Electronic Finger Processing to Recover gold

Starting another gold recovery run. I've got my big beaker here. It's really full of fingers. It's all fingers this time. A lot of them close-cut fingers. There's no memory chips on it. It's all just fingers. A little bit of solder. A few little chip capacitors and resistors left on the boards, but they're pretty clean for the most part. Some of the fingers have been really close-cut off the board, so there's nothing there but the fingers. I'm using mostly liquor from the last run with a fresh shot of muriatic acid and a little bit of hydrogen peroxide in there. I can see there's a pretty vigorous reaction going. I've got the bubbler going. There's a lot of material in there. This may take a while, but it's also summertime, so it's a lot warmer. Maybe the reaction will go quicker, so we'll see. I'll leave it there for probably at least a week before I try processing it and see how well it goes. Also, there's some bits from my last run that still had visible gold on them. They're back in here for a second run through. I'll let this go and see what the results are in a week or so. One more thing. About a third of the material in there belongs to my brother. Whatever gold I get, a third of it's going to him, so just for the record. Okay, it's only been about two hours. It's really hot out here. It's about 95 degrees. You can hear the air conditioners droning in the background between the chemical reaction and the sunlight shining on it and just the general fact it's 95 degrees. This is really hot, and I see lots of gold floating around in there already. This may not take a week. We'll see. I'll let it go for a while, but I see lots of free gold floating around in there already after a fairly short time. So, this is working good. Warmer weather. I guess it's good for something. YouTubers, this stuff has been bubbling away for four days now. Now, that's not very long compared to the last couple of batches I ran, which I let go for at least a week or eight days, but it has been hot up into the mid-90s every day, and the heat seems to be accelerating the dissolution of the base metals in there. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give it a shot and see if it's ready to go. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off the bubbler, take the lid off, and bring it over here, and I'm going to dump the liquor, only the liquor, into this colander with some paper towel in it just to catch any gold foils that make it out. I'm not going to dump the PC board pieces in there because they'll poke holes in the filter paper. Then, I'm going to take the pieces out of the beaker one at a time, and I'm going to rinse them in this rinse beaker and wash them off with the water from the spray bottle, and I'm just using tap water at this point. There's no point in using distilled water for this process. Distilled will come later. So, I'm just going to try and wash all of the gold foils off into this beaker right here. This is a process I figured out last time, and it worked pretty well. It was pretty quick, and I didn't lose so much gold all over my workbench. Before I do anything else, though, I'm going to gear up. I've got my safety equipment here, my leather apron, my gloves, my face shield. I'm going to do all that just in case I get splashed with some of the nasty liquid in this beaker over here, and it is nasty. It's very acidic. It's got lots of heavy metals in it, so I don't want to get any of that on my skin, in my eyes, or on my clothes. So, I'll relax a little bit once I get that liquor poured off into this catch bucket here, and I may give everything a quick rinse with some water just to knock the acid down some, and then I can go in and pick the pieces out one at a time with my gloved hands and make sure all of the gold is off of them. So, I'm going to get geared up and get started, and I'll give you updates as I go. Okay, I have poured the liquor off. Pardon my voice. I've got the face shield on. I guess I can take it off for the moment. I've poured the liquor out through the filter, and some of the gold foil was floating in the liquid, so it's caught on the paper towel in there. That's fine. That's the purpose of the paper towel. So, nothing gets through into there. A lot of this stuff looks like it still has a lot of gold on it. This piece of gold finger looked like it was still 100% complete, like none of the gold had come off, but I'll tell you what. I just ran my finger across it, and all of the gold came right off, and I rinsed it off into this rinse beaker. So, all the gold from it's down in there, and I'm going to proceed to do the same thing with each piece of circuit board in here. And so, between what's caught on the filter here, what stays in the bottom of this beaker, and what goes in here, I'm hoping to catch all of the gold. And this should go pretty quick, because it only takes a few seconds to clean each piece. So, I'm going to get at it, and I'll give you another update in a minute. Oh, and I'm really glad I had my gloves on when I poured this stuff over, because I got sloppy with it and managed to pour it all over my left hand. So, I'm glad I had my gloves on, or I'd probably have some chemical burns right now. So, don't forget your safety equipment if you're going to try this at home. Okay, here's an example of what I was talking about before. Here's two sets of fingers that just came out of the beaker here. The one on the left looks like it's hardly even been touched. Well, the one on the right looked exactly the same a minute ago. All I have to do is run my