Does anyone legally incinerate? - Page 2

Originally Posted by gustavus

I have a 1/4" steel sheet with an angle iron welded on as a backstop to hold the motherboard in place while shearing of the IC's with my air chisel. You will find that more than just flatpacks have gold bonding wires inside.

Had a truck load of telcomm boards, that I had removed the IC's after incinerating ball milled everything into powder then stored into 20 liter pails, during our move once again placed and forgotten about.

About this time last year once again found the pails, tipped the contents onto a plastic drop cloth then using a magnet from a trailer axle equipped with electric brakes and my large battery charger removed all the magnetic scrap then put everything away to work on my catalytic leaching project.

Came across these two pails once again last week, anyhow a large pick up truck load of boards will net you about 80 lbs of ash. I tried panning the values from the ash this evening but discovered that ball milling ground everything much to fine to pan out.

So the project goes back on hold, getting the shop organized takes priority.

Pictures of the shearing station and my home built ball mill.

Nice set up...

I use a ball mill as well, does a great job on some times of material.

I use a classification screen used in panning/prospecting to sift the gold wires. Works fairly well.

Scott

Have you inquired about this at the gold refining forum?

Originally Posted by Ewasted

Have you inquired about this at the gold refining forum?

I daresay that myself, patnor1011 and noidea from the gold forum are the pioneers of working with incinerated IC's with patnor1011 being the only one to offer toll refining for this type of material.

There are plenty of GRF members who will refine your material after being pyrolyzed, Barren Realms 007 comes to mind.

The best way to process is to flux up your ash then melt the metals into an anode. bag the anode then part the copper onto a stainless steel cathode.

To cast my anodes I use a cast iron frying pan oiled up before pouring in the molten metals, the oil creates instant carbon your metal will not stick to the cast iron..

Ammens book on refining precious metals gives formulas for electylites used for gold, silver and copper parting cells.

Originally Posted by PistoneScrapProcessing

Ha imagine that someone in the scrap industry trying to rip someone off!!!! The real problem with smelting is there is not a gold standard or certain way that everything is smelted and recovered. Everyone has a different process and way of doing it.

Its just like being a steel mill and trying to buy everything for as cheap as possible and trying to get maximum return out of your melt. Every mill has a different way of melting there steel, different buying program, different alloys produced, different mixing programs, different grades of material they buy, etc. In my opinions there are to many variables to smelting for it to get as close as you can to 100 percent recovery. There is going to be waste and material up the stack and into the baghouse. IMO.

Hmm when a laboratory can assay gold in parts per million from a ton of ore not much if any loss there if any at all.

Greenwood B.C. ran a large gold smelter early 1900's, there are huge slag piles everywhere and not a gram of gold to be found in the slag, someone must have been doing something right.

https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=greenw...en&sa=N&tab=wl

Gus, have you thought of using a blue bowl type concentrator to seperate the fine gold out? Mike


https://www.google.com/search?q=blue...w=1280&bih=690

Actually I have leached cons with the HCl/Cl method.

Smelting is used in mining, sometimes it's the only way to separate metals from others efficiently. For example, if there is not enough silver to dore it and run as a silver proposition, then the silver has to either be upgraded, or removed. So it's often smelted with another metal it has more affinity for and thus is separated from the other amalgam. Then the process is repeated to separate out the other metals.

Also, depending upon the type of ore you are dealing with, the cons may be incinerated or roasted to convert chlorides to their metallic form, or to drive off sulfides, etc.

Precious metals often times are not in their metallic form when mined. There are actually very few that exist naturally in their metallic form, most are in their mineral form and must be somehow converted into their metallic form.

All of the processes that I currently use to recover and refine PMs, with the exception of one, have been used 100s of years before electronics were ever dreamed of. Point in case is Aqua Regia, it was first discovered at used in AD 800 by the Persian Alchemist Geber. And smelting goes all the way back to the copper age, even before the bronze age. So Aqua Regia, chemical refining with acids, is about 1200+ years old, and smelting, which started during the copper age, goes back over 5000 years. And there were obviously no computers back then.

Scott

A few pictures of the electric trailer brake magnet doing its job, these magnets are meant for intermittent use and get very hot with extended use so I have decided to go with an AC magnet which has a much better duty cycle.

Trailer Brake Magnet.


AC Magnet.