If you are not sure, ask a refiner

Did he have an assay done on the material before he started this?

If so I'd be interested in knowing what it showed was in the mix. If he had this done what was supposed to be recovered in PM's?

Do you mind if I ask how much material you had to work with and what you were able to recover from the material and alos what process you used?

What was his procedure for incineration of this material?



That is correct Gustavas that the catalyst needs to come in contact for the reaction to occour. The other info you found was interesting as well.

I was sent 1 lb to run as a sample from a refiner who was attempting to work with the material. I was told it was catalytic material similar to car catalytic converters. I was given an assay that was suppose to be for the material I was sent. The assay was for auto catalytic converter material, but not for the material I was attempting to work with. I didn't find out until after the fact that the material was not what the assay said it was. I then requested contact with the person who owns the material and found out it wasn't from autos, that he never had it assayed, and he wouldn't tell me where the material came from. At that point I stopped even entertaining running the material. As a refiner, if someone is not willing to disclose where the material came from, I am not willing to process it for many reasons. The main reason is the potential dangers in processing material you do not know the composition of.

I got stuck in a very nasty situation with a group of prospectors/miners who had cons they claimed were 10% PMs. What they failed to disclose was that the cons were taken from old mining tilings that had recently been subjected to cyanide leaching. Back in the late to early 1900s it was not cost affective to attempt recovering the harder to recover forms of precious metals, so they were discarded. Currently in Northern California, there are companies who are taking over the old claims and running the tilings because of the increased value of PMs.

When I attempted to roast the cons, to drive off the sulfides I was expecting a sulfur smell, what I was not expecting was the white gas, which could be any number of poisons, toxins, cyanide gas, etc. What I was not told is that they had already subjected the cons to a cyanide leach. I contacted them immediately after I figured out that there was something present other than what I was told originally. Even after demanding what else was present in the cons they still would not tell me, I had to verbally abuse them until they finally admitted attempting to do a cyanide leach, and then not washing the cons correctly.

Needless to say I will not process anything unless I know the makeup of the material prior. If I had breathed in whatever the white gas was composed of, I could very well be dead today. So when I was told by the person who owned the material, that he couldn't disclose where he got his material, I hung up the phone and have never spoken with him since.

I didn't find out until later, until the owner of the material finally had the material assayed, what the problem was with precipitating the PGMs. And then, even at that, it was the other refiner that told me what the material contained, and what mineral was making it difficult to precipitate the PGMs. Then he went further and asked me how I would process the material. Again, I didn't even entertain the thought of discussing it, I am not going to contribute to the death of someone else because they took my advice, and I gave it, without knowing exactly what the composition was. That just seems like giving a baby a loaded gun, taking the safety off, loading it, putting their finger on the trigger and expecting them not to shoot themselves. At that point I already set my mind I wasn't going to play around with the mystery material anymore.

So to answer your question, no, there wasn't an assay done, but I thought there was. I am not sure what the mix is because the owner was not willing to disclose any information and I honestly didn't care after I made my decision not to process the material. I don't see any point or value in posting how I processed the material because it didn't work very well, and I don't know what the material was actually comprised of. I do not know how the material was pyrolyzed, but again it doesn't matter, pyrolized material is pyrolized material and I doubt very seriously anything was added in order to pyrolize it so it would be the same using 10 different methods to do so, it has no bearing on how to process the material. It should never have been pyrolized, it should have been broken down into it's component parts and processed correctly. I would assume this is exactly the reason why jghilino is segregating his material, so that it can be processed correctly.

Scott