unsuccessful try with ICs

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byte-tech

byte-tech

Member
Joined
Apr 28, 2014
Messages
23
Location
Torreón, Coahuila
Good day!

Disclaimer: My English is much better than my ability to whistle a full song underwater without an O2 tank. Said so sorry for the wall of text, i wanted to give details of what i made.

I had 1.3 kg. of mixed chips from 6 legs to bga's chips so i started as per Patnor free guide (thank you!) and incinerated, removed magnetic s, copper wires etc. all according the book until the panning stage. First off, i never panned in my life so didn't expect to see gold wires at my first try (and think still didn't see a single one in this process), removed lot of ash by gravity using a container inside another bigger one pouring water, slowly, long story short, i ended with a concentrate of ash, some unburned little pieces of chips, shattered wafers and some little copper wires.

Non canonical procedures: the problems start...

Ready to process my concentrate i decided no to treat it with my hard to come nitric, and used HCL, a pinch of H2O2 and an air pump for one week. After that cleaned, rinsed and carefully decanting to another container. now everything was ready to dissolve the PMs. Too a sample of the concentrate with a spoon, put in in a glass vessel covering with HCL, added two drops of HNO3, slightly heated and tested with stannous chloride and got a weak positive. i was ready to go!
As my concentrate was still too much for my glass vessels i used the same plastic little bucket with a good thickness, poured HCL and add HNO3 with a dropper, got no color change, no fizzling and no bubbles. after this and thinking that i could not use heat on the plastic container decided to make my AR at 2:1 ratio, so poured more HNO3, more than was needed. Now got a yellow solution, fizzling, and bubbles form here and there.

Left the mess for two days stirring form time to time, my yellow solution was not yellow anymore but green, ok too much copper. Poured the solution to a clean glass vessel and diluted with water, now i got a vessel filled with milky green lemon color solution (i must say was a beautiful green) tested and got a negative. Thought that i had a big mess and was better to cement with copper and start over. Put a piece of copper pipe (sadly didn't make it a plain one) and left for two weeks stirring from time to time on a daily basis, removing with a brush some of the white thing (assuming silver) stick to the copper and putting back the cooper piece inside the vessel. After the two weeks and visible solids on the bottom (mostly whitish), tested and got a negative. i Though erroneously that cementing was not enough to clean my mess and evaporation was needed to consume all the nitric i used if the copper didn't that ad this point....
So decided to evaporate, removed the copper piece and put my still milky lemonade on my hot plate and start to slowly evaporate the solution at low heat, took a while , wrongly over evaporated until a crust was formed that gave me the opportunity to see how a crust looks like: green, blue-green. whitish, brown and black if i remember correctly. ok time to reconstitute the crust, added HCL just covering everything and continue the evaporation process for two more times not letting form a crust this time. i let the solution cools down with enough HCL in it, tested and the color of the q-tip turned darker, last for some minutes and the color comes back to emerald green with some darker spots, the less bulky cotton side of the stick, is black and last much longer but still gets back to green so i assume its a false negative.

If you survived to this wall of text and want to shed some light, your comments, admonish are welcome and much appreciated

Uresti.
 
You may still have undissolved metals that have cemented your values. There may also be some unburned carbon that has absorbed your gold. Wait till someone, with more know how than me, comes on to direct you. Good Luck!
 
you got yourself a fine mess there :)

Some tidbits I can share from my experience:
1) separate the chips into different classes and process together (chips like north/southbridge BGA's are easier to process)

2) I recommend using nitric when first dissolving base metals, it dissolves much faster and separates the silver, which is easy to recover, in the leech. if you have lots of time, then its not such a big deal

3) A general rule of thumb... when dissolving gold with AR, use only as much nitric as you need. It takes "about" 1 mL of Nitric (70%) to dissolve a gram of gold. you shouldn't need much more than that unless you have extra base metals left after the first leech. Add SLOWLY, as the reaction takes some time. (dont worry, we have all made that mistake)

4) Look into the use of Sulfamic Acid and why/how you should use it.


That being said, I think you should be okay, in as much as your PM's should still be in 'the crust.' You will need to read up on what you will need to do to try recover from this point. Pictures might help some of the guys give you some advice.

The shame of it all is that if you had evaporated/reconstituted first, that would have eliminated the excess Nitric.
 
You do not mix AP and AR EVER. AP will dissolve most metals except gold and AR dissolves gold. It is possible that you have dissolved your gold and cemented it back out onto another metal. It is also possible that there just wasn't enough gold to make the solution strong enough to show a solid positive.