fingers across it, and those fingers come right off. You know, wash it off in the rinse beaker here, and get all the gold in it. So, this is going pretty easy. So, I've got a small pile done already. It's only been a couple minutes since I did the last segment. So, it's going easy. I'll give you an update when I get done. Okay, it's done. Everything's processed. I've decanted off most of the liquid in the rinse beaker, and look at all that gold. There's a lot of gold there. Yeah, this was a good run. That is really beautiful. So, most of it came off clean. There's maybe the errant speck on a few of these pieces, and then over here I've got the stuff that, well, I'm not sure what happened with this one. It was on the bottom. Maybe it didn't get good liquid circulation around it. There's still a lot of gold stuck on there. It just doesn't want to come off, and then some of these smaller pieces, I don't know if it's showing up on the camera, maybe not, have through holes plated in gold that didn't come off either. I mean, it's just a tiny amount of gold, micrograms probably. Same with this one, through holes plated in gold that didn't come off, and then I got a couple pieces where the conformal coating extends over the gold a little bit, and it didn't come off. So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take these pieces and throw them in with the next batch and see if I get better removal by sticking them in again. But the vast bulk of it is gold-free. Like I said, maybe there's the errant speck on it, tiny speck from, you know, stuck on in the rinse water, but this worked really, really well. It didn't take long. It took me about a half hour to process all this, and it probably would have gone quicker if I didn't have to stop and answer the phone a couple times. So, it worked really well. Got all this gold. Plus, oh, I forgot, I've still got gold caught on the filter paper in here, too. So, what I will probably do is process this filter paper. I have a collection of filters with gold caught on them. Someday I'm going to process them all and get the gold out of them. This one has a lot of gold on it though, so what I might do is just throw it in with this when I dissolve this gold to re-precipitate it as pure gold. So, I may just throw this filter paper in with that batch. So, that's probably a project for another time, but when it happens, I'll tack it on to the end of this video. So, things are going good. Got a ton of gold. Very happy, and thanks for watching so far. Hey, YouTubers. Okay, it's the next day, and I've got all these gold coils from yesterday that I need to dissolve and re-precipitate as pure gold. So, I got about three or four different ways I can do this. I can use aqua regia. I can use poor man's aqua regia. I can use bleach and hydrochloric acid to dissolve the gold, or I can use hydrochloric acid and concentrated hydrogen peroxide, and there's probably other ways too, but those are the four I can think of off the top of my head. Well, I don't have any concentrated hydrogen peroxide, so we can't do it that way. I don't have any concentrated nitric acid, so I can't do aqua regia. Now, I do have hydrochloric acid or muriatic acid over here, and I do have nitrate salt, so we could make poor man's aqua regia and dissolve it. I also have concentrated bleach, sodium hypochlorite, from my pool. So, I think the process I'm going to use, since this is just fine foils, and the bleach and hydrochloric acid doesn't seem to dissolve chunks of gold very well, but it does dissolve fine foils, I think I'm just going to use the bleach and muriatic acid method. Now, we'll see how it goes, and there's one advantage to this too, is I don't have to neutralize the nitric acid at the end before I precipitate the gold, since there won't be any nitric acid in there to neutralize. So, hopefully this will work pretty well. We'll see how it goes. This will be only the second time I've tried dissolving gold in hydrochloric acid and bleach. So, I'm going to get geared up for handling the chemicals, and oh, and I finally broke down and bought some proper watch glass beaker covers. So, they were pretty inexpensive on Amazon, so I thought, oh, what the heck, you know, I'll buy a few. So, let me get geared up, and we'll get started. Okay, first thing I'm going to do is add a couple hundred milliliters of hydrochloric acid to the beaker, cover on. Now, I've got some of the concentrated sodium hypochlorite from my pool chlorine container here. I'm going to start adding it, dropper fulls at a time, and see if we can get these gold foils in here to dissolve. Now, as I understand the situation, adding the bleach to the hydrochloric acid is going to produce free chlorine gas. So, you need to do this in a fume hood or outside. I'm going to try to stand far away from it, number one, and number two, upwind of it, and the free chlorine in solution will oxidize the gold and get it to make chloroauric acid with the hydrochloric acid. So, we'll see how it goes. I have done this before, just once, with a much smaller amount of gold. So, we'll see how it goes with this amount. Now, if it doesn't work very well, I'll get the hot plate out and heat it. I don't know if heat is necessary. I don't think I heated it last time, and it dissolved the gold. You can see the bubbling as chlorine gas is formed as I dropper this stuff in. Sorry, I'm once again hand holding the camera rather than setting it on a tripod. I know I'm bad about that. I don't want to put the bleach in too quickly and have a boil over. So, you can see how much bubbling is involved with each little