Gold Recovery for Dummies?

! Dear readers! Please remember that internet forums are a gigantic "one-room schoolhouse" where you will see snippets on subjects which may be dangerous for you to dabble in if you are not trained in that field.

If Joshua is wearing proper protective gear and exercising reasonable caution, exactly what he has done may not be frightening. But general experimentation by mixing chemicals, electricity, heat, metals, etc., without being grounded in theory can produce extremely dangerous reactions.

His general proposition, that the acid and electricity will dissolve the copper and nickel, while the gold to sink to the bottom of his tank is in error. Gold recovery is a many step process, and unfortunately the belief that it can be recovered by simply dissolving the rest with vinegar, salt, and electricity isn't sound theory. Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

? Hi Cory,

Did you every find a way to extract the gold from the luster glazes?

Butch

Butch Bradley
artist - Wheeling, Illinois
September 27, 2024

A. GOLD REFINING STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS

For every ounce of scrap gold you are going to refine you will need a capacity of 300 milliliter container for the aqua regia solution.

1. Place impure gold to be dissolved into a glass or plastic container.

2a. Aqua regia - Mix one part nitric acid to 3 parts hydrochloric acid. OR
2b. To the container, add 30 milliliter of nitric acid for every ounce of metal.

To the container, add 120 ml of hydrochloric or muriatic acid for every ounce of metal in the container.

3. Allow impure gold to dissolve for an hour to overnight for complete dissolution.

4. Once all gold is dissolved, filter out any particles out of the acid solution containing the liquified gold into another glass container using a fine stainless strainer. The remaining particles should not be discarded as these may contain other precious metals!

5. The acid containing the dissolved gold will be an amber to emerald green color depending on the purity of the gold and should be clear (not murky or cloudy). If the acid solution containing the dissolved gold is murky, it may contain particles and should be re-filtered with a finer grade paper filter.

6. Slowly, add the water/urea (urine ) to the acid solution containing the dissolved gold. The acid solution containing the dissolved gold will foam with the addition of the water/urea (urine). Do not add the water/urea (urine) so quickly that the acid foams out of its container. When the acid solution containing the dissolved gold stops reacting to the addition of water/urea (urine), stop adding the water/urea (urine). You've just raised the pH of the acid from 0.1 To 1.0, killing the nitric acid but not the hydrochloric.

7. Add precipitant ( sodium bisulfite ) slowly in minute amounts to the acid solution containing the dissolved gold, immediately the acid solution containing the dissolved gold will change to a muddy brown appearance as brown particles of gold form in the solution. Occasionally agitate the solution with a glass stir rod, as the brown particles continue to form they will sink to the bottom of the container, this brown "mud" is, despite its appearance, pure gold.

8. Allow precipitant ( sodium bisulfite ) to fully draw out all the gold out of the solution, test for gold in the remaining solution, if it tests positive for gold, you may have to add more precipitant ( sodium bisulfite ).

9. To test the solution for remaining gold, first immerse the end of the stirring rod in the acid. Remove it and touch that end to a paper towel to make a wet spot. Put a drop of gold detection liquid on the wet spot on the paper towel. If any gold is still dissolved in the acid, the wet spot will turn a purple-black or a purple-brown. If you see this color change then give the precipitant more time to work and/or add more precipitant.

10. Now all the gold should be drawn out of the solution and the acid should now be a clear amber color with a brown mud settled at the bottom.

11. Using a fine paper filter, pour off the acid into another container allowing the mud to stay in the filter. The mud is pure gold.

12. When all the acid is poured off, return the mud to a container for rinsing, add tap water to the mud. Stir and let the mud settle. Using a fine paper filter, pour off the tap water into the container with the acid. Do not pour off any particles of brown. Repeat this rinsing 3-4 times or more.

13. After completing the final tap water rinse, rinse once again with aqua ammonia ⇦this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] ( %10 ammonia to %90 distilled water ) white vapors will appear. The aqua ammonia cleans impurities from the gold mud while, at the same time, it neutralizes any acid still clinging to the gold mud.

14. While in the fine paper filter, give the mud on last rinse, this time with distilled water until mud and filter is clean.

15. Take filter with clean gold mud and gently squeeze of any excess water and place filer with mud into crucible for melting.

16. Once melted, the gold will again take on the appearance of metal. If you've followed the instructions carefully and used filters, the gold will be 999.5 % Pure with virtually no losses.

17. Platinum- If you had platinum in your gold, it will not dissolve, to any appreciable degree, in the room temperature aqua regia. It will be left behind when you pour off the aqua regia, prior to precipitation. To insure high purity of the platinum, you will need to re-refine this material. Put this material in a fresh aqua regia bath. This time, however, heat the acid to simmering. Continue heating until all the platinum is dissolved (that may take 1-2 hours). When completely dissolved at 1 ounce of ammonium chloride for every ounce of dissolved platinum. The platinum will precipitate as a red mud. If you want to leave the iridium in the platinum, then wait for it to precipitate before recovering the platinum. Iridium will precipitate as a blue-black mud after the platinum precipitates. Platinum group metals will also show up on the stannous chloride test. Platinum turns red, palladium Palladium turns orange and iridium turn blue-black.

