Harold_V said:
When all of this comes into focus for you, and it will, you may come to realize that I was trying to help you through a situation in which you likely had misinterpreted some of your results. Platinum precipitating without assistance should have been the first clue. Instead of showing gratitude, it appears your choice is to kill the messenger.
Right now, I must get this posted so I can go find my beanie with the propeller on top. I fear I'm out of uniform.
Harold
Hey, Harold. I do apologize to you if my straight forwardness looked like an insult to your knowledge. I don't mean it that way at all. As I said, I learn a great deal from your posts. I just think you shut yourself off from a lot of good knowledge that could enhance what you already know. You say you are a man of science, but I would suggest that you cease to be such when you refuse to let go of your old paradigm long enough to even look at a new one. But that is your personal choice and I respect it.
Neophyte that I am, I'm not afraid to suggest that you might learn something from my posts too. Hoping that your skepticism just might come from an actual desire to know if some of the things I am saying are true or not, I have a little experiment at the end of this post that you, or anyone else, can try to prove it to yourself.
Remember when you posted the following on Oct. 8th on the Aqua Regia/Sub Zero forum about a chemical called "T-6":
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Funny-----as slick as that is, you'd think he'd be busy recovering all that gold instead of trying to screw people out of $20.
You want my opinion? The only thing hidden is that dude's intelligence. If there's enough gold in salt to recover, it would show in an assay.
Here's a simple rule that will keep you out of trouble:
If a sample won't fire assay, regardless of the grandiose claims of a promoter, it's highly unlikely it contains any values.
Harold
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Did you ever bother to look at any of the links GSP provided to find out what T-6 is and how it works? If all you know about is recovering values from scrap then it may not mean much to you. But in the natural world PGM's are most plentiful in such a finely divided and complexed state that their chemistry is more organic than inorganic. So you are right in saying that you can't recover it economically, IF you are expecting it to act like the PGM's you get from scrap. But the natural world isn't made out of manmade scrap - yet.
So if you want to recover new PGM's you have to learn how to meet nature on her own terms instead of expecting her to come meet you on yours. Does that make sense to you so far? Nature is organic. Most of the PGM's in most of the world are organically bound. I think the proper term for this particular branch of chemistry is "Organotransition Metal Chemistry". Refiners are inorganic chemists. Each of these 2 branches of chemistry may not realize that the other exists, but he/she who bothers to learn them both is way ahead of the game when it comes to this subject.
T-6 is an organic carbon ring molecule that has a very strong affinity for high-valent T-metal cations. That's why it makes such an effective cleanup agent for heavy metal polution. The humic substances in the soils and water grab the heavy metal ions and try to complex them so that plants can eventually use them. The T-6 has a strong enough covalent affinity for PM's to grab a large % of those ions away from the humic substances in such a way that they can begin to form metal-metal bonds. In nature micro-organisms are responsible for the formation of most of the metal-metal bonds that convert these organic PGM's to placer and vein deposits. In the new paradigm of PM mining the same thing can be done with chemicals like T-6.
So, you said your opinion of Mike at GoldMineWorld is, "The only thing hidden is that dude's intelligence", and you say that he is, "...trying to screw people out of $20." Would you rather stand by those statements, or see for yourself how plentiful the PGM's are by swallowing a little of that pride and actually trying it out for yourself?
This will be the first time I have ever offered this process publicly. It has nothing to do with how I am recovering platinum now, so I might as well give it away to whoever can make good use of it rather than just put it on the shelf to collect dust. It is not all that unique anyway. It mostly reflects the kind of information that Mike sells in his $20. reports. So for those who need a step-by-step guide and don't want to buy any of his reports, here is one from me for free:
1) Go to: http://www.goldmineworld.net/mainmenu.html and order
5 square feet of his carbon fabric for $35.; and his 2oz sample bottle of T-6 for $7.50. His web site say the shipping is free.
2) Cut off about 1 square foot of the fabric and tie it to some kind of an anchor with strong wire or string so that you can leave it in a creek for a week without losing it. If the water is very swift try to find a place where the fabric won't bounce against rocks too much. Otherwise you might just find shreds left on your string when you go to retrieve it. The fabric is a very fragile carbon fiber felt. Spring, summer and fall are the best times for this but winter will work if you can manage not to lose it. The best creeks are the ones that are closest to springs and lode bearing mountains, but even a major river should work. There are gold and/or PGM's in all of them.
3) Now boil this piece of fabric in about a gallon of sodium hydroxide and water at PH 11 to 12 for an hour. The liquid should turn a very dark brown from the humic acid being leached. For this initial experiment you can wring the solution out ot the fabric after it cools, wearing rubber gloves and eye protection, of course. This will pretty well trash that piece of fabric in the name of science, but if you decide to go large scale later there are ways to make the fabric last much longer.
4) Filter any sand or debris out with a coffee filter.
5) Stir in 1/2 oz of the T-6 and let it soak for a few minutes.
6) Titrate down with HCl until a lot of precipitate forms. This should be somewhere between about PH 6 and PH 8. Filter that precipitate out and save it.
7) Add another 1/2 oz of T-6 to the liquid and titrate down with HCl again to about PH 1. Let it soak here for a few minutes. Some precipitate may be trying to fall out here too. This is likely to be humic acid that has already been stripped of it's PGM's by the T-6 so just ignore it.
8) Titrate back up to wherever you get the most precipitate again. It will probably be somewhere between PH 7 and PH 9. Filter out the precipitate and add it to what you saved in step 6.
9) Rinse the combined precipitate several times with distilled water in a double coffee filter.
10) Dry the paper coffee filter with the precipitate on it in an old pan at about 225 f.
11) Scrape off as much of the dried precipitate as practical and add it to a suitable clay crucible for smelting at 2000f. (Alternatively, just add the whole paper filter with the material.)
12) GoldmineWorld's suggested house flux is: 40 parts borax, 5 parts soda ash, 1 part flour, 1 part silica sand, and a silver blank as a collector. The suggested hold time at 2000f is 3 hours, but I get very good results at just 1 hour.
13) Pour the melt into a cone shaped mold so that the metals settle in the point at the bottom.
14) After it has cooled break the slag away and weigh the bead. I always lose a lot of silver, probably because my furnace gets too hot, so don't assume that the values you have collected can by determined by weighing the raw bead alone.
15) Part the bead with hot 50% nitric acid to dissolve the silver plus any lead, copper or palladium you might have collected. Drop the Ag and Pd as per the directions on Steve's web site.
16) Treat the solids left over with cold aqua regia to dissolve any gold collected.
17) Now dry and weigh the solids that are left. This is your PGM content, plus, probably, some minor contaminants. Start parting them if you know how. I have seen enough values to definitely look profitable IF the problems I am having now of assaying and selling them can be surmounted. Especially if you can sell the rhodium.
Realize that this is not a quantitative assay because there is no practical way to determine by what ends up on the piece of fabric how much of the PGM's in a given waterway. Also, there are endless variations in the way this experiment can be performed that suggest that no single method is going to get a fair representation of all the PM's in the water. Also, you can repeat the leaching of the fabric several times and still get good yields each time, before you have to put it back in the water to collect again. This experiment should, however, prove to the average skeptic that the PGM's are ubiquitous and abundant all over my state of Oregon, and, from what I hear from others, most likely in nearly every waterway in the world. After you prove this one to yourself, Harold, you'll want to reexamine your skepticism about gold and PGM's being in sea salt.
Daniel
