Q&A 0726 Your Questions Answered PGMs Silver Cell & Science

[00:00:00]Well, hello scrappers. Mike here.

[00:00:02]Welcome back to my channel. Another Q&A session. Like I said last time, backed by popular demand. I know some of you don't like this. You know, they say it's uh no all talk and no action and they hate it. Other people don't like it when I don't do them. So, there's no pleasing everybody. So, we're going to do another Q&A session. Um I'm doing this between torrential rain showers out here while I'm waiting on some stuff to dissolve in the fume hood. So, might as well do a little Q&A while we're at it.

[00:00:33]So, I got an interesting question from who was it here. Uh, Prometheus 6722 wanted to know out of all the videos I've done, and I've done a crap ton of videos, I haven't counted them up lately, but it's got to be close to a thousand on YouTube by now. Um, what have I learned the most from my videos?

[00:01:00]I think that's the way he worded it. Or what was the most useful thing you learned while doing a video? Well, I've learned a lot. Let's put it that way.

[00:01:09]Um, last couple of videos I've learned that if my aquar is kind of funny looking, kind of brown, kind of red, it might be full of PGMs. Okay. So, that's that's something I've learned in the last couple of videos.

[00:01:24]Yeah. Um there's been a lot of PGMs lately. So, uh yeah, if your Aquaria turns funny colors, you better check it for PGMs. You drop the gold out of it and then check what's left and see if you got platinum, palladium, other stuff in there. Um that's an important lesson I've learned fairly recently.

[00:01:49]Um, another lesson I've learned fairly recently is to stick to the scientific method. I screwed up big time with my gold braiding. And I don't know if that video is out yet or if it's going to come out after this. I think it's going to come out after this actually.

[00:02:06]Um, so I screwed up big time, changed too many variables at once and screwed up the whole process when I had something that kind of worked and I just wanted to improve it a little bit. wound up completely screwing it up.

[00:02:20]So, yeah, just a good reminder, stick to the scientific method. Um, don't just wing it. Don't just cowboy it, you know, stick to the scientific method.

[00:02:30]Otherwise, you're going to wind up with a mess that's um impossible to figure out where you went wrong, okay? And you basically got to back up to square one and start over again.

[00:02:45]So, yeah, I learned that the hard way just recently, and you'll see when that video comes out. Like I said, I don't think it's out yet.

[00:02:55]Still in the works.

[00:02:58]All right. Um, I learned a lot building and running a silver cell. I had never done that. People have been telling me for years I needed to build a silver refining electrolytic cell. And I'm like, I don't have that much silver.

[00:03:11]It's not worth the effort. And then my friend Yanni dumps a ton of silver on me. And suddenly, well, I did need to refine it. It was worth the effort. So, I built myself a cell. I built one similar to what Anthony Thomas uses. And I've refined a lot of silver through it.

[00:03:28]And running that silver cell, I learned a lot, a whole lot.

[00:03:35]Um, I learned that trying to grow the crystals too fast leads to impure crystals. You got to grow them slow. Low low current. Keep the voltage across the cell below 5 volts. Even lower if you can. Don't worry about high current. You just got to have patience. Let the crystals grow slowly and they'll grow clean, very pure. You know, I was shocked when I sent some of my uh crystals from the silver cell off for XRF analysis and they came back better than 39's fine.

[00:04:09]Almost 49's fine. Uh, so yeah, slow is the way to go with your silver cell when you're growing the crystals in it. Don't overcurren it, don't over voltage it, be patient, and uh you'll get some really clean silver out of the cell.

[00:04:30]And u speaking of the silver cell, you might want to subscribe if you're not a subscriber already because we're going to do some more silver cell work in the future. I'm working on a new version of the silver cell, one that's a little smaller and doesn't need as much electrolyte because I find the cell I built is just too big. And once I run all the silver I have through it, I've got a lot of electrolyte then that needs to be processed through the cell. But it would take all of the silver in that electrolyte to restart the cell. So, I'm working on a smaller what I'm calling a cleanup cell. Simpler design, too, I think. And hopefully, it's going to work just as well as the big production cell, basically. Uh, but it'll allow me to clean up the little bit of silver that I have left over until, you know, Yanni dumps another load of silver on me. So, uh, I think you'll be interested in that. Um, Anthony Thomas has been experimenting again with some modifications to his cell and I looked at what he was doing and I'm thinking I'll bet I can do something similar to that but even easier. So, we'll see if it actually works. That's coming down the road.

