What process should i use?

[jmsiebenaler]

I'm new to this and I kind of screwed up. I had a large amount of costume jewelry plated with gold. Instead of stopping here first and realizing I needed to use a "wash" of some sort to get the gold off, I melted the gold. Now I have large bars of metal with gold in it. What process do you recommend I use to get the gold out? Or have I lost it forever.

 

[butcher]

Costume jewelry is made from all kinds of metals, many of which can give you a lot of problems with acids, some of the metals like zinc are very reactive to acids, others like lead can form insoluble chlorides, tin is just a problem in most any solution.

Costume jewelry is not only low yield but can be troublesome to work with.


Yep you messed that gold up, if it were my mess, I would just throw those melted pieces in a plastic bucket, which I use to dump my waste solution in (hoping to collect the somewhat valuable slime later).

Consider you’re self-lucky you did not work with high-grade material before you spent time to understand how to process it properly and lost a lot of values.

My suggestion is Hoke's book, and reading the forum begin learning, work with memory fingers (study and understand the process before jumping into the middle of another mess) use this and Hoke's getting acquainted experiments, save up that high grade material until you have working experience and enough material to process and to make a nice hunk of valuable metals.

 

[Drowningbodacius]

Shouldn't this be in the help needed section.

 

[goldsilverpro]

What's a "large" amount? How many pounds?

Maybe you can sell the ingots on eBay. I'm serious. There have been recent sales for ingots from melted gold plated copper based electronic pins that went for 3 or 4 times the gold value. The seller of these was basically honest and, in his ad, said that they were melted pins and he had no idea how much gold was there. You could say about the same thing.

As far as refining the stuff yourself, that's a big problem. Typical gold plated jewelry only runs about $20/pound, more or less. If you used nitric, that would cost about $50-$100/pound in chemicals. There are other ways, but all have setup and chemical costs.