above, are you dealing with gold or silver? are you washing gold powders or dealing with silver chloride with a few gold flakes.

Added to the silver stock pot, I would rather use iron and sulfuric to convert silver chloride to silver, and use a silver cell to collect anode slimes of gold or any PGM involved...

 

[Jmk88]

Hi Butcher,

I’m dealing with gold flakes in silver chloride.

Having been studying non stop the last week, i don’t think it’s efficient at all running this material in any chloride solutions due to the silver reaction.

I did consider the ferric but my understanding is that will generate enough silver chloride to be a problem again?

I think I will have to oxidise the chloride as best I can, then reduce with small increments of nitric.

My younger sister is a 2nd year bio chemistry student and she is saying that silver oxide isn’t very soluble in nitric which is on the contrary to my research?

 

[butcher]

I’m dealing with gold flakes in silver chloride.
Then you have a dirty silver chloride. (possibly contaminated with other base metals with a few gold flakes) and whatever trash you have previously had involved with these salts of chlorides.

Having been studying non stop the last week, i don’t think it’s efficient at all running this material in any chloride solutions due to the silver reaction.
Only studied for a week and you are trying to use chemicals and chemistry you obviously do not understand?
I would say put the acids up for now and spend some time studying.
Forget about your gold fever.

If you are serious about learning forget about getting gold or silver. Put your effort into the study.

To learn very much in these skills it takes years and lifetimes of study and practice,
practicing something you do not understand or have no knowledge of, before educating yourself is just a waste of your time. our time, your chemicals and your health.
Begin with the basics, educating yourself, Hoke's book will answer all of your questions and more.

At this point, you have spent a week trying to learn a skill that many, many men have spent their whole life trying to learn or even master a tiny portion of these skills and sciences.


And before your first week of studying is through your mixing dangerous deadly chemicals you do not understand making dangerous reactions you do not understand?

I did consider the ferric but my understanding is that will generate enough silver chloride to be a problem again?

What? You already have a silver chloride, if I understood what you said above you were dealing with silver chloride.





I think I will have to oxidize the chloride as best I can then reduce with small increments of nitric.
Please explain more, why, how...
How many weeks have you spent studying this procedure?

 

[Jmk88]

Butcher,

I will convert the silver chloride using hydroxide.

The purpose of my study was to find options to dissolve silver chloride.

Thiosulphate works but will cost a fortune. Same with ammonia.

So I have understood silver oxide is soluble in weak nitric. Therefore I will try that.

Going forwards I won’t use a chloride leach for silver content material.

The sole purpose of my recent studies was to understand options to deal with silver chloride.

 

[nickvc]

When dealing with jewellery scrap silver chloride is part of the deal but it isn’t a huge problem if you are vacuum filtering and rinsing the chloride it should only leave 1-2 parts per thousand gold, this can be recovered by converting to metallic silver and running in a silver cell.
I really think you are wasting your time worrying over silver chloride as I said in jewellery refining it appears whether you want it to or not, small amounts of silver chloride will be dissolved in AR but it can be removed by diluting your solution with water and good filtering and even by boiling the gold powders in dilute HCl which will also remove much of the contaminates that co precipitate with the gold or that are dragged down.
You are chasing your tail for pennies when the goal is to recover the gold where the real money is, and with wet / chemical refining you will never get it all, there is always some left somewhere in the system whether in the crucible or undissolved or in really fine powders that settle over days or weeks.

 

[butcher]

I can understand you experimenting to learn, but I do not see how you are going to learn by jumping from one process to the next willy nelly.

I would find one process and follow it through to the end.

before jumping into another process with a whole another set of problems or things you will need to learn to make it successful...


If you use nitric acid it should be free from chloride or sulfate salts, silver chloride is insoluble in nitric, silver sulfate also has a very low solubility...

I believe you may learn, the way you are going about it, but it just seems like a hard way to learn (to me anyway)...

I feel your problems come more from not understanding a process or how things work than a problem with the processes themselves, and then not following through with a process to make it work, or stick with it long enough to learn how it works and learn to overcome problems...

It is also difficult as we cannot see what you are doing or how you are doing it.
so with us answering your questions we cannot see or understand what you are doing. You only get part of an answer, and we only see part of the question, this is a terrible way to learn.


You say that you are going to use homemade nitric acid on silver you plan to convert to oxides,.
All I see here is a bunch more questions coming, about why that did not work...

 

[Jmk88]

The nitric experiment I described with nitrates and sulphuric didn’t work.

But yes I am enjoying understanding what reactions happen and what occurs.

