soo screwed

[Dravin]

Hi guys, I have done alot of reading and watching on what to do from the scraping to the refining and melting of gold.
I would say that I have a decent grasp of what to do and whats goin on.
But yesterday I took and made some home made AR, (using, HCL, Dist H2O, and home made Nitric Acid (LS recipe))
started out great nice pretty orangish yellow then turned dark greenish.
let the reaction stop pretty much everything was gone. put some Sulfuric acid in there to drop the lead then let sit
pour over to a clean vessle with ice to get out silver chloride, let sit over night. filtered into clean beaker at this moment it
was a light green. (antifreeze look). Tested with stanous chlor and it turned up negative.
OMG what is goin on here lol. figured it was a faulty test and proceeded to pour stump out (tested to see if was smb it is)
and the light green turned dark green and got cold. Im now lost in what to do or what i did wrong.

 

[martyn111]

What material did you start with?
You say that when the reaction stopped pretty much everything was gone. Had the reaction stopped due to all the acid being used up? Did you use any heat?
What colour were the undissolved solids?
These are just some of the details which we will need to know before we can give you much help, if I were to take a guess I would say that the undissolved solids from the orignal reaction is where you are going to find your values, hopefully you still have these and haven't disposed of them.

 

[Dravin]

What material did you start with?
You say that when the reaction stopped pretty much everything was gone. Had the reaction stopped due to all the acid being used up? Did you use any heat?
What colour were the undissolved solids?
These are just some of the details which we will need to know before we can give you much help, if I were to take a guess I would say that the undissolved solids from the orignal reaction is where you are going to find your values, hopefully you still have these and haven't disposed of them.

i would say that the acid was done doing what it wanted,
mostly i used the foils off of old ddr memory, with some 24k foils (tested) and 14k jewelry, and a gold covered copper scraps that i smelted to see if my home made furnace was getting hot enough to smelt gold and lets say it does the job.
this was all placed in a beaker and was set on medium low aroma hotplate

as for the remainder of the pieces, the 14k jewelry was still intacted, but was not worse for ware took a great deal of dissolving, and the copper was still there i put those items in a new batch of dist h2o and nitric acid mix, very potent combo, feel that i should have used this method first but comtimplateing on adding hcl to the mix.
sorry off topic. lol

 

[Geo]

the reason your test was negative is because there wasnt any gold in solution. any gold that dissolved would have cemented out as a black powder on any copper in the solution. as long as you didnt toss out any of the material your gold is there, its just that you misplaced it. now its gone from being something you can recognize to something that can get thrown away by mistake if you are not careful. when you are recovering PM's with an AR solution, you must continue the dissolution until ALL the material has been dissolved. this is a newb mistake and once you locate your lost gold you probably wont make it again. your lost gold is with any undissolved copper from the solution.

 

[Dravin]

the reason your test was negative is because there wasnt any gold in solution. any gold that dissolved would have cemented out as a black powder on any copper in the solution. as long as you didnt toss out any of the material your gold is there, its just that you misplaced it. now its gone from being something you can recognize to something that can get thrown away by mistake if you are not careful. when you are recovering PM's with an AR solution, you must continue the dissolution until ALL the material has been dissolved. this is a newb mistake and once you locate your lost gold you probably wont make it again. your lost gold is with any undissolved copper from the solution.

wooooohooooo thats great news cause that is all in the next batch, oh and get this, totaly strange, just checked the solution in question with stanous chlor, and it was a brown color
not sure what that is.

 

[Geo]

brown stannous chloride test is considered a false positive in most cases. sometimes the brown can be light enough to look purple. most likely it is from too much SMB in the solution.

 

[eesakiwi]

any gold that dissolved would have cemented out as a black powder on any copper in the solution.

Thanks, I'm just starting too & wondered why the remains of the copper looked as black as coal.
When I keep eating it in HCL/H2O2 will the gold come out as a 'gold' looking gold.
I save eveything thats used, instead of discarding it.

 

[nickvc]

The gold that's been dissolved in your AP will not look like gold but will be a black powder. If you keep reusing your AP solution to dissolve more copper it will eventually cement all the gold out of the solution, that's that's the beauty of it, plus it's renewable so it's low cost.

 

[martyn111]

I save eveything thats used, instead of discarding it.

It's good to hear that you have saved everything and discarded nothing, until you know what is in your 'waste' it is advisable to do exactly as you have done.

Dravin, going off your reply to my earlier post and the replies received from Geo and nickvc it would appear that my initial hunch has been vindicated, that your values are with your remaining undissolved solids, a few minutes studying the reactivity series will explain why the values will cement out of solution if there are any solids higher in the reactivity series than the values.
To point you in the right direction use the search (top right of the page) and enter 'reactivity series' for the relevent information.

 

[Palladium]

wooooohooooo thats great news cause that is all in the next batch

One thing you need to stop doing is mixing different kinds of material lots together. Not saying it can't be done, just saying until you have a firm grasp of refining this can cause you problems.

 

[nickvc]

wooooohooooo thats great news cause that is all in the next batch

One thing you need to stop doing is mixing different kinds of material lots together. Not saying it can't be done, just saying until you have a firm grasp of refining this can cause you problems.

Words of wisdom!
If by chance you add something with tin in to the mix :shock:

 

[Dravin]

thanks guys really diggin the help, in this home made AR i got brewing now. there are alot of very fine particals floating around when u shine a flash light on it u can tell they are real fine bits of gold. i keep adding more acid to the mix and waiting untill the brownish orange fumes die down and then add more. y am i unable to dissolve the fine bits of gold

 

[Geo]

if it doesnt dissolve by the time all the other material is dissolved, its not gold, more likely Rhodium.

 

[Dravin]

if it doesnt dissolve by the time all the other material is dissolved, its not gold, more likely Rhodium.

Does Rhodium shine yellowish orange?

 

[Dravin]

i realy admire all the help you all have done to aid in my project.

On to sulfuric acid, got about 500ml of AR about to stop reacting everything is going great. I have read and seen that its a good idea to put some Sulfuric acid in the mix while it is still hot to drop the lead. What do you all say?

 

[Geo]

Rhodium is a silver-white metal that is used to plate silver and white gold jewelry. its color can be effected by being alloyed with other metal from the PGM's. it is very hard to dissolve in acid. it is used as a catalyst in catalytic converters on vehicals. the color your seeing could be reflected light through the solution.