the aqua regia evaporated and now I have a barrel full of various colors crystals

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Roy houmard

New member
Joined
Feb 1, 2017
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3
displaced a truck load of old computers and then got sick so it sat in a 55 gal barrel for about 3 years. When I was well enough to work again I opened the barrel to find about 1/2 of the aqua regia had evaporated and the barrel was half full of little crystals of multiple colors. I recognize the green ones to be copper but the rest I am not sure of. There are Dark purple almost black pockets And other pockets are an off white.There are some thare tank almost brown similar to rust and they all settled in layers or pockets. If anyone has any suggestions I would be eternally grateful for advice because my skill got Me a bucket full of pretty rocks and the whole process only took me 6 years.
 
Welcome to the forum.
When you say you put s load of old computers into Aqua Regia please tell me it was just gold plated parts...
If you dumped everything into acids you have created a mess and giant headache, if you have any undissolved metals then your gold will have cemented back out of solution.
You need to give us more and complete details of exactly you have done and with what for us to be able to help at all, but if as I suspect you have dumped loads of boards connectors etc in AR you will need to do a lot of reading to get the mess sorted.
 
I stripped out all of the parts that had gold and or silver trying to eliminate the trash and I also put in a large amount of jewelery some of it was plate but in those cases I broke them up then soaked in nitric trying to eliminate the base metal. There are quite a few cell phone components in there. I have tried to follow advice I have seen on this site .. thank you for your time I am a little uncertain and would prefer to get advice rather than jump into it half prepaird
 
Put the lid back on that barrel, seal it up tight and call a disposal company to take it off your hands.
 
Roy houmard said:
I stripped out all of the parts that had gold and or silver trying to eliminate the trash and I also put in a large amount of jewelery some of it was plate but in those cases I broke them up then soaked in nitric trying to eliminate the base metal. There are quite a few cell phone components in there. I have tried to follow advice I have seen on this site .. thank you for your time I am a little uncertain and would prefer to get advice rather than jump into it half prepaird
Click to expand...

Could you please direct us to where on this forum you found this advice? I think the Mods need to purge this from the site! :shock:
 
rickbb said:
Put the lid back on that barrel, seal it up tight and call a disposal company to take it off your hands.
Click to expand...
That might sound a bit harsh and unhelpful to the OP.

It isn't.

rickbb is just saying what the best option is in this situation.

I did something similar, on a much smaller scale.

If i was faced with 55 gallons, that lid would already be on, sealed and in the disposal companies' hands, due to the sheer money & effort required to either try to refine it, or even just make it safe.

Best chance will be to get paid a little bit for it, or at least not have to pay for the disposal.

Please do not get disheartened, nor throw gallons of toxic heavy metals down the drain !

A photo of the crystals would certainly be fascinating. If you can take good enough shots of them, you might be able to earn some $ out of it that way !
 
Even with this mess there is a way forward but, it is a big but, it will take a lot of reading and work to sort this out, given a lot more details we can probably help, there will need to be a willingness to read by the OP and a lot of patience but this can be sorted.
 
Roy, welcome to the forum. You mentioned that you have tried to follow the advice you've seen on this site, but your profile shows you joined today. Were you a member in the past under a different name? It's not a problem. I was just curious if you were here before you got sick. I'm glad to hear you're feeling better.

I agree with a couple of members that if you can provide pictures of what you have and give us more information about how you got to this point, we'll be better able to help you. You mentioned using nitric to eliminate base metals. Was that part of what ended up in the 55 gallon barrel? You also mention that half the barrel of aqua regia had evaporated, so was it all aqua regia? Was it a full 55 gallons when you got sick, and now there's only about half of the liquid left? Does the barrel just contain the remaining aqua regia and the crystals, or are there still parts of the original cell phone components and other starting material in the barrel? You mentioned that you opened the barrel and found half had evaporated. What kind of barrel is it (steel, plastic, etc.)? What kind of cover did you have on it that allowed half of the liquid to evaporate? I could probably ask another dozen questions, but I'll let you get started with those and provide any other details you can.

If you had a quart or a gallon I might agree with just disposing of it properly, but with a half barrel that could get expensive, and hopefully if you used that much acid, you should have a reasonable amount of values in there. Any mess can be cleaned up, but we need more information to start to steer you in the right direction. I have ideas of how to proceed, but it depends on some of those answers.

You're not the first person to find an old container containing an unknown combination of "stuff". I'm sure you won't be the last. We can use this thread as a learning experience for you, and a teaching experience for those who find themselves in the same situation in the future. Know going in that this will probably not be easy and will take some dedication and effort on your part. If you're up for it, we are too.

Looking forward to some pictures and details.

Dave

Edit to add it looks like Nick posted some of the same thoughts while I was typing. :)
 
The barrel in a reclaimed pest aside container. The liquid that was left is definitely hot. It came about as abi-product of my earliest attempts (rather failures). I am sending some pictures l am hoping that this is fixable with a whole lot of sweat. Time is of the essence for me because I am borrowing it . I have CLL lukeamia that isn't about getting favors it just demonstrates my sence of urgency and willingness to do whatever work that needs done without bitching. My background is 1 1/2 years with huggers manufacturing where I was the lab tech responceble for 3 5000 gallon tanks 1 voranol, 1.niax , and 1 isosycionate
(Those chemicals could easily be missing spelled).We made beer can coolers in Baytown TX and deridder la we inside poly urethane can coolers .
And the 2 years at American plating in houston. We put Nichol plating on oijl feild parts mostly ball valves in what they called a canagen bath. We disposed of large quauntities of chemicals using a styling pond and evaporating it and then a disposal company came and collecting the dry remains.oi still have all my chenmicals that I have used to be disposed of 0roperly the last thing I will do is have any trouble with the EPA or the local cops they already think I have a meth lab.my credentials are not gold but I am taking disposal seriously1486004828365.jpg1486004576790.jpgView attachment 21486004933768.jpgView attachment 1View attachment 2
 
