Stainless steel in my Cu(II)Cl etch and now a huge mess!

[Geo]

Chlorine is a gas. Cool solutions holds more dissolved gasses. When you heat the solution, it forces more of the gasses out of solution. Should you have swirled the contents of the container or stirred, it would have really bubbled a lot more. You can rid a solution of excess chlorine this way. Just remember that sodium hypochlorite has to actually boil to decompose into chlorine gas. Just heating it doesn't work well. Either let it sit for a longer time or boil it for a shorter time. This does not work with nitric acid or nitrate salts.

 

[raa]

Thanks Geo, I'll be sure to give the solution a quick boil next time.

I finally got round to finishing up this batch and ended up with my first tiny gold bead:


I boiled the gold powder in water then Hcl then water but did not do a second dissolve/drop.

At 1.5g, it's a bit down on the 2g I was expecting but there is some gold left in the crucible which did not flow.

Overall I am quite happy for a first attempt.


Thanks to everyone who helped!

 

[Palladium]

I used a stainless steep pot with too thin material in it... The final incineration was with material that contained a bit too much acidic salts in it. Here is the result.

Stainless steel pot.jpg
Göran

Yep! I kind of did the same thing destroying a bowl, but under different circumstances. After i filmed this video the bowl you see in it was toast from the acid etching. The reasons are the same though, trapped acids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNOyFTRcwF0
The residue acids that were in the materials are what are going to be driven off like in the picture goran posted above. I'm a pyroceram man myself!

I like the way this thread has progressed and i think your doing fine Mark. The one mistake i see is you should have cleaned up the foils with warm hcl after you got them collected. Normally that step can be skipped, sometimes! The reason you should have done that is because you had the problem with the iron oxide and probably some other metals also coming out of solution because of the iron. Had you done that it would have lead to less filtering problem like you experienced. Even though the end result was the same it could have went a lot smoother. The number one piece of advise i give people is procedure, procedure, procedure! Each step or procedure put into place is there for a reason. Skip one and something else in the process suffers. The first gram is the hardest! After that it gets easier and easier. Keep up the good work!

 

[Topher_osAUrus]

I'm a pyroceram man myself!!

A man after my own heart!

I had forgot how much I had, and how much I use (and love) my corningware until I had to move 8 large boxes of JUST pyroceram.

But, really it's a necessity, there are no good (cheap) substitutes for it, for numerous operations in the lab. So, it all gets put to use!