C. WILFORD
- ELGIN TEXAS USA
January 7, 2012

A. Philosophers stone? Alchemy? When using nitric acid to remove base metals in gold recovery it is very easy to misplace your gold. On electronics that use gold for shielding (such as RF shielding) the gold can be very thin and instead of coming off in foils will separate into finely divided particles and will get lost in trash. Another cause for missing gold recovered this way is bad work habits. Dirty glass that has been cross contaminated will hold chemicals that can't be seen. Did you use the glassware for any solution that contained a HCl acid solution? If so, remember that you can't rinse acids from materials. If you use a container for a HCl solution and then rinse well, and then use it for a nitric acid solution a weak aqua regia will form and dissolve values. A small amount of HCl will make quite a bit of AR solution. As far as the philosophers stone, the only one I can think of is the one in the Harry Potter stories. Values that have been precipitated have distinct colors and as far as white powder goes, metal salts can be white if crushed finely enough. If you would like some help, put the witchcraft aside and let me know what you did to get what you have and I will try to give some advise on what it is and what can be done with it.

Jeff Massey
- Decatur, Alabama, USA

A. Chemical extraction of precious metals from ore is a very long and tedious process. First, the ore has to be roasted to a red hot temperature and held there for 20-30 minutes; this reduces the sulfides to sulfur dioxide and the organic carbons to carbon dioxide. Next, you need to mill the material to about 200 mesh. The first chemical leach will need to be ferric chloride ⇦this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] ; this will remove iron; heating the material speeds this process up. After the solution turns black, decant and rinse well several times with water. Next, add diluted sulfuric acid and stir; heating the material speeds this process; this removes any iron oxides left from the ferric chloride wash. Rinse with water with several cycles. Now you are left with a good material fit for leaching with aqua regia. There are a couple of other leaches but they are far more dangerous than the one I described.

Jeff Massey
- Decatur, Alabama

A. Hi Rich. I don't know what you mean by "the eBay thing" ... buying gold recovery equipment [adv: that stuff on eBay], buying gold-bearing scrap [adv: gold scrap on eBay], selling scrap to eBay?

If you feel that you know enough to safely experiment, no one can stop you. But things that seem dirt simple often aren't really quite that simple :-)

When you are doing electroplating, you're not moving tiny bits of gold metal from the anode to the cathode (that's not possible), what you are doing is dissolving the gold into the solution as a gold salt, moving the gold ions in the salt from anode to cathode, then oxidizing the gold salt back to gold metal. So to create even the poorest gold plating deposit for subsequent refining requires that you use a solution which is capable of dissolving the gold as a salt and keeping it in solution. That is hard to do without a "hazardous solution", usually based on deadly cyanide -- it's not something you are going to do with table salt.

You should probably try to get access to George Gadja's delightful little "Gold Refining" ⇨
which explains what can be achieved by de-plating, and on which substrates. Strong sulfuric acid, S.G. 1.65, with some sort of cooling to make sure it doesn't go above 100 °F should work. But the gold does not plate out, rather it precipitates as a mud, probably requiring further refining to be saleable.

Luck & Regards,


Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hi Logan. Do you know the thickness of the gold plating, so you have some idea of how much gold is there? You'll never know whether your process is efficient or you are just pouring most of the gold down the drain until you start with that. Good luck.

This page includes the step-by-step instruction you seek (for example, the 17 steps generously offered by C. Wilford), please don't dismiss them as "techno-babble". People have told you there is no safe way for someone with no chemistry knowledge and training to dabble around in complex chemical recovery operations involving cyanide and aqua regia, so there is no "safe and productive way". Sorry.

Complex chemistry can't be made simple. If you choose to not try to learn the relevant chemistry it will forever remain "techo-babble". You have 3 choices: stop, live very dangerously, or commit yourself to studying & learning the subject. George Gajda's little book "Gold Refining" [on eBay , Amazon, AbeBooks affil links] covers the whole subject and is very understandable.

If you want to just try to scrape the gold off with an Exacto knife ⇦this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] be 100% sure to never do it without wearing good, real, safety glasses ⇦this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] . A shard of razor sharp steel breaking off and flying into your eye is a possibility.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hi L. Please try to phrase your question in terms of the step-by-step instructions that C. Wilford posted, or an alternate list of instructions. You're certainly welcome to ask for clarification of a step that you don't quite understand, but it isn't reasonable to ask how to simply skip step 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, and jump from step 5 to step 16 :-)

Luck & Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey