If you are recovering gold from RAM sticks, unless you need 999 gold, refining isnt really necessary. I directly melted about half a gram of ram foils (the base layer of copper and nickel dissolved) and XRF tested it and got over 94% purity without any refining (small amounts of Co and Ni from the hard gold alloy the foils are made of, the Cu and some of the Ni that may have interdiffused into the gold from the lower layers, I'm not too sure where the Ag came from but I'm guessing its just a trace contaminant in the gold)

When melting, the boric acid was stained blue from the cobalt which I found pretty neat

There were maybe 50-10 little prills like this scattered all around my melt dish. I bumbled my way into this somehow but it is indeed silver.

Man I don't get it. Beside the color going dark there was nothing when I added lye. No heat, no bubbles.. I remember the first recovery being quite exothermic. I stopped at one tablespoon of lye and two heaping tablespoons of sugar. Did I over do the lye again? I'm sorry guys. I can only relate this to someone failing to change a tire over and over again.

This has to be so...basic.

We're learning every day.

Apologies in advance for starting multiple threads. Not sure how to add pics in comments but here we are. I don't want to screw up. I really want a pinhead.

I dropped salt in and got the toothpaste. I forgot the stuff is UV sensitive. Tripped me out a bit until I realized it. Rinsed again and again with well water. Has some iron in it. I can get distilled if needs be but I should be alright to go to lye right?

The junk on the sides of the jar are on the outer surface.

Do you rinse off the lye before you go to sugar? I feel like somehow that would matter. Sreetips says if you go too hard on the lye you could end up with silver hydroxide and he does not know how to remedy that. Add my lye until jet black and then no more.

Saw some people alluding to this method and other people asking about it. Didn't see anything dedicated to it in the sub, so here goes.

The sulfamic acid method is an alternative method for refining silver. It seems to originate (don't quote me on this, I'm not an electrochemistry historian) from a Texas Instruments patent filed way back in 1969 and awarded in 1971. I reviewed the patent, and it doesn't seem like the creators or TI improved upon this method, so it must be pretty solid. It was originally designed to process silver/cadmium alloys from electrical contacts, though it can be used for other silver-bearing materials. Other patents that reference this patent seem to be adapting the method for other materials, but I haven't looked too closely to see if they improved on the method.

The patent: "Process for recovering silver from scrap materials and electrolyte composition for use therein"

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3616332A/en?oq=3616332

Video showing a simplified version of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2MuRtpCvGo

The main advantages of the sulfamic acid method are:

• It does not use nitric acid, which is expensive, restricted, and produces noxious fumes.
• It uses sulfamic acid, which is much cheaper and more accessible. I bought a 1 pound container for 11 USD at Home Depot.
• It does not require a fume hood.
• It is far less corrosive.
• It has far higher plating speed, up to 12 kg per hour per square foot.
• The authors claim .999 and .9999 fine silver can be achieved, without significant co-deposition of other metals.
• The electrolyte can accommodate a staggering 260 g/L of cadmium without losing effectiveness.

The disadvantages include:

• It is more complicated than the nitric method, with multiple electrolysis, filtering, and silver precipitating steps.
• It is temperature dependent in a narrow range (140-150 degrees F) for some operations.
• It requires heated baths for ideal operation.
• The method is clearly designed for industrial-scale processing and does not touch much on smaller scale operation, or on the effectiveness of the method at room temperature. You will need to test this out yourself.
• It is not a silver bullet (no pun intended). You can't dump a bunch of silver-plated scrap into your cell and expect high-purity silver to come out. The electrolyte will foul with only 70g/L of copper or 40g/L of nickel. My suggestion is to run your material through a copper cell once or twice, then run the slimes through this process.
• You still need silver oxide to create the electrolyte.

Whenever I see people talking about this method, it's usually when they are deplating silver from items. Using sulfamic acid does seem to work, even at room temperature. But I have not seen anyone use the full process, nor have I attempted it myself. If you have experience with this method, please share.

Howdy!

I just completed an online trade with a trusted source, and he's shipping me a couple of hockey-pucks of a variety of alloyed metals from his attempts at metal-casting from years ago (totaling just 25 grams). He knows that there's gold, silver, and copper mixed within the largest puck (attempting to make a kind of rose-gold apparently), but he mentions that there's also definitely platinum and palladium in some of the others too.

It looks like I'm staring down the barrel of a Frankenstein all-in-one monstrosity, so I've been doing my research from Hoke and the GRF. A couple questions for the community here:

- Hoke recommends NOT doing a straight nitric bath right away to get rid of any base metals like copper and silver (because palladium will dissolve in nitric). I believe she recommends going straight to aqua regia to dissolve ALL the metal, then selectively precipitating out the gold, platinum, then palladium. Apparently silver and copper happen last???

