The gold won't drop using SMB - help needed

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Mooh

New member
Joined
Dec 31, 2020
Messages
4
Hi everyone;
First I put 500grams of old mobile boards in AP and I added some fine iron to create ferric chloride to help in etching the copper and separate the gold foils form the boards ...
The first question , did any gold dessolve in the AP and ferric chloride solution? And if so how can I recover it back ?
After I separated the gold foils from the boards I dessolved it in AR ... The problem is I had a greenish dark brown dirty solution I added SMB to the solution there were no fizzing after one hour I had a white precipitant with slight brown one and the solution became darker ... So I ended up with a diluted AR with white precipitant ......I need a help, please!
 

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Standard question... Did you denox the AR before trying to precipitate gold?

... and do that stannous test too so you know if there is any gold in solution.

Göran
 
One has to be honest and say with 500 grams of phone boards could you see the gold that dropped :shock:
 
g_axelsson said:
Standard question... Did you denox the AR before trying to precipitate gold?

... and do that stannous test too so you know if there is any gold in solution.

Göran

I did not denox the AR ... Urea and sulphamic acid are impossible to have in my country ... Is there other methods
 
If the AR is concentrated by evaporation, then HCl is added, then evapoation...etc - the original treatment
 
kurtak said:
Cement the gold out with copper - the copper will use up the free nitric & then all the gold will come down (cement out)

Kurt

I did that and I heated the solution to make the reaction faster after almost 24 hours I still have the stannous chloride text positive ... But when I came to look back on the test papper I found that the brown stain that left by the test was disappeared... Is the solution still have the gold in it .... And why stannous chloride test still positive ?
 
The brown stain is likely a false positive for no gold. If it was a faint purple and dissapeared it could be a small amount of gold with still some free nitric. (Which could also be a false positive.) But I'm inclined with the latter.

Andrew
 
nickvc said:
One has to be honest and say with 500 grams of phone boards could you see the gold that dropped :shock:

With 300 g/ton (at least within a factor of 2, 150-600 g/ton) of gold, 500 g would give about 0.15g gold. It's fully possible to extract that if you have some basic skills.

I did refine one 35 g card and extracted 10 mg of gold and made a button out of it.
Refining of fingers from a single card

So, yes, it can be done. :mrgreen:

Göran
 
Mooh said:
g_axelsson said:
Standard question... Did you denox the AR before trying to precipitate gold?

... and do that stannous test too so you know if there is any gold in solution.

Göran

I did not denox the AR ... Urea and sulphamic acid are impossible to have in my country ... Is there other methods
As Lino mentioned, evaporation and additions of HCl is always possible. It is described in detail in Hoke.

This is a procedure that I feel every refiner should try at lest once. It shows you how concentrated a gold chloride solution can be before starting to crystallize.
One big advantage with this method is that it doesn't add anything that can't easily be removed from the solution. Any excess can just be evaporated so you keep the volume low. With urea or sulfamic acid you add stuff that's not easily evaporated so the minimum volume increases.

Göran
 
g_axelsson said:
nickvc said:
One has to be honest and say with 500 grams of phone boards could you see the gold that dropped :shock:

With 300 g/ton (at least within a factor of 2, 150-600 g/ton) of gold, 500 g would give about 0.15g gold. It's fully possible to extract that if you have some basic skills.

I did refine one 35 g card and extracted 10 mg of gold and made a button out of it.
Refining of fingers from a single card

So, yes, it can be done. :mrgreen:

Göran

Goran the point I was trying to make is that I think perhaps the op expects to see a serious amount of gold powder from his efforts and the problem is he can’t see that gold only some brown black junk on the bottom of the beaker :shock:
 
I just wanna thank you all guys for helping me .... This is my first time trying to refine gold .... The 500grams of mobile phone boards it was just a sample to make sure that I can do that with large quantities .... Thanks to all of you for helping me again .

I used sodium bicarbonate to make the solution PH 6 to drop all the metals in the solution and I will start doing the process all over again ...
 
nickvc said:
Goran the point I was trying to make is that I think perhaps the op expects to see a serious amount of gold powder from his efforts and the problem is he can’t see that gold only some brown black junk on the bottom of the beaker :shock:

You are correct, in a dirty solution it's hard to see the small amount of gold.

When time and weather allows I'm going to do a dirty recovery from some phone boards just to get he feeling for the obstacles.
Right now we have 1 m snow here and not a shadow of a groundhog to be seen.

Göran
 
I just wanna thank you all guys for helping me .... This is my first time trying to refine gold .... The 500grams of mobile phone boards it was just a sample to make sure that I can do that with large quantities .... Thanks to all of you for helping me again .

I used sodium bicarbonate to make the solution PH 6 to drop all the metals in the solution and I will start doing the process all over again ...
I wanted to ask you how did you proceeded with the phone boards processing, what was the final process that worked for you?
 
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