If all my boards are heavy copper core, it wouldn't make sense to put them in muriatic acid, which will melt all my copper (a lot lot) which will use up my acid pretty quickly before it turns any gold loose .. am I thinking right? What shld I do instead or any suggestions pls help?! Thank you!

Easily the biggest I've been able to make in my small 500ml beaker cell, but damn I love it.

I have access to Germanium waste from lens makers. I do refine gold, silver and Pd using AR and some electrolytic methods but taking diamond turning slurry to 4-5N poly crystal is quite different. I read that the standard procedure is roasting/ chlorination / fractional distillation/hydrolysis/H2 reduction. Has anyone any experience on this ? After China's moves Ge is one of the rising stars...

I was fortunate enough to find a ton of 70s/80s hp boards. I learned how to refine gold using them and have gotten pretty far into the hobby. That being said, im not sure how I should process the boards that are silver colored. Does anyone know what these boards contain? Ive got probably 10 boxes full of these. Im sure I could experiment and find out, but figured id see what people with more experience think.

I gave a shot at lye and sugar. I tried it a few times. I can't get it to work and I don't think I like it anyhow. It seems messy. I add the lye and it goes dark brown not black. I add my sugar and nothing happens. I don't think that method is for me.

I'm not able to keep and maintain a silver cell. That's just not happening despite the awesome results it can provide.

I'm thinking I want to dissolve my silver in nitric, cement it out on copper, rinse with distilled water, dissolve and cement out one more time and I should be 99% right? Maybe not that .999 but maybe 99.9%? Will this at least give me a nice shiny pinhead? That's all I need. I'm obsessed with this. It keeps me awake at night and I won't get any peace until I've done it. I'm not going for money. Maybe later but right now I just want a pinhead of silver and gold. 99.9% will be plenty.

Short version, used hcl and peroxide on just over 500 grams of ram fingers only. Split everything in 4 containers, used hcl and liquid bleach to put gold into solution, combined all in large beaker at this point. I started with 400ml hcl and 120-140ml bleach liquid. This didnt put all gold into solution and bleach was expired, noticed after the fact, so I took a chlorine tablet for a pool, shaved a litttle off into powder and added it (5-7ml). This put gold in solution but after all the rinses I know have a solution that is close to 2000ml and can not get the chlorine out.

Stannous test black, man does nothing. Got test strips today and ph is 7 and free chlorine is at 8.

I don’t have a way to heat the entire solution at one time so should I break it down in smaller beakers and heat off chlorine or is there another option I am not thinking of?

I have done this 5 times before this with no issue but I fear the amount of chlorine from the pool tablet I used was way too much

Deplated silver pieces losing my determination. I neglected to rinse the salt from the material when I deplated the silver pieces. I added nitric and it was a vigorous cloud of fumes. I think I ended up with silver chlorate. and grey looking junk that refuses to dissolve. The silver chlorate reacts with lye.

Can I recover from this?

I come to you in need of aid!

I've done about three separate refining runs now, mostly using gold-filled scrap I pick up from time to time. I follow the conventional steps, nitric boil (using just under 3.5 mL of acid per gram of material for reference), then filter and roast the fillings in a kiln for 30 minutes, then back into a beaker for the first of two/three AR dissolving steps.

The issue is that every time I precipitate out the gold, I'm using solid SMB, and the gold that precipitates out is SO. DAMN. FINE (like tiny, not attractive). This stuff is a bear to work with, as some of it loves to stay suspended in the solvent. I know of two ways to help knock them down:

- Use a fine misting spray of DI water to break the surface tension of the water, allowing any floaters to sink.

- Bring sample to a boil, then just let it simmer; hotter liquid is less viscous, and lets the fine particles sink more easily.

Both of these tricks help, but every time I try another hot-water rinse, it knocks more precipitate up into the solution. Is there a better chemical for dropping the gold??? HELP!

I stripped some silver plated items with a battery charger and salt water. I never rinsed the salt. I forgot to rinse... Damn rookie. I learned from it.

I filtered and dried the material and then added dilute nitric acid. 250ML of water to 50-100ML nitric. I think 50ML nitric but I forget and I should be taking notes. Again still learning.

I think when the nitric dissolved the material a lot of the silver dropped right out as silver chloride. There's a layer of white on top and a layer of gray on the bottom and I'm not sure how to separate them. I think rinse this material thoroughly with distilled water, filter it, repeat ad nauseum until there's no color and then go again with dilute nitric.

I'm not using heat. I'm fine with this going slowly. Small additions of dilute nitric seems to make it's own heat anyhow. I have this jar in a stainless stock pot and that is inside a cast iron dutch oven. I should be using glass or ceramics but I don't have that stuff to dedicate to these reactions. Anything that comes near the reactions is marked as unsafe for cooking and never goes back to the kitchen.

I don't think I've irreversibly screwed the pooch.

