what happened!? silver and nickel drop with au?

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first thing...those connectors were solid gold. had to have been because i ended up with 4.6 grams! wasnt happy with the purity so i am rerefining right now along with cleaning all my filters. will update again after rerefine is done.

now the thing im really happy about is my mess this post was all about anyways. i had pure success in getting the white powder back into solution while leaving the gold out of solution and i ended up with way more than expected going off of the information shared with me. still need to collect and wash then weigh and update. here are a couple pictures!

here is a video of my lab set up! check it out. rate, comment and subscribe! thanks!
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chris.bozman42,
I watched the video.
What concerned me is this looked like it was in your house.
I do all of my work outside; have been building a shed, but having second thoughts about working inside it.

The fume hood looks good, for what your doing now, but there is no way I would do what I do in a house, or even in a shed I cared to use for something else.

The acidic fumes, spills, and other mishaps, could ruin a house, or even an old shed.

If this is not in your home, it is a nice little lab, if it is in your home you need to get it out.
 
it is in my house butcher. in a spare bedroom. i have a glass top for small spills and the fume hood works great. this is only for my small projects. the larger stuff will be done outside. as far as spills i am extremely careful and only use small amounts at a time inside. this is only temporary. we are moving in 3 months into a new house with a garage and will be building a lab of professional quality. i will update on the forum in the gallery as i go.
 
I would not do this in the house, no matter how good the fume hood worked, I realize your not doing a lot of material, the fumes from these chemicals can be absorbed into the sheet rock of that house, everything in that house could beginning to rust away,these fumes can harm your heath and your family's health.


A few grams of gold is just not worth it, or the risk, I would defiantly consider an alternative place to work.
and get these chemicals out of the house.
 
ok. thanks for your input. i will move everything outside as far as chemical processes and chemicals. i will keep my fume hood in here and do my collecting and melting in here. its too cold out to be out for any duration of time. i cant wait till we get into the new house. the garage is away from the house and i can remodel however need be to make it a safe and proper working laboratory. i do not want to put at risk the health of me or my family. once again thanks butcher. i just assumed using small amounts of this stuff with a proper fume hood set up would have been ok.
 
Chris
I have worked in my lab all night long, 22 degrees, rain and snow,whatever the weather, so I know about the cold, even though I am building a shed I think I will still do most of my work outdoors, thinking about just a roof, no walls and a good warm wood stove to warm the ole bones.
 
i had to thought of just building a roof after you mentioned strictly working outside. then i thought of a design that will permit excellent fresh air flow and allow me to keep the inside at a comfortable tempurature. basically make the shed into a fume hood with a fume hood station in it. constant fresh warm outside air and constant ventilation. then i could put a fume hood station in there as a main fume removal method and the room being a secondary method of ridding the area of escaped fumes. i will design something that will work in this fashion. i plan on doing this for years to come and will need a good long term work place.
 
i finally melted the test run of the 100 grams of those pins. I got 3.8 grams. melted with a decent pipe. might run it through one more ar process. i am now filtering off and evaporating a run of 26 ounces. did not fully digest all pins. about 75% of the total mass of the pins is digested. the solution seems to be exhausted. reducing to syrup to add more hcl to rid the solution of any possible nitric left. after this step i will repeat my methods of the test run to rid it of the chloride powder. filter. decant. wash. incinerate then 1 to 3 more ar rounds to achieve the nice light golden color i got from the test batch. which was ran through ar 3 times.
 

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well i just finished with the first round. all the way up to precipitating...and nothing! so im flabbergasted to say the least...so i sit and think for a while. then i decide to go look at the mass of pins material left and low and behold none of the gold digested. the mass the is left is nothing but gold foils the majority of which were flipped inside out showing a copper yellow color throwing me off when i set the pins aside and some of the copper chloride powder. now i believe i basically created nitric with this batch. i messed up on adding wayyyy too much nitrates and by butchers calculations its a 5:1 ratio hcl:nitrate to create poor mans ar. i am certain i just created nitric and basically separated the layers from each other. leaving heavy foil like matter. there is a lot of it too. leading me to believe either none or a very very minuscule amount was digested. now i am going to collect the foils and such and incinerate. then im going to use the acid peroxide method to fully rid the foils of any base metal. then hcl clorox the foils. i am still learning and i know i have made some mistakes but i love trying different methods and yada yada yada. lol. update on the process as i go still until finished.
 
