Hydrometallurgy: Leaching in Heap, Vat, CIL, CIP, Merrill–Crowe, SX Solvent Extraction

Hydrometallurgy: Leaching in Heap, Vat, CIL, CIP, Merrill–Crowe, SX Solvent Extraction

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dissolve gold dore bar (3 replies)

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bryan randolph
7 years ago
bryan randolph 7 years ago

Hello all

     I am an amature gold and rock hound, my buddy and I went in together and bought a gold dore bar and we are having problems trying to dissolve it out. I have been told to use nitric acid and I did some but I am scared because I dont want to hurt anything can anyone give any advice on what we should do, the little bit we used nitric acid on wasnt very clean it had little pebbles and some wood in it but we stopped because we are worried that we are going to hurt the silver and gold mainly. Can anyone help.

.999
7 years ago
.999 7 years ago
1 like by David

Your looking for a simple answer to a complex question sir. Were are you located Bryan? Have you had an assay or xrf to know what elements you are dealing with? There are many ways to recover the gold and silver depending on the metal composition. How much dore are we talking about? Was the bar purchased from another miner or off line somewhere?

b
bryan randolph
7 years ago
bryan randolph 7 years ago

ok well first of all thank you for the response, I am in southwest colorado, I dont know all that is in this bar I do know its suppose to have silver and copper and gold but other then that, that is all I know since I was new when I bought it, it looked yellow like gold so I knew it had to have gold but that was years ago. When we bought it, it was from a guy online who said another guy sent the material to him to salvage and originally he was suppose to dissolve everything down and have a gold ingot, silver ingot and copper ingot but when the guy was ready for payment the guy said he didnt have the money and got into an argument. well long story short the guy who smelted everything just re-smelted all of it and put the entire thing into a dore bar and sold it to the lowest bidder. which was us for 200 dollars now if it was all a story or what we dont know we just want to seperate everything and then make an ingot out of each item of metal

 

G
GeoffC
7 years ago
GeoffC 7 years ago
1 like by David

Seems too good to be true! A dore bar for $200. If there is gold in it the easiest way to realize the value would be to send it to a commercial refiner or mint. I don't know how that works in the USA.

A very crude way to determine if this is contains gold and silver would be to drill some filings from the bar and try to dissolve then in hot nitric acid. If the filings don't dissolve and turn black in all likelihood there is some gold there. After taking any undissolved filings out of the acid heating in a small flame should return the gold colour of the filings if they are gold. Check for silver in the nitric acid after it has cooled and the filings if an remain are removed by adding some common salt (NaCl). If a white precipitate is formed and the solution goes cloudy then it is likely silver is present in the bar. Unless there is a considerable weight in this bar copper is unlikely to be of any significant value.


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