Where did my gold go?

[george2524]

Hi all,
New to the recovery/refining hobby, So far I have been using hydrochloric acid-peroxide to remove the gold and hydrochloric acid-chlorine bleach to dissolve the gold, sodium metabisulfate to drop the gold. My last batch was memory cards that appeared stripped. After all the gold was stripped I found a lot of tiny chips and a few slightly larger chips in with my gold. I had a beautiful clear medium yellow color solution after dissolving the gold and putting the solution through a filter. I could not get to it right away to drop the gold, the next day the color was blue with lots of powdery sediment and did not show any gold in solution when tested.
Anyone have any thoughts on why my solution turned blue?

 

[butcher]

Check your chemicals spelling you need sulfite, not sulfate to precipitate gold from solution.
Sodium metabisulfate will not precipitate gold.
Sodium metabisulfite will precipitate gold from solution.

The blue color comes mainly from copper in solution,..

From your very brief description, the powdery substance contains your gold and most likely other insoluble metal chlorides, the impure gold normally looks like a black powder, while other metals like lead chloride are white.

 

[george2524]

Sorry for the misspell. I redissolved again and my solution was yellow once more and i then filtered and this time it was clear and I was able to drop my gold.

I never have been able to spell worth a darn, thank goodness for google and spell check.

 

[nickvc]

Sorry for the misspell. I redissolved again and my solution was yellow once more and i then filtered and this time it was clear and I was able to drop my gold.

I never have been able to spell worth a darn, thank goodness for google and spell check.

I’m not trying to pick on you but in this field spelling the name of chemicals correctly is very important, someone who knows nothing, or doesn’t have English as their first language, but thinks they can just try a few things might cause real damage to themselves or others by mixing the wrong chemicals together, even with the right chemicals what we do is still hazardous.
If some of your spelling is off we don’t care just try very hard to check any chemical spellings and I’m sure we are all good with that.