If 100g pins gave 3.8g gold then there is 96.2% base metals.
If you only dissolved 75% of the pins in the next run then any gold dissolved would have cemented out on the remaining base metal. Did you test your solution before trying to drop gold?
The good news is that your solids now contain four times as high concentration of gold (15.2%). This is the idea behind the modified AR process, dissolve as far as you can but not as far as starting to dissolving the gold, then remove the barren solution. Now you have concentrated your gold before the last run when you take all into solution with AR and drop the gold as normally.

Göran
 
Back to your lab set up...
A plastic tub is to cramped an area for doing things like pouring and moving solutions and filtering. Accident waiting to happen no matter how small it's a mess..
Also, looking at your broken off coffee maker/hot plate, notice the stained droplets all over it. Lost values but also indication that it's splattering everywhere when bubbles pop. This is the danger of working inside your house. Bubbles popping, no matter how strong the wind inside the hood, can end up everywhere.
I had a table and wall covered in plastic in my garage with a heavy duty fan blowing in the door and going up through the holes in the delapitated roof. After several poor man's AR batches, there was stains on the fan case that was several feet away from the table as well as the plastic being covered in stains. And... rust and crust on just about everything in the garage.
Where does the hood vent to? And through what materials does it flow?
You should at least keep everything lightly covered to help keep your values from Popping away.

BS.
Just stating the obvious learned from experience on how Not to do something...
 
I was not able to test this batch with stannous because I ran out of the small batch i had and did not make another batch at the time. I made one tonight. So I will be testing the next batch indubitably.
I did however take 20mL and run a small smb test and got nothing. even considered left over nitric. reduced to syrup. added hcl and reduced again and still nothing. So I figured it had all cemented out as I had heard about before. I like this modified AR method better than the sulphuric stripping method because I do not have the proper filtering equipment to deal with sulphuric seeing that normal paper filters do not work. The last run I had to decant and then slowly add water and decant until there was a small enough amount of sulphuric to run through a paper filter. which was a pain.
As far as my coffee pot heater and the stains. I had a wet filter on top to reduce the evaporation of nitric and to stop such splashing and spilling but it had dried up and blown off from the circulation in the fume hood and did not realize it for about 5 minutes. This issue has been taken care of with some old ceramic plates. This afternoon i will be collecting from the hcl peroxide solution and running it through the AR process a couple of times. I will be back with updates and more pictures.

Also, I will be rebuilding my fume hood out of clear plexiglass about 2.5 times the size of my current set up. It was a quick cheap build to help generate capital to get proper equipment and to build my lab up. As far as where my ventilation goes. I have an 8 foot adjustable plastic drain pipe venting out my window about 3 feet out on a 45 degree angle away from the window. window is sealed up air tight. I will also be building an outside covered work space as I described earlier in this thread when we move into our new house. Any large processes from now until then will be done outside though. Only doing the final collection and washing inside for safety reasons 8)
 
chris.bozman42 said:
i finally melted the test run of the 100 grams of those pins. I got 3.8 grams. melted with a decent pipe.
Click to expand...

Hey what id theses pins come out of. Are they gold filled jewelry findings or computer scrap? 3.8% gold is more that watch cases. that's 17.2g/Au #

If I miss read sorry but I find that hard to believe. I wouldn't turn them down if I had the chance though. 8)

Eric
 
there was a contest on the forum about a year ago that concerned pins. the contest was to guess the weight in refined gold from just under a pound of pins. the result was almost a troy ounce of gold.
 
geo. if that is true than that is roughly 1/14th the total weight. if my percentage conversion is correct but i came up with 7% with rounding the figure off of the information given. thats not too shabby. i on the other hand achieved 3.8%. either due to losses or not dropping all the gold out of solution. i would have much rather obtained 7%! :lol:
 

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