This dissolved the gold also so I won’t be using that again.

I’m really not jumping; I’m trying one thing and when that is not working, I am trying another.

What I’m trying to achieve was simple; process gold filled material without nitric. I understand now that isn’t feasible.

So now I am going to use nitric going forward.

 

[butcher]

The nitric experiment I described with nitrates and sulphuric didn’t work.

Only because, you do not know how to make it work.

But yes I am enjoying understanding what reactions happen and what occurs.

You are not getting much of an understanding of how to make things work, but I can see you are gaining a good understanding of how things do not work the way you think they should...

This dissolved the gold also so I won’t be using that again.

Before long you will not be using any method of recovery again, you seem to be running low on options, ruling everything out that has some problem to overcome.

I’m really not jumping; I’m trying one thing and when that is not working, I am trying another.

That is jumping, jumping from one small problem out of the frying pan and back into another problem and an even hotter skillet.

What I’m trying to achieve was simple; process gold-filled material without nitric. I understand now that it isn’t feasible.

Sure It is feasible and simple, and there can be more than one way to accomplish it, but only with understanding.

So now I am going to use nitric going forward.

So, now you have a lot more to study if you plan on learning to use nitric successfully...
Be sure to study safety before you even open a bottle of nitric or try to make it.

 

[Williamjf77]

My last gold filled batch, I ended up with a lot of small flakes mixed in with junk, my solution was to keep the bulk clean material separate, process that then hit the filters with all the flakes and whatever metal salts with AR then filter out the crap.

Precipitated then washed with hot dilute hcl, redissolved and was left with gold and silver chloride which was after help here, filtering out the silver chloride.

 

[g_axelsson]

I'm with Nick on this. Don't worry about the silver chloride. You got nitric acid so separate any solid pieces of metals still in there, then add a tiny bit of nitric acid so you form aqua regia (add HCl if you need it). Heating and stirring, even boiling with a cover will speed up the dissolving of the gold. When the gold has dissolved you let it settle and test that you really have gold in solution.
Then you pour off any clear liquid. Add some more water, for example double the volume of the sediments left. Stir it well and let it settle before pouring off the clear water. Repeat that a couple of times until the liquid looks clear or only gives a weak reaction on a stannous test.

Each dilution would mix any remaining gold chloride with equal amounts of water so when you pour off the clear portion you cut in half the remaining gold chloride. Theoretically, after pouring off 7 times you have less than a percent of the gold left with the sludge.

The liquid you poured off is probably quite weak, so it might be easier to cement it on a copper bar instead of trying to precipitate it.

From this point, refine it as normal gold.

The remaining sludge should contain most of the silver and a small part gold. Treat it as silver chloride, for example iron and sulfuric, but many methods exists. The remaining gold should follow the silver from this point. When you have enough silver you could set up a silver cell and the last gold should end up in the anode sludge. There might be quite a lot of other junk in the silver chloride so don't be surprised if only part of it converts to silver.

But I agree with Butcher too, you should study a lot more. For example treating your sediments with nitric acid would have created aqua regia and dissolved the gold.

And I think your sister is wrong about silver oxide not dissolving in nitric acid. Silver oxide batteries can be dissolved in nitric acid. Are you sure she didn't think of silver chloride?

Göran

 

[Jmk88]

Thank you Goran.

Very much appreciated.

 

[Jmk88]

Sorry Goran,

To add; the idea to add nitric was with the idea of first washing all the final foils in water twice and then converting to silver oxide.

I was then going to add nitric to dissolve only the silver oxide following conversion with the intention of leaving just the foils.

Would the water washes (boiled) remove all chloric presence so to avoid dissolution of the gold too?

Nick - thank you too I only just saw your comments. Understood. I will filter the majority of the copper chloride solution which I can be careful with to do the majority of the separating. I will then convert to silver as per your advice.

Kind Regards,

 

[modtheworld44]

Jmk88

You should use the concentrated ferric chloride if you want less silver problems.Ferric chloride will hold the silver in solution while Hot and Concentrated giving you the upper hand your looking for.When you get done running the process (most or almost all base metal is removed) filter while hot with out adding water and your silver problem will be gone.Use hcl washes No dilution to keep silver in solution.From here take foils and run them in AR . Do not use water in this process (dilution drops out your silver) and while on heat add only concentrated ferric chloride THE END .Thanks in advance.



modtheworld44

 

[Jmk88]

Hi Mod,

Thank you so much.

I have just boiled in some and it literally disappears. I’m astounded.

It gives more than enough window to filter just the foils which I’m doing now.

Thank you sir.