Sulpheric Acid

[docone31]

Can concentrated sulpheric acid, drain cleaner, be used to digest base metals?
I am not using Rooto, but Liquid Fire.
I have some gold filled scraps I have put into the small container I put some acid in. So far, nothing. I added a touch of salt and got a phosphorus smell. Also nothing on the metals.
I really haven't started getting supplies yet. I just got Hoke's Book, and I have a lot of scrap.
Mostly just getting my feet wet.
I figuired, if I could just let my gold filled scrap sit in a bucket of acid for a time, I could then dissolve the gold with my karat scrap.

 

[Anonymous]

Usually sulpheric acid is used in a electric cell. To just desolve base metal, muratic acid is what you need. Have you watched Lazer Steve's videos? Highly informative......Jack

 

[docone31]

I have Hoke's book through Steve, and I have indeed seen his videos.
That gentleman has spent some time making a quality video on quite a few things. He has helped me.
As an aside, the pieces are still sitting there.
I can definately state from my experiment, sulphuric acid is at the least real slow.
Hey, I had some and three pieces of gold filled. I figuired what the heck.
Acid got dark though.
I put a small piece of silver in it also. Same deal, no change.
I read somewhere heating the acid will make the sulphuric eat copper.

 

[OMG]

Ya. thats what I read too... hot concentrated sulfuric acid will dissolve copper. I've used it on black sand concentrates and it works quite well. You on the other hand should use muriatic and peroxide to dissolve the copper. It will work much better and quicker and at room temperature.

When you add salt (NaCl) to sulfuric, it makes muriatic acid (which may go up as a gas - I don't know) and sodium sulfate. (Na2SO4).

If there are a lot of base metals to get rid of, use HCl+peroxide, then take out the cleaned up gold and dissolve it in HCL-clorox, or AR (if there is silver present). Then all the metals should be dissolved, and you can use SMB to drop out the gold as a brown powder.
Then you can get that gold powder out and clean it and melt it, or if you want to make it even purer, dissolve it again and precipitate it again.