[00:05:48]Let's see what other videos have I learned from. All these are fairly recent examples in the last year or so.

[00:05:54]Um, if I go back back into the distant past of my YouTube history, um, when I built my fume hood, I was talking about the fume hood a second ago. Yeah, I learned a lot building it. And, um, you can look up those old videos on YouTube where I built this fume hood and see all the mistakes I made. I did almost everything wrong. The only I think I did right was building it out of wood and using plexiglass for the doors. The wood seems to be pretty impervious to any and every chemical that's splashed on it.

[00:06:28]And I've only had to replace the plexiglass doors once in all the years I've had this thing. Everything else has been replaced multiple times. I started out um putting the fan up top to suck um the fumes out the top. Bad idea. Don't do that. You're building your own. Um, what happened was all those nasty fumes would condense up top and then drip back down into the fume hood uh and contaminate what I'm working on in there and make a mess. So, yeah, that was a mistake. Uh, I my m init another mistake I made was using a metal fan like a bathroom exhaust fan initially for my fan. Yeah, that lasted maybe a couple of weeks before it completely rusted up and died from the fumes.

[00:07:21]So, that was bad. I used metal exhaust tubing that completely rotted out in only a few weeks.

[00:07:31]So, yeah, it took me a while to figure out uh put the exhaust on the back of the fume hood, pull the fumes out the back and downhill so that there's no condensation dripping into the fume hood and use um a sealed billagege blower um to move the air out of the fume hood.

[00:07:53]That lasts a long time. I mean, I still destroy them, but it lasts a long time.

[00:07:58]Um, you know, I go through a couple a year maybe and then all plastic exhaust tubing and now I've got a great fume hood that works wonderfully well. If you guys want more info on the fume hood, let me know in the comments and maybe I'll do another video on how to build a fume hood since I haven't done one in a while and, you know, we can update it. Oh, and also I put the light up top where the fan used to be. And then I put a sheet of glass against the ceiling of the fume hood to keep the fumes from getting up into the light and rotting it out. So, you know, lots of improvements. You You live and you learn over time. You know, you rot out a light, you figure out a way to prevent that from happening again. you rot out a fan, you figure out a way to prevent that from happening again, you know, and just just sort of incremental improvements until you got something that actually kind of works pretty darn well. So, yeah, like I said, go uh go check out those earlier videos.

[00:08:56]They're kind of hilarious looking back at them now. But I definitely needed a fume hood back then when I first got into this because I was working in my backyard just off of a bench and I was always trying to stay upwind of the nasty fumes, the big clouds of nitrogen dioxide or the boiling hydrochloric acid or whatever. And the wind was always changing direction and it's like I didn't want to wear a gas mask all the time. So it's like I need a fume hood. I got to figure out how to make it work.

[00:09:25]And in the end, I did for cheap because, you know, if you price these things, whoa, are they expensive. So, yeah, building my own was definitely a good idea. At least it was an affordable idea, and it was a good idea.

[00:09:44]All right. You know, I've talked about the lead bath method a couple of times, and people are asking me, "What is the lead bath method?" Other people are asking me who know what it is are asking me why aren't you using the lead bath method and um you know Altech uses it and he does pretty good with it. Um well what is the lead bath method? First off get an iron pot, you fill it with lead.

[00:10:08]You melt the lead down, get it really good and hot and you throw your goldplated electronics in there. stir it around really good and you scoop them out with um a mesh basket or whatever so the lead can drain out. And what'll happen is the gold will dissolve in the lead and you'll be pulling goldfree stuff out. And then once you've got the the gold in the lead, you throw some silver in the lead and dissolve that in there. And then you cupel or scorify away all the lead. Basically oxidize it.

[00:10:41]And what you're left with is is what's called a doray of silver, which is full of gold and a little bit of lead. And then you dissolve that doray in nitric