Ok, I have been with utmost respect to safety and our environment playing with foils from fingers and pins for now my third summer. At times I experimented as well with throwing into a continuously running AP bucket, karat plated 925 pieces of jewelry and in separate vessels about 400 cpu's, ceramic, green,black and brown.
I never threw anything out because I KNEW I was making mistakes along the way in my learning curve.ALL liquids went into buckets until I learned more. I came up on 25 gallons of dark green super low ph solutions.
Time has come to clean up. Without doing more reading or re reading I decided to take all the precipitates from standing buckets, consolidate them, ( dark gray,brown,white clumps and obvious un dissolved silver) and wash them repeatedly with hot water them muriatic until I had a clean sediment that is wash water clear, leaving me with a dark gray with separated brown heavy precip still with obvious solid 925 pieces in it. Dried to a paste apx 50ml vol then added about 100ml muriatic and about 10ml Clorox. It turned a beautiful yellow/gold, let it settle, decanted, filtered, stannous test quick solid purple deep in color. Diluted 4x added SMB,,,nothing dropped, stannous is testing negative now. Hmmmmm
, went back to books and this forum, put a copper pipe fitting in and in 24 hours solution went to a dark green/brownish with a lot of black sediment and on the fitting.
The lot of my questions is am I on the right track to cleaning up my mess and is the black likely lost gold? How should I proceed? Again wash with hot water alternating muriatic till clear, melt, re process with AR?
I don't want a hand hold, just a little advice, I prefer to learn on my own but I'm just not sure at this point.
I never threw anything out because I KNEW I was making mistakes along the way in my learning curve.ALL liquids went into buckets until I learned more. I came up on 25 gallons of dark green super low ph solutions.
Time has come to clean up. Without doing more reading or re reading I decided to take all the precipitates from standing buckets, consolidate them, ( dark gray,brown,white clumps and obvious un dissolved silver) and wash them repeatedly with hot water them muriatic until I had a clean sediment that is wash water clear, leaving me with a dark gray with separated brown heavy precip still with obvious solid 925 pieces in it. Dried to a paste apx 50ml vol then added about 100ml muriatic and about 10ml Clorox. It turned a beautiful yellow/gold, let it settle, decanted, filtered, stannous test quick solid purple deep in color. Diluted 4x added SMB,,,nothing dropped, stannous is testing negative now. Hmmmmm
, went back to books and this forum, put a copper pipe fitting in and in 24 hours solution went to a dark green/brownish with a lot of black sediment and on the fitting.
The lot of my questions is am I on the right track to cleaning up my mess and is the black likely lost gold? How should I proceed? Again wash with hot water alternating muriatic till clear, melt, re process with AR?
I don't want a hand hold, just a little advice, I prefer to learn on my own but I'm just not sure at this point.