It is pretty obvious you have no idea of what your doing. Set everything aside and start reading. Read Hoke and read the forum until you know what is being said. Until you are familiar with what you should be doing and what you should expect, you shouldn't be touching any dangerous chemicals.
 
thank you for the responses and advices.

Yes i always (not when i started to learn the hobby of course as mistakes are part of the learning curve) drop the nitric with a dropper to avoid using excess oxidizer in my AR, this time i did it for the reasons stated before. yeah my mistake, was eager to see an immediate reaction.

bswartzwelder:

i don't mean to be unrespectful but i never mixed AP and AR, dissolved metals with AP,, cleaned, rinsed and then AR. Im not an experienced refiner, im just an avid reader since the old forums, studied Hokes and safety to dispose waste,but sometimes even the best hunter lets the hare go. Thank you for your concerns.
 
I would say that your gold simple cemented on undissolved base metals. It takes quite a lot of Nitric to dissolve everything from concentrate. I do use hot nitric and no matter how much or how long there always are some small pieces of metal even after long treatment in hot nitric left in my concentrate. AR is always greenish as it seems hard to get rid of everything no matter how many times I treat concentrate. Mixed batches with a lot of different types of IC are always like that with a lot of different metals in them. This apply to cases when I am in a hurry and do not have time to spend with repeated panning. By repeated I mean going over the same material many many times eliminating all pins, ash and bits.

That is simply why I spend a lot of time panning material to get rid of most or nearly all metallic parts and ash. If you see concentrate on my thread pictures you will see I go down practically to gold, not much or pretty much none of other metals present.
 
bswartzwelder said:
You do not mix AP and AR EVER. AP will dissolve most metals except gold and AR dissolves gold.
Click to expand...
There is one caveat to that last sentence, as I have experienced the opposite. If you do a 50/50 mixture of HCL/Muriatic Acid & 3% Hydrogen Peroxide, it will dissolve gold. I learned that the hard way. From what I've read here on the forum is that no matter how much HCL or Muriatic Acid you use, you only need about a cap full of peroxide. No more... not unless you're doing very large quantities of gold plated items.

When I did a 50/50 mix, I saw the gold flake off of the pins and sim cards, and later on when I went to check the solution, all the gold flakes were dissolved into the solution. That's when I read it here about AP dissolving gold if you add too much peroxide to the AP.


Kevin
 
I am glad that you used stannous test solution. Too many new members try all the routines EXCEPT testing what they have with stannous. Without a valid test, there is almost no way of knowing what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. Keep up with the reading and soon you'll be processing thousands of pounds of gold just like everyone else here. OK guy, you can quit laughing now.
 
Update.

Ty all for the enlightening. I just finished cleaning my mess. there wasn't any gold on that solution, the gold was cemented on the undissolved material. Divided the material in 3 parts and redissolved each one in hot AR, filtered over and over with the same coffee filter until i got rid of most of the ashes, tested and got a strong positive. Im sure there still some gold on the leftovers and some was absorbed by the little unburned chunks of ic's, ill take that as a cost of learning, sure could be avoided since the beginning. Time to celebrate! 8)

Edit: Sir i wasn't laughing at all! im grateful for all the help
 
byte-tech said:
Update.

Ty all for the enlightening. I just finished cleaning my mess. there wasn't any gold on that solution, the gold was cemented on the undissolved material. Divided the material in 3 parts and redissolved each one in hot AR, filtered over and over with the same coffee filter until i got rid of most of the ashes, tested and got a strong positive. Im sure there still some gold on the leftovers and some was absorbed by the little unburned chunks of ic's, ill take that as a cost of learning, sure could be avoided since the beginning. Time to celebrate! 8)

Edit: Sir i wasn't laughing at all! im grateful for all the help
Click to expand...

Be careful what words you abbreviate. You wrote Ty, if you meant thank you, you should say, thank you. That is considered texting lingo and it's forbidden on the forum. I know it's a hard habit to break but it's for our on good.
 
if I may interject without over stepping the boundaries ?

one of the reasons for no texting lingo is that this is a international forum.

many members use a on-line language translator to read the forum and by using texting lingo their translators have no idea what is being said.
so to avoid someone misunderstanding what is being said the moderators & administrators demand that clear speech is used by everyone.
this includes proper spelling and / or using a spell check

no one wants someone getting hurt because of a intentional lack of clarity. here on the forum everyone takes safety seriously, and spelling is part of that.

even though english is my first & only language, my spelling is not the best, i have been asked to install a spell checker for this reason & it's a good idea.

i do believe this has been covered in past posts meant for new users to the forum, i have had the privilege of being a member here for a long while, it's a great place to learn, a great place to be welcomed.
 

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