addition. If I dumped it all in, it would really bubble over. Let me let that sit for a while and see if any of the gold is dissolving. I can tell by the color that there is probably some gold getting into solution. It's starting to turn yellow. So, that would indicate that there is some chloroaric acid forming. So, that's a good thing. So, I'm going to just let it sit for a bit, maybe give it a stir, and then add some more bleach in a bit. Well, it's been a couple minutes. I gave it a stir, and I'll tell you what, the gold does seem to be dissolving nicely, even without being on the heat. In fact, the reaction is heating up the liquid on its own pretty well. So, I don't think it needs to go on a hot plate. So, I'm going to let it sit for a little while longer, dissolve some more, and if necessary, add some more bleach to it. Well, it's been about 10 minutes. I stirred it again and gave it a couple more shots of bleach. I'm not really sure the extra shots of bleach were necessary, because the gold was dissolving pretty good. It looks like it's pretty much almost gone, and there's a lot of debris on the bottom of the beaker. It's hard to tell how much gold is still left in there, how much is just debris, but it looks like most of the gold has dissolved, which is nice. I may have used a little bit too much muriatic acid. I may not have needed to use quite as much. The solution doesn't look very concentrated. I could boil it down or just, you know, precipitate the gold out as is. I'll probably do that. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to wait until I'm sure all the gold is dissolved. I'm going to add a little bit of sulfuric acid, a shot of sulfuric acid to it, this drain opener here, just to make sure that if there's any lead in there, it gets precipitated out, and then I'm going to filter the solution through a couple layers of coffee filters into another beaker. So, I'll have a nice, nice clean gold solution, chlorooric acid solution, that I can precipitate the gold out. So, I'll get nice pure gold. So, I'm going to let this sit and make sure all of the gold is dissolved. I'll probably give it another stir or two. I doubt it needs any more bleach. So, let me stir it up a little and just give it a chance to make sure all the gold has dissolved. Okay, it's been a few more minutes. All of the gold does, in fact, seem to be dissolved. There's no more bubbling going on. Well, minimal bubbling. Seems like just debris in the bottom of the beaker left. I'm going to do a stannous chloride test just to verify there is, in fact, gold in solution in here. Yeah, that dark color tells me there's a lot of gold in solution there. So, that's good. Now, I didn't have any doubt, but, you know, it never hurts to verify. And what I'll do now is I will filter this into this other beaker. So, I've got a nice, nice clean solution that we can drop the gold out of. And then, once the gold is dropped, I'll test the solution to make sure there's no more gold dissolved in it before I discard it. I don't want to throw away any gold. So, stay tuned. That's coming up. Before I forget, I'm going to give it a shot of concentrated sulfuric acid just to make sure any lead in solution gets dissolved or precipitated. I'm sorry. Any lead in solution gets precipitated, so it'll filter out when I filter the liquid. And I think we're just about ready for filtration. I'm going to let that sit for a couple more minutes just to make certain everything's dissolved, all the gold's dissolved, and all the lead's precipitated. All right. It's been a couple more minutes. Everything seems to be dissolved. Time to filter. Oh, there's a lot of chlorine gas still dissolved in that liquid coming out as I filter it. Got to remember to stand upwind. Remember, do this in a fume hood or wear a gas mask if you try this at home. Chlorine gas is nasty. They used it as a poison gas in World War I and killed a lot of people with it. So, be careful. So, it's going to take me a while to filter all this liquid. I'll show you what it looks like when I'm done. So, while this is filtering, I thought I'd give you a little bit about my philosophy on this. I try to keep it as cheap as possible because I'm not going to get a huge amount of gold out of this stuff. So, you know, I process waste that I can acquire either for free or for next to nothing. I use the most inexpensive chemicals possible, you know, bleach and hydrochloric acid. I mean, I use this stuff in my pool all the time anyway. I've already got it on hand. It's not costing me any extra. I'm making my own stannous chloride solution. I picked up these beakers secondhand, really cheap, funnels from an automotive store, coffee filters, you know, a drain opener for sulfuric acid. So, and I'm working outdoors. If I keep doing this, you know, into the future, I'll probably need to build a proper fume hood. But, for now, working outdoors for the small amount I'm doing works good. So, my whole point here is I'm trying to keep the cost of equipment and reactants as low as possible because the amount of gold I'm getting, you know, it's one, two, three grams at a time. It's not a lot of gold. I'm not getting rich at this. So, you know, if you want to get into this at home, and I know a lot of you do, I get feedback. You know, a lot of you, I'd say don't do this at home, but everybody wants to because, you know, the allure of gold. But you got to keep the cost down. You got to keep it as inexpensive as possible. You know, coffee filters instead of proper lab filters, you know, whatever you can do to keep the cost down. Otherwise, you know, you're