Roy I'm sorry to hear of your problems but pleased to hear your determination to succeed.
One important point needs to be ascertained, are all the metals you placed in the barrel originally dissolved ?
I mentioned earlier about your values cementing out, this means if you have any base metals left the gold could well still be in the metals and any sludge on the bottom of the barrel.
If you have no metals left then all the values should have dissolved and should now be in your crystals, if there was silver present it should now be as a chloride powder.
My suggestion is to take a decent and good representative sample of your crystals and re dissolve them, you may need to use HCl but try water first, use a beaker or a Pyrex container preferably with a catch pot under it and put it on to heat up, once your crystals are dissolved any silver should be visible as a powder on the bottom of your container, this can be collected by filtering your solution, you can now hopefully test for any values by using stannous dependant on whether you still have nitric in your solution, if have or can obtain a few prills of urea add them to your solution and if they fizz then you have excess nitric,if you have an excess of nitric then add a copper bar or some flattened copper tubing and allow the values to cement out, this will form as a black powder which can be kept or tested by dissolving in HCl and a little bleach or AR, only use the minimum of nitric,and then testing with stannous.
Even if there are some metals undissolved I would still check your crystals as in the volume you are talking about some of the gold or other values could have escaped cementation.
I would hold fire on my thoughts until others comment as there may be a better route to follow that I can't see.
 
Roy, do you have stannous chloride for testing? If not, you should get it so you could test your liquids for dissolved values.

Without stannous you are blind as a refiner, only guessing where the gold is.

Göran
 
It would be good for you to get specific as to what parts actually went into the acid and what parts were stripped out and not processed in acid. Your description of a "truckload" is vague at best. The reason this information is important is our members here can tell you approximately how much gold and silver you are looking to recover if you provide good details.

Why does this matter? As Nick suggested dissolving a small representative sample is the wise approach, no sense in hydrating it all if you cannot get any indication of values. But in a small cup of sample you may only be looking for a gram or two and it may not be as obvious to you when you see it. That's why it is important to have a ballpark of what you are expecting.

A mill to crush these multicolored crystals into a powder would be helpful. Then it would be easier to process further and help greatly in making the batch homogeneous. If it is completely dry, a cement mixer with the paddles removed and some steel balls and a cover may do the job.
 
To me it would be hard to get a representative sample to test without first ball milling it and then sampling it and that's a lot of work and resources. If it was ar then the silver is going to be chlorides which is going to follow you into the next ar step as a solid. Then any other trash such as flakes of the board and any other dirt and trash from the boards is probably mixed in. If all you have is them crystals and not the original boards which may contain your gold, because at this point the only question is " Where is the gold? " I would hot water wash all the crystals to remove anything that may go into solution. Test the water rinses with stannous to make sure your not losing values. If you try and wash the crystals with hcl you may create ar again. If the solution was hot with nitric before it evaporated it may have trapped nitric in the crystals and hcl would create ar. After water washing i would incinerate,hcl wash, and ar it again. I like seeing the color purple when i'm prospecting for gold when refining, but...... That can be deceiving just like pyrite is!
 
If the crystals are brittle, I believe I would start by dropping a bowling ball or a sledge hammer on it a hundred times and rock it back and forth on its edge to mix it well and then take a sample from that. Honestly though, I would only do that if the feedstock was the bare minimum in the beginning. What I mean by that, is just the plated items dissolved. If you had actual boards that you dropped in whole, disregard what I have said. I have never dealt with this kind of situation so take what I say as an idea and not an option. My advice would be to see what everyone says and then see if one of the more experienced guys would mentor you through this step by step.

I do want to say that I am sorry for what you are going through, my mother battled bone cancer for 10 years and then developed leukemia on top of that a year before she passed. Make sure you fight, keeping a good attitude is a great medicine. If you ever want to talk just shoot me a PM.

Mike
 
In a way you are lucky the acid dried out to leave you these crystals. Before, while you still had a lot of acid and dissolved and undissolved metals in solution you had a waste nightmare. And the chances of successfully leaching out the gold and silver to separate it was a daunting task.

If you try to re-dissolve the entire batch you will likely end up with 2 or 3 times the volume you had before the acid dried out on you. If left to dispose of that properly you will be looking at a large sum of money and likely troubles as well for not being a licensed business with that much waste on hand.

Spend some time thinking about how you can crush this stuff, the cement mixer with a cover duct taped on will keep the airborne dust down and some hours spent listening to the crushing balls banging around will result in a fairly consistent material. It will also still be dry and easier to dispose of if you cannot find any values.

Once you get the sample try to digest a weighed cup full in hot water, at worst you will not generate more than a gallon of waste to deal with later. Test the colored liquid on top with stannous chloride, if you are lucky it will show no values. Let the solids settle and decant the liquid to collect the solids. Unless there was a stain on the liquid, your gold will be in that mud. And all of the silver as silver chloride.

Crush it, try the hot water dissolve on a small sample and test it with the stannous. Then tell us what you have observed and we will discuss the next steps. Do not be tempted to just dissolve the whole mess in hot water as you will have a larger waste problem on your hands.

Still waiting for your estimate of what went into solution. Having an idea as to what you are looking for will pay a big part in your next decision. You are fortunate in that a good number of our members have offered suggestions here but it is up to you to come up with the answers to the questions and do the preliminary sampling and testing. If you do it you will be advised how to best recover what you have.

The ball is fully in your court sir, the degree of help you get from here out will likely depend on your answers.
 

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