IC cons for resabed01

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resabed01 said:
rusty said:
Looking good resabed01, whats next to do.

Wet everything down with a layer of water, mag the fine iron filings out.

You can leave the water to use for your dilute nitric leach, 50/50 water acid when going after the silver and any palladium there could possibly be in there.

Filtering is going to slow you down a tad, try wicking.

Use distilled water on that silver rinse, the distilled water is free of minerals looking to grab some along the way.

I'm using HCL to convert the silver nitrate to silver chloride, then going the scrap iron route to convert this into metallic silver.

Once your satisfied all the silver nitrate has been wicked from the concentrates, proceed to go for the gold using the leach of your choice.


A word of caution, those finely divided powders react violently to acids, I add the acids to my cold and concentrates let the acid work on the cons for a half an hour or more before adding more acid, string at this next addition then when I'm satisfied the acids have taken up some of the metals I add the heat with a very slow paddle speed.

The heavy metals will form a layer under the insoluble mud, so be careful string as not to bring up to much metal into the hot acid at once or you'll have a boil over.

Here's a boil over I had this afternoon, caused by to much paddle speed for too long a duration. You'll not be so lucky should you have a boil over, the reactor saved the day. Didn't loose a gram of values.
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Thanks for the advice Rusty. Magnetic seperation was the first thing I did. From the total I pulled out almost 10% of the solids that were magnetic. Some small trace amounts still exist but I don't think there will be enough to cause problems. I'll give it another water wash and go over it with the magnet again before I start leaching. I think my biggest enemy here will be tin. I wanted to do a HCL leach first to remove tin, aluminum and anything else that wants to hitch a ride with the HCL. After that, incineration again before moving onto nitric acid.
Before I start any leaches I want to find a suitable vessel that will be large enough to prevent boil overs as I expect a fairly rowdy reaction. Four litres would be enough, maybe more. I know the coffee pots won't work in this case.
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Give yourself plenty of headroom, start with the amount of acid you figure is needed for the job then add a teaspoon full of concentrates periodically. Once each teaspoon full has settled down add another.

My recent boil over reactor had 4 liters of material plus the leach so figure that I had 6 liters of headroom not counting above the level mark and the lid cavity.
 
Small 5 lb batch that needs the numbers crunched, after the ball mill, put the milled material into what I figured would do for the 50/50 nitric leach.

Using this water to slurry the milled chips pulled out the magnetic material, from here I added my nitric in small increments taking up the silver and any possible palladium.

Filtering the silver nitrate the solution came out almost water clear, from the filter dripped to filtrate into a flask which had some hydrochloric acid, as the silver nitrate converted to chloride a beautiful mound of silver chloride formed inside the flask.

I might add that the chips processed had magnetic legs.

After several rinses with distilled water there was no more chloride forming inside the flask telling me the filtrate in the filter was now free of silver. From experience I know this not to be true as silver will later show up during the evaporation of the AR.

Silver chloride from the AR will catch in the filter as the gold chloride passes through so its not big deal.

After filtering the silver nitrate free of the concentrates, I go straight to AR. Finely divided gold goes into AR at ambient temperature very nicely, which is what I have going on with the pot below.

Once my AR has stopped reacting then comes the heat to catch those more persistent precious metals - like platinum.

At no time have I incinerated the concentrates, your doing a lot of unnecessary work and using an excess of acids.
 

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Over the winter I purchased a bunch of 2000ml beakers with this project in mind. The concentrates fit nicely into one of these and leaves about 3/4 of the space as headroom. I also found some clear glass pyrex cereal bowls at a goodwill store that fit perfect for use as a watchglass. With this gear I wanted to finish these concentrates this year. Work and life consumes a lot of my time so my backyard recovery and refining moves along slowly. It's now warmed up enough outside so things don't freeze overnight so I wanted to get started on this.
Having incinerated the concentrates last summer, I started with the nitric leaches. I did 3 in total, 24hrs each all while sitting on a hotplate. The first one was most likely the weakest. The second pulled out some more color than the first. These two leaches tested with stannous and showed a very faint presence of gold. I kept these separate and it is right now it's on a hotplate with a measured amount of sterling added to consume any excess nitric before I drop out PMs with copper.
The third nitric leach tested with a strong presence of gold. This I expected because I wasn't happy with the quality of incineration I did last year and I'm sure some chlorides got through. I poured this leach off and set it aside.
Now, I'm on the first leach of AR and I expect to do 3 of these as well @ 24hrs each with washes of DH2O between. The first AR leach has been bubbling away nicely all day now. Tomorrow I'll pour it off and rinse before moving onto the second.

Working with these concentrates is time consuming because they are ground so fine. It takes pretty much a whole day for them to settle so I can decant. Also, once they sit overnight they harden like cement and it takes considerable effort to stir them up again so the leaches can be effective.