going to be paying a lot more for the gold than if you just went out and bought bullion. So, as it is, I'm probably not making a profit, but it's a lot of fun. It's interesting and keeps me off the streets, let's put it that way. Well, except for collecting e-scrap, so I do that. Anyway, I just wanted to editorialize a little bit about, you know, keeping it cheap. You got to keep it cheap. Otherwise, you're wasting a lot of money on this. Anyway, I got to put the camera down and spritz everything into this, everything in this beaker, into the filter with my spray bottle of distilled water. So I can't do that with the phone in one hand. So I've got to put it down. Be back in a minute. Okay, it's about got it all filtered through. Gonna wash down the filter with some distilled water to try and get as much of the gold solution out of it as I can. Wash it a couple of times until the yellow color disappears. It does look like I got all the gold in solution. It doesn't look like there's anything but some plastic debris and maybe some chip resistors and stuff down in there. Looks like all the gold went into solution, so that's good. Speaking of yellow color, okay, give it another wash here with distilled water just to make sure I'm not leaving a lot behind in the filter. This filter is going to go in my gold filter collection now. I'm getting quite a collection of them, and someday I will just process all the gold filters and see what I can extract from them. Some have been used for filtering chlorooric acid like this, and some have been used for filtering solutions after gold has been dropped out. So they'll have a little bit of microfine gold on them. So once I get a big enough collection and a little time, I'll process them. Gonna let this finish draining now. Not gonna make you watch it. Okay, we're done draining. I'm gonna take this filter out and add it to my gold filter collection over here. And like I said, someday I'll process all the gold filters and see what I get out of them. So let me get the gold filter out of there. I'm gonna wash down the beaker or wash down the funnel to make sure there's nothing caught in it. And I'm gonna transfer this to this other clean beaker over here for precipitation purposes. So I'll do that off camera. Okay, so I've transferred it to this smaller beaker. As I said about dissolving gold, there's lots of different ways to dissolve gold. There's lots of different ways to get gold out of solution too. You could use copperous, which is an iron salt and a plant food readily available. You could use, and I was not aware of this, you could use ascorbic acid or vitamin C will cause gold to precipitate. I'm going to use the most common method, which is some sodium metabisulfite. It's basically a meat preservative, I believe, is what it's primarily used for, but it will also precipitate gold out of solution. Now, if we had dissolved the gold in aqua regia, which was one of the options, we'd have to neutralize the nitric acid first, or this wouldn't work. We'd just get lots of foaming and nastiness and we wouldn't get any gold out. But we didn't use aqua regia, we used bleach and hydrochloric acid. So there's no nitric acid in there. So the sodium metabisulfite should precipitate the gold without too much trouble. And I could dissolve it in hot water first and add it, or I'm just going to be lazy and I'm just going to put it in a couple of spoonfuls at a time until it looks like all the gold is precipitated. So we'll see how it goes. Give it a little bit of a stir here. They say you shouldn't stir it while it's precipitating or you'll gold plate your stir rod. I don't know how true that is, but every once in a while, I feel like following directions. So color's starting to change. Okay, so much for following directions. Yeah, okay, it went clear and now it's starting to darken. And I think I see some gold precipitating out on the bottom already. So there we go. The gold is dropping out. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to wait and let the gold precipitate and all land on the bottom. And that could take a while, that could take up to a day. And then I will test the solution with stannous chloride and make sure there's no gold left in solution. If there is, I'll add some more sodium metabisulfite and bring it out of solution. So we'll just let this stand. The darkness is caused by microfine particles of gold suspended in the water and they're blocking the light. So that's why it got so dark. So we'll just let this stand and let the gold particles consolidate and drop to the bottom. And then I'll test the solution and see if it needs more sodium metabisulfite. Well, it's been about 20 minutes, just long enough for me to work a little bit on some of my other projects. A lot of the gold has settled. I may let it go, like I said, overnight just to make sure it all settles out of solution. Yeah, you can just see a pile of gold in the middle, where the swirling solution piled it all up. So yeah, it shows up a little better this way. Not a huge amount of gold, but like I said, I'm not getting rich at this. If I'm lucky, it's probably a gram, maybe two, we'll see. But I'm going to let it all settle out and then that may take until tomorrow. And I'll test the solution to see if there's any more precious metals dissolved in it. And if so, I'll add more sodium metabisulfite. But yeah, all that gold foil in that beaker did not amount to a lot of solid gold. But I wasn't expecting it to because, you know, the gold foils, they're really, really thin. But it's a little more gold to add to the collection. It's piling up slowly but surely. So I'll show you when it's time to weigh it up. All right, it's the next day. This has settled overnight. All of the gold has settled out of solution. There was quite a pile in the center as well as a good dusting on the bottom. I tilted the beaker over to one side and the central pile slid down to one side. You can see how thick the dusting on the bottom is. So there's more gold in there than I thought there was originally. Still, it doesn't seem like a lot for the amount of foil that was in there, but the foils are really thin. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to test the solution to see if it still has any gold in it. So I'm going to get a couple drops here and do the stannous chloride test on it. I am seeing a very faint, maybe showing it better on the camera than it is to the eye, very faint color there. But it's not the purplish black of gold. It's faint and it's orange brown. So I'm thinking that means that there's a little bit of platinum in there, which is to be expected. It's kind of a contaminating and a lot of gold. So, but it looks like it got all the gold out of solution. So that's good. So all this stuff, the liquid, I'm going to decant the liquid off and it's going to go into my stock pot. And I'll pardon the noise. The neighbors are getting a new roof. I'm going to decant the liquid off and it'll go into my stock pot. So maybe someday I'll try processing the platinum. But I don't have very much of it right now in my stock pot. So maybe years down the road, we'll see. So I'm going to decant the liquid off. All my beakers are in use for other projects. So I've got this tall beer glass, but I'm going to, I'm going to decant the liquid off through a filter just in case any gold comes along with it. And I think I see a little bit of gold floating on top. So I'm going to knock it down with spritzing from my spray bottle of distilled water. So that'll, that'll knock any gold on top down, break the surface tension, and it'll sink to the bottom. So I'll give that a few seconds to sink. Then I'll start decanting the liquid through this filter. I'm pouring the liquid. I stirred up the gold powder a little bit, so I'm letting it settle again. I've got it, the beaker tilted like this to get the, the gold to settle into the bottom corner of the beaker down there. So I'll let that settle and continue decanting off the liquid. The liquid's coming off nice and clear. So, and the, the Stannis test showed there's no more gold in it. There's just a little platinum. So this is good. Once I get the bulk of the liquid decanted off, I'm going to wash the gold into the smaller beaker here. So I can give it a couple of washes. I'll give it a concentrated hydrochloric acid wash and a couple of distilled acid, distilled water washes to clean it. But I'm going to let that settle for a bit before I do anything else. I don't want to dump too much out. I've got a filter to catch it, but I'd like to keep as much of it together as I can. The, the gold is in this small beaker now. I've already given it a, an acid wash, and I'm on its second distilled water wash now after the acid wash. It looks pretty clean. Nothing came off with the acid. The color stayed clear. So it looks like it's pretty clean gold, like there's no copper or anything else in it. So that's good. So I'll let it settle and decant the liquid off and give it another distilled water wash, and then I'll let it dry so I can weigh it. Okay, I'm done washing. There's the gold I got. I'm gonna, I would normally put it on a hot plate and dry it, but I have some errands I have to run. So I'm just going to put it in a safe place and cover it with some paper towel and let it dry naturally because I'm not going to get around to weighing it for a while. I got things to do. Some gold got caught on this filter in here that I used for decanting off the liquid. This filter will go with my gold filter collection, and it'll get processed eventually so that gold's not lost. So anyway, I will show you what the weight is when I get around to weighing it. Okay, this is a little unexpected. I was expecting a little bit more than 0.7 grams. I was expecting maybe somewhere between one and two grams based on the volume, but you never really can tell until you weigh it up. Now some was caught on the filter I used, but you know, probably just less than a tenth of a gram, I'm sure. Probably a hundredth of a gram maybe. So just as I was saying earlier, you got to keep the processing cheap because, you know, not necessarily going to get a lot of gold out of this. But at least all that stuff was cheap to process. I've got a little more gold to add to my collection. My plan is to wait until I have a fairly large amount of gold powder on hand, maybe an ounce or so, and then what I'll do is redissolve it and re-precipitate it to purify it further before I attempt to melt it into a button. So this gold looks pretty good. It's got a good color to it. It looks like good clean gold, but you know, I know some of the gold I did, especially my early precipitations, is a little dirty, a little bit of contaminated. So what I'll do is I'll wait until I have a lot of it around and then I'll redissolve it, re-precipitate it, and then melt it into a button. So okay, that's it for this process. Got a little less out than I thought, but used, you know, pennies worth of reactants and got the stuff cheap. So not too far in the hole on this. Might even make a profit, but probably not much. So I'm going to add this to my container of powdered gold and move on to the next project. Thanks for watching.