While Geo is helping with the gold, I will hold back advice as much as I can, on that portion as two people may do things a little different I do not wish to confuse you, with my suggestions on that process.
Since Geo has not mentioned the solution, I will say something there.
Save it to add your washes and waste acids from solutions you will be using to get your gold, add that copper back to the barrel to help cement any values you miss, (anything of value that would cement on copper would, when you are finished with the solution and wish to see if solution holds dissolved gold, or possibly any elemental metal gold colloids that will not settle or would not cement out onto copper because they were already reduced to metal but would not settle.
Just incase some gold colloids are in that solution; here is a way I would test it.
Get your stannous chloride made up, take a small sample of the ugly green solution, in a casserole dish on a solid burner hot plate, add about 20ml of this solution to be tested, and add 5mL strong sulfuric acid, evaporate the solution down to salts then lower heat to dry the salt, raise the heat keep the salts crushed now with a propane torch get the powder red hot, if the dry powders fuse and become a syrup lower heat, (so it does not bubble and pop), but keep heating re-crush to powder and heat the powder red hot, in this heating process we drove off H2O then a HNO3, then HCl and finally H2SO4, the chloride powders went to sulfates and then we drove off the sulfate as SO2 gas when they became red hot leaving us with metal oxide powders.
Now boiling these powder oxides in 10ml HCl, then add a tiny bit of water let powder settle and decant, and continue to rinse the powders with water till clear, if any powders are left it did not dissolve in HCl, they may contain value (if there were powders left lets see if they contain gold) if powders left now add a 10ml HCl and about 2ml bleach heat till fumes vapor off chlorine gas, dilute with a little water, dip a Qtip into the liquid, drop a drop of stannous chloride onto the Qtip, if it turns purple we will need get the gold out of this solution, if no gold was in this solution then we can add a piece of steel to the liquid to cement out copper and other metals, decant liquid from the copper, and neutralize the liquid with NaOH sodium hydroxide (lye) (caustic soda) to precipitate base metal oxides (raise pH to 9), till the solution is a clear salt water, decant this slat water from the metal oxides/hydroxides, dry these powders and the copper powders now solution and powders are safe to dispose of, dry powders in trash and clear salt water is safe for a sewer ( I like to keep my dry copper powders for other purposes).
“You don’t ask a easy task do ya buddy.”
Jason you are right, I do not try to make it easy, and sometimes the tasks are difficult, but if I did not feel you were man enough to handle them I would not suggest them, refining as you wll soon learn is not an easy task, not as easy as it seems it would be to you at this point, but it is worth it, and I think you can handle it, just be patient and take it easy, learning takes time and sometimes lessons are not easy, but then purity in our gold is worth it, and the education I feel is even worth more than the gold.
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