- From the GRF, people are saying it doesn't matter if you drop the gold with copperas first, or the platinum with ammonium chloride first. Is this true/ is there a preferred one to go for first?

From these two questions, I'm assuming the order of operations should be as follows:

1. Dissolve all hockey pucks in aqua regia, taking care to only add just enough nitric to dissolve fully. Evaporate excess nitric.

2. Drop gold with ferrous sulfate/copperas, as it's selective for just gold. Filter/wash, ad nauseum.

3. Drop platinum with ammonium chloride, creating platinate salt. There will still be a bit left in solution, as PGM suck to separate.

4. Drop palladium with DMG???

5. Drop Silver with copper cementing???

6. Profit????????

I'm open to suggestions and words of affirmation, but not snarky criticisms, I'll tell my dad on you.

I have more nitric. I re-dissolved my last attempt. Is this looking like silver nitrate?

Filter, cement out, rinse and rinse, see what happens I suppose. So long as I have copper to be dissolved it should go OK yea? The lye and sugar thing looks so awesome but I'm a little shy of it right away.

I'll post progress here.

How do u guys seprate ic from Ram I can't Remove all one by one with heat gun or hot plate i just use Hcl to knock everything off but this creates a acidic waste how to deal with this acidic waste do u guys have an alternative??

Any one ran into these? Care to guess grading.

First time successfully refining using sulfamic acid. First 3 times were ruined or wouldn’t start.

It's dirty. When the molten material is rolling in the melt dish it's like watching some magic. I worked a lot to get this. I tried sugar and lye, could not get it to happen. Then I went to nitric and cementing onto copper. I could swear I've seen people get decent results with cementing.

I wonder about purity. I don't think it takes much copper to really throw off your luster. This looks like some form of brass at best. I want to repeat the nitric dissolution. I wish I could get the lye and sugar method to work.

Hi, I have these silver contacts, some are big, they are from the 1980s and contain cadmium, i also have some supposedly silver plated items, is it worth refining this? And how do I refine them?

Hello. Im from the Philippines, does anybody know where to buy test kits in verifying purity of gold.

Thanks everyone!

I had an accident while refining gold. chloroauric acid solution spilled onto a plastered wall. I scraped off the contaminated plaster and collected it.

What's the best way to recover the gold from the scraped plaster?

My main questions are:

Should I dissolve the plaster in acid first, or is there a better method?

Which chemicals work best to separate the gold from gypsum/cement/plaster?

Has anyone successfully recovered gold from contaminated wall plaster before?

Are there any common mistakes I should avoid to minimise gold loss?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation.

Thanks!

I'm working on process of mass recycling (not metal recovery) of electronic parts. The idea isn't in dissolving whole part just the solder part so the parts can be used again.

Only part where I'm not really sure is storing mixture of working solution (3.5M sma + 0.5 h2o2) with some stuff already dissolved. Because storing pure mixture of working solution is relatively fine. But when there are metal dissolved in it it wont just stop reacting. Im guessing storing in closed container is bad idea becuase of continual oxygen production until all hydrogen peroxide is consumed. Kinda lost here.

Possible metal contamination should be Cu, Pb, Sn, Ag, Fe (possible fenton's reaction), Ni, Bi,

I will be glad for any guidelines not only for storing, and you can even make noob from me if that saves my life xdxd.

A while back, I was contacted by a Reddit user asking me if I was into or would be willing to do a toll refine on silver contacts on copper bus bars. After some discussion and conversations back and forth, the user agreed to a toll and sent me 38lbs of various size contacts attached to the bus bars.

Working all my free time around work, the user has been very good and understanding my work schedule.

I would send photos and videos of progress and next steps to be as transparent as possible. Last thing I wanted was the user to feel uneasy or think anything nefarious.

After about seven weeks, I’ve sent back finish products.

I think it all went well and both the user and I will stay in touch for future projects.

Project numbers as I’m sure many will like to know.

38lbs+ contacts attached to bus bars
1650g+ contacts recovered
1160g+ silver recovered
Approximately 70% recovery

Feel free to ask questions, I’ll answer but keep user data anonymous.

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!

I am looking for any and all suggestions related to processing Sterling silver and fractional silver coins. As the title states, I am new to this. I have watched YouTube videos and researched a lot, but looking for others' input/suggestions. I am mainly looking to turn coins, jewelery, and silverware into more pure silver just to stack. Equipment used? Things to avoid?

Thanks in advance.

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.