Geo
Well-known member
I have accepted a small batch of material that someone tried to smelt. It has about every metal you can imagine. The original material is high grade, military electronics (pins and connectors) CPU's of all kinds including ceramics, gold filled jewelry, gold plated jewelry, silver contact points still in the copper buss. I have about forty pounds to work on with another several hundred pounds if I can get the flux worked out. I want to work with small batches containing three or four pounds of metal (including existing slag) at a time. I have #4 salamander crucibles to work with. I need a flux combination that will take out the Fe and ceramic material and leave the copper and precious metals. I milled a couple of pounds of the material and leached the metals out to see what I was working with. From the two pounds I recovered 1.2 ounces of silver and right at a gram of gold. There was a strong positive test for PGM's as well. Not all of the material can be leached. A majority of the material is magnetic. The ceramic bodies of the CPU's are still intact but are coated with slag. There are large globs of metal and the whole mass is full of tiny prills. There are large masses of un-melted metal that appears to be iron. I plan on milling the entire mass and removing as much iron as possible manually.