Easy gold recovery from pins

[00:00:04]Hello everybody. Welcome to today's video. Today we're experimenting with a bit of copper chloride and I've got 360 g of pins split across three beers.

[00:00:16]So this is going to be a rabbit and hair sort of race.

[00:00:23]In beaker number one, I'm going to add hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide.

[00:00:34]And in beaker number two, I'm going to be using hydrochloric acid and an air pump.

[00:00:46]And in baker number three, I'm going to be using both.

[00:00:51]And I want to see whether it's better to use hydrogen peroxide or better to use an air pump or how how much faster it is to use both together.

[00:01:04]So I'm going to top these up to 700 ms each and then we'll get started.

[00:01:15]Now I called this a rabbit and a hair uh race.

[00:01:20]So in beaker number one with the hydrogen peroxide, this is going to be the hair. It's going to use a lot of energy to begin with to dissolve all that copper into solution.

[00:01:42]Did I say rabbit and hair or tortoise and hair? I meant to hair if I said rabbit and hair.

[00:01:48]So I'm adding 50 mls of hydrogen peroxide 12%.

[00:01:54]In number two, this is going to be our tortoise.

[00:01:59]Slow and steady using an air pump.

[00:02:07]And then in number three, first I'll add 25 ms of hydrogen peroxide.

[00:02:24]And then once the reactions settled down, I'll switch the air pump on.

[00:02:35]I'm going to leave these for a couple of hours. Then I'll get back to you shortly and I'll explain a bit about what's going on in each of the reactions.

[00:02:45]Okay. Okay, so we're 2 hours into the reaction and as you can see, we've got um a a big array of different colors.

[00:02:54]So, let's talk about what's going on in these beers.

[00:02:57]Now, in beaker one, you got the hydrogen peroxide oxidizing the copper uh that's forming copper 2 chloride. Now once the peroxide is depleted uh the co the copper chloride that's been created is be is going to become the primary etchent um it's going to attack the copper uh it's going to oxidize it and reduce itself into coupress chloride.

[00:03:25]Now in beaker 2, uh the oxygen from the air is dissolving into the hydrochloric acid. Uh that's then going to react with the copper to form the copper 2 chloride. Although it doesn't seem that it's actually started yet. As you can see, there is a bit of a color change in the pins.

[00:03:43]Uh once the copper chloride is formed like in beaker one, the copper chloride is be is going to become the primary etchent. Um that's then going to turn into coupas chloride.

[00:03:55]But then the cupras chloride is going to be reoxidized back into copper 2 chloride and the reaction is going to start again. And that's what's happening in beaker number three.

[00:04:07]Um if you notice that it's a completely different color to be number one. It's a lot lighter. uh the cupras chloride that's being created by the hydrogen peroxide is being reoxidized um by that air bubbler.

[00:04:27]So beers number two and three are being agitated by the air. So fresh acids getting onto them pins in beaker number one. Uh obviously I would have to stir it up every couple of hours and we'll see how it goes. So, the next time that you see me will be we'll check in 24 hours time. Uh we'll have a look at number two, see if that's uh starting to dissolve copper yet and then we'll take it from there.

[00:04:55]So, it's been 7 days and as you can see in number three, almost all of the base metals have been dissolved and the reaction has slowed down a little in this one. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add another 100 mil of hydrochloric acid just to get it over the finish line.

[00:05:24]And if we look at our hair number one, you'll see there's still a lot of base metal in there.

[00:05:36]Now, this one got out the gates really, really quick. used up all its energy and now it's slowed right down.

[00:05:47]The tortoise has overtaken the hair.

[00:05:52]It's been slowly plotting along.

[00:05:58]And as you can see, almost all of the base metals are gone from this one, too.

[00:06:07]It's probably two days behind number three.

[00:06:12]I'll let these continue and I'll get back to you when this one's done. Okay, so 9 days in and this one's done.

[00:06:26]The tortoise has beat the hair.

[00:06:30]Slow and steady wins the race by a lot. There's still a lot of material there.

[00:06:42]So, if you was wondering whether you should get an air pump, definitely for the sake of 105, you're going to save yourself weeks. And these are useful for doing fingers, pins, throw them in your stockp.

[00:06:59]helps with the agitation and the oxidation you can't lose.

[00:07:08]So now I need to see how much gold was in that 300 g of pins. But to do that I need to get all this dissolved first.

[00:07:16]So, I'm going to put both of the air pumps in that one and dissolve all that copper away. See how much pure gold we can get.

[00:07:34]Right. So, it's been 16 days in total. Now, I've got it all filtered off and let's get in some Aquaria. I'm going to go with the poor man's aquaria.

[00:07:44]So, sprinkling the potassium nitrate and I'll probably do 150 mil of hydrochloric acid.

[00:08:09]Put a bit of heat on. Let it cook and then we can get it filtered off. and drop some gold out.

[00:08:43]So, now it's time to get it filtered.

[00:08:44]I'm going with the vacuum filtration for this one.

[00:09:12]That was quick and easy. Next up, precipitation.

[00:09:16]And I'll be using ferrra sulfate, I think, for this one.

[00:09:21]Now, I'm not expecting a huge amount from this. I'll be surprised if there's more than half a gram in there.

[00:09:28]We'll see.

[00:09:39]I'll leave it to settle out and uh see what we get.

[00:09:44]Right, let's have a look at what we got.

[00:09:47]Let's had a bit of a rinse with some water.

[00:09:51]I'm going to give it a quick boil in some uh 20% hydrochloric acid just to clean it up and then I can dry it off and get it weighed.

[00:10:17]Okay. Okay. So, it looks like there's more than half a gram there. Let's actually find out what it is.

[00:10:25]Press the right button.

[00:10:48]Right. So, there we have it. 0.9 g.

[00:10:53]That's a little more than I was expecting. Uh, most of these pins came from hard drives. There's not enough there to really melt it into a button.

[00:11:02]But, if you found the video interesting, give it a like, subscribe, leave a comment if you wish, and I'll see you on the next video.

[00:11:23]Heat. Heat.