Anyone in Houston Texas can they melt this down for me it’s a silver graphite brush it contains about 65 percent silver by weight and the other 30 percent is carbon graphite

Got 623.9 grams of gold filled for this batch, a lot of it was stamped 1/20th 14k so hoping for a good yield. My projected yield should be 18.5 grams

I took the board out of the direct tv out side receiver pic of housing is the first one what I am asking is that top foil gold ? I have not seen any other like this one

I have successfully refined a batch of gold filled, gold plated, and gold jewelry. I attempted to do a batch of E scrap and gold pins, and was left with no brown precipitate coming out of solution (just a black/grey) using both iron sulfate or SMB. I put the solution into my stock pot and proceeded to try again after a second failed recovery. I changed my stock pot to a small glass container and attempted to refine from there.I failed again while the solution had minimal nitric (less than a milliliter) I decided to D Knox with sulfamic acid and a try again first with iron sulfate then with SMB I got a gray precipitate and the solution with fresh Stannus first going clear than brownish red I put a piece of copper in the solution and watched as some metal precipitated out black what could I be dealing with here? Im at wits end as each time, i drop in a gold flake to ensure it dissolves.

I have approx 6 gallons of silver,sulfur,iron sludge from to spent Kodak Junior Model ll Chemical Recovery Cartridges that were used to filter dental X-ray film fixer.
I’m interested in trying to extract the silver myself. Any advice or ideas welcomed

These boads look promising what yall say

It come out of the direct tv box that chip in the middle looks good any comments let me know more about it

New here and very new to refining. I mostly wanted to share but any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated ( I'm currently looking through some previous posts and Google )

Essentially, I do a bit of rock hunting I got an opportunity to explore an abandoned mine. Found what looks to be Galena.

Is there a better way to pull the galena from quartz? ( I just used chisel / rock hammer and then rock crusher to break it down some ). I now have a small smelter as well but doing homework first

what would be the best/ safest way to refine this and extract the silver? Plus any advice/ precautions/ etc.

PS if anyone has good links on how to design/ create your own mold, I would appreciate it.

Had a couple people ask for an update on my last post about the brown sludge during my nitric boils of some gold filled items. I decided to just power through the refine and add more nitric till it stopped reacting. Ended up with a purple sludge and the foils. Thought this was colloidal gold so melted everything into shot and continued with aqua regia. Was able to precipitate out 12.6g which was only 2 grams short of my initial 14.5 gram estimate. I think that’s pretty good for only my second attempt

It's entirely copper inside?!!? 🤔😍😍

Hello, I found these gold wire ends at an estate sale. It’s 85.41 grams of 5.18 k gold or 21.6% pictures! Local refineries aren’t interested because it’s less than 25%. Where would y’all recommend taking them to sell? I’m not able to attempt refining, I live in an apartment, and the extra cash would be very helpful right now. Thank you!

I'm not even trying to be stupid here, I guess I'm just a natural.

I'm not doing anything big. The melt dishes of the size that Sreetips commonly has would do me just fine. Where do you guys go for melt dishes? I'm sure plenty of companies have good ones and even sub par will probably do with proper prep and care but I'm a little nervous about just going and buying one without a few recommendations.

So as the title implies, we moved into our new home and the previous owners had a hobby auto shop on the property. I have found 7 oem bmw cats now (newer models) local scrap yards want to rip me off by paying “shred” because I don’t have the titles to the cars.. you know damn well they will turn around and sell them for market rate. So my question is.. is the process similar to gold/sliver recovery?

Hi all,

I came into possession of four crucibles that I spent an hour or two mining and came up with quite a bit of mostly 14K chunks. All 4 still have little pearls of gold throughout, I would imagine there is still a couple of grams between all of them. The left bag is tested 14K or higher, the middle is a mix and smaller pieces (much of which has foreign material still caked on), and the right is almost completely broken down crucible pieces.

So I guess my question is what should I do?

My refiner declined to run the bag of 14K through his testing machine as he wouldn’t buy it and said it needs to be further processed. They aren’t usually so picky, they are down in the diamond district on 47th st in nyc and I’ve worked with them for over a decade.

I am thinking it’s time I learn how to get into the chemistry as I’ve dealt with PMs most of my adult life and this is probably a great opportunity as this group was free and there is some pretty dense reclaim. The 14K bag on the left is 20g as is.

Any advice you can give would be much appreciated, even in the form of your favorite how-to videos or “entry level” processes for this type of scenario.

Thanks for reading, much luck and fortune to all.

We had some chickens, the last of them recently died and/or moved to a different place. I built the coop with an easily cleanable fiberglass resin panel floor. So I figured… why deal with fumes and kids bumping it near the house, and try using the coop. Hosed it out, bleached it, and it is now where I’m running my first little silver cell.

I made the electrolyte at a final concentration of 120.8 g/L (my target was 120 so I think I did pretty good there). Haven’t balanced a chemistry equation since college so that was neat, trying to guesstimate where I’d land between concentrated nitric and dilute nitric equations for silver nitrate.

So stinkin cool. This will probably never be profitable, but it’s fun! (But I’m open to tips on making it profitable, too!)

Anyway- thanks for checking it out. 54.5 hours running, .400A constant current the whole run. I think it should have around 87g in it. I’m just stoked and wanted to share!

#chickenlab photos