[music]
Alright everyone! Welcome back to Cody's Lab.
So I figured it's about time I finally get around to processing this material that came from electronic computer parts.
See this is what the material looks like after it's been chopped up in a ball mill
I think he had used
and this just like computer motherboards and stuff, and then this is what it looks like after it's been incinerated and sifted.
Now I have done a fire assay on this already, I think that was about four or five months ago
and I found about 5 milligrams of gold in a 150 gram sample,
which means, if my math is correct there's less than an ounce per ton of gold in this,
which means that if you're gonna try to make money on this, the margins will be incredibly tight.
But it should be still possible.
Let's see how much gold I can actually extract from it using some sort of actual process here.
A fire assay is gonna be way more efficient than anything I can do on a large scale.
If you couldn't already tell from the gold pan, my plan is to knock down most of the material by panning it out
and extracting the heavy materials.
As I very much doubt the gold will actually be in the ashes, it should actually be stuck to heavy metallic particles.
Let's add a little bit of dish soap here to knock out any oils.
Then I'm gonna pre-wet it, to make it easier to pan.
Now that I've got some of this sloppy material, I'm just gonna wash off all the light stuff, and hopefully, keep all of the gold.
Now of course there's also gonna be a little bit of silver and possibly palladium and other metals in this as well,
but I'm really only going after the gold today because, well, that's all he asked me to find.
But also, in the fire assay there really wasn't very much of the other metals there, the gold seemed to be dominant.
And uh, it takes quite a bit of silver to make it worth your while to extract, so I'm not gonna worry about that too much.
I'm just gonna process this down for the gold, and it appears like this has a lot
of copper oxide in it, so it's not like black sand but it's copper, so it's black cupric oxide.
That's pretty easy to dissolve in hydrochloric acid, but I think what I
might do is just melt it down.
And anything that still metallic would form a nice bead and settle to the
bottom of the crucible, and then I can just slag off all those oxides.
Think that'd be the cheapest way to do it, at least industrially. Now that I'm done
panting off all the fiberglass I'm left with primarily pieces of metal and
metallic oxides. I can see there's some pieces of solder in there, mostly these
little copper pieces of wire but I have seen some little tiny gold wires and
those would have actually came out of these integrated circuit chips such as this.
You see they use a very fine gold wire to connect between these thick external
wires here and the actual silicon chip inside of these integrated circuits.
Also I've seen some very fine gold powder,
I don't think I'll be able to take a very good picture of it, but I'm
suspecting that actually came off of the gold pins here, where the plating kind of
flaked off as the base metal melted and/or oxidized and then the little pieces
of gold that flake off of this either melt down into tiny tiny beads or get mixed
in with another metal. Some of the gold may have actually washed off which is
why I'm collecting the wash water here, and if I do find a significantly lower
amount of gold than I'm expecting then I will rework this, probably using a
cyanide bath or something.
I'd rather avoid that, but that is an option. Suppose the next step is to
remove as much iron as I can.
That's quite a bit of iron coming out of that actually. I don't think the gold will be
bonded to the iron so I can safely get rid of this. So the plan for today is
just to melt everything -- gold, lead, copper -- all together into a single chunk of
metal and then I'll work with that.
So what I've got to do is I'm going to add some borax, some sodium carbonate,
I'm gonna put it all together into a crucible and furnace it down.
This isn't a clean crucible but it also never had any gold in it so it shouldn't
cause any trouble. Into the furnace. Wish it luck.
Considering how much lead was in it I think that should be just hot enough to
have it all fluid.
So, let's pull it out of here
and see if I actually caught any metal.
Ok
Looks like I got a blob of metal in there, I'm gonna put it back in the
furnace. Tell you what, this furnace is taking way too long to heat up and as
you can see there's a little bit of flux that has spilled out so I'm actually going to
turn this thing off and I'm gonna take the blob of metal out and try to
put it in the other furnace.
I think it's small enough, it might work. Ok, now that's got to be hot enough to
have that melted, so let's open this up and pull it out.
Okay, here it is.
Let's pour it out on this on this plate.
That's it!
Now rather than using acid or something to dissolve away the base metals leaving the gold
I thought I'd try something a little different and use electrolysis.
So I've got this little bath set up here, with the negative electrode being a
little copper wire and a piece of metal
as the positive electrode, so I'm going to add in a little bit of nitric acid to
act as an electrolyte. That ought to get things going.
This is actually how they recover most of their gold at the Bingham copper mine.
They get the copper that they smelted out of the ore and then they electrorefine it,
and all of the other metals settle to the bottom, which is then processed for the gold.
So I just tried to lower that piece of metal and it ended up falling in, also
pieces of the copper here on the other electrode we are starting to fall off
into the solution so I decided I'm going to stop this, and I think looks pretty neat.
Quite a bit of copper that I processed, you guys get the idea.
And I'm just going to finish it off with some acid
just to speed things along because this video is kinda overdue, I kind of wanted
to get this out earlier.
As for what this black material is, there is some gold of course but my guess is
it also contains your other metals such as lead, tin, and possibly even silver,
because the copper would be the easiest thing to transfer across.
Once all the copper was gone you might get some lead transferring onto the electrode,
but, of course, since copper's the most abundant metal here it would have just
fallen off to the bottom of this thing. But now it would be much easier to smelt
down and recover the gold. Of course, I'm going to be adding acid to this so it'll
actually concentrate it even more
but you guys get the idea.
Okay, so it looks like the piece of metal is completely dissolved and I still have the black powder
so presumably there is some gold here. So I filtered out the gold containing
powder that is the black and I've added a little bit of litharge and flux which
is the orange-ish color, that is to help collect it together
you know, standard methods of collecting precious metals. So we're just gonna pack
that into the crucible, and load it in the furnace.
Here's my lead and gold mixed together.
Break off the slag and put it into a cupel to remove the lead.
So looks like that piece of metal actually puffed up like a piece of popcorn down
in the cupel which means it wasn't pure lead, it must have had some tin or
something in it.
The best thing I can do to fix that is actually add some more pure lead to try
to, you know,
lower the amount of tin and hopefully get that oxide to dissolve into the cupel.
Or, I could get it really really hot, that might work too.
I decided to try the lead thing.
So I'm cleaning this spilled slag out of the furnace here, and look at that!
It's like bright blue.
I've never seen that before. I'm pretty sure this is like copper carbonate or
something but that's just proof that there's some really weird stuff in that
electronics. [chuckle]
Now that's more like it. I can see that there's a bead of gold there.
Once this is cools off we'll go weigh it and see how much we recovered.
Let's say it's probably almost pure gold, and there it is it just solidified, ha, and I
love watching that.
So here's the bead of gold that we collected from the two kilograms of
material, let's put it on the scale and see what it weighs.
40 milligrams.
Now I was expecting roughly 50 to 60 milligrams, so I say extracted most of
the gold using the method I did. Excellent. Hope y'all enjoyed, and I'll
see you next time.