At this point it's impossible to guess how much gold is in there... it could be 1 gram or it could be 15.
 
resabed01 said:
Working with these concentrates is time consuming because they are ground so fine. It takes pretty much a whole day for them to settle so I can decant. Also, once they sit overnight they harden like cement and it takes considerable effort to stir them up again so the leaches can be effective.

At this point it's impossible to guess how much gold is in there... it could be 1 gram or it could be 15.
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Is there any way you could get someone like a local scrap yard or one of the forum refiners to analyze it with an XRF ?
It might read out something like this..... on a 30 gram sample as it came out of the ball mill.
0.726 % Pt
1.83 % Au
4.14 % Ag
0.324% Pd
 
If I remember correctly I pulled about 1.5g of gold out of those concentrates. Disappointing to say the least. I still have everything set aside including a small cup with some dirty Ag and Pd that i pulled out.
In my opinion, the only way to do black ICs is to incinerate first to unlock the bond wires from the resin. This first step is crucial.
I'm now working on a 5.36kg batch of black ICs taken from RAM sticks. They were double incinerated and I should have those complete by next year.
 
Boardsort pays $3.90 per pound, 10.88Kg = 23.98 pound of Black IC chips would give $93.5. At a spot price of $1193/ounce it would represent 2.4g gold at least in mixed lots... and probably more as boardsort isn't buying to lose money.
I'm sad to tell you that you probably lost more gold in the 90% tailing than you had in the 10% concentrate.

I don't want to gloat, but I had real reasons for being skeptical in the beginning.
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=17717#p180573

A centrifuge with a fluidizing bed is a wonderful thing to have when dealing with ores, but ball milled raw IC:s is far from a gold ore and Rustys centrifuge isn't fluidizing and when you get a solid sediment in the bottom everything will go over the edge.
Rusty said "if gold is present it will squeeze out the lighter material water". No, not if gold is mixed and smeared all over the place. The size of the particles also plays a large role.

Ok... may I gloat a little bit at least...
rusty said:
Göran you would have to run one of these fantastic machines to get a better understanding of how it works. In the meantime wave at the competition as it passes you by.
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Waving goodbye to Rustys centrifuge as it passes me by, spewing gold in any direction... :mrgreen:

And for the record, I have spent five years at the university studying physics and among other things fluid dynamics. I understand how a centrifuge works.

Göran
 
Rustjunkie said:
Rusty is still wondering if you have gone any further with this ?
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Rusty is no longer a registered member of this board.

Harold
 
Out of respect for the forum, it's rules and other members, my questions are not really personal. This started as a detailed experiment laid out so even I could follow and understand it. I have followed the centifuge thread both here and in occasional correspondence with Gill and see no harm in relaying the results. I am sitting on a a fair bit of similar scrap that I am considering preparing for recovery or refining. I thought the idea was to document the processes from beginning to end, for all to see. For my part here I am taking everyone at their word as this goes from a given weight of chips hopefully to pictures of a refined product. After milling the powder and seeing it being run through the centrifuge the various metals are separated by weight and the lighter materials flowing over the edge and caught in a settling vessel so nothing is lost or discarded, ever. Up to this point it has been treated as ore. No?
 
Rustjunkie said:
After milling the powder and seeing it being run through the centrifuge the various metals are separated by weight and the lighter materials flowing over the edge and caught in a settling vessel so nothing is lost or discarded, ever. Up to this point it has been treated as ore. No?
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If nothing has been lost then Rusty has the missing gold if Resabed01 only got a kilo of concentrates back.

Rusty had a too simplistic view of how a centrifuge works. If you ignore basic principles then you will fail.
A centrifuge works on fluids, not sediments. It works on particles suspended in fluids. It even works on separating different isotopes of atoms when it is in fluid or gaseous form. As soon as there is a sediment the particles are fixed in place and won't move. Anything washed away from the surface will bring both heavy and light materials with it.

What sinks faster in water, a gold particle or a small rock? Correct answer : it depends.
If the rock is huge compared to the gold particle it will sink faster. The same is true with a centrifuge, smaller gold particles can sink slower than larger but less dense particles. Ligher particles of the same size sinks slower but if the particle sits close to the bottom it can reach the bottom before a heavier particle that is higher up can do it.The gold can easily be smeared onto other particles and when it does the combined particle can have a much lighter density than gold.
When particles have sedimented then it is too late to do anything about it and they will soon be covered in more sediments.
It will work just as good as squeezing your tooth paste to separate the heavy stuff from the lighter. It just don't work that way.

Göran
 
Resabed01 can still be found on YouTube. Been a while so I am struggling to recall what name he uses there, possibly the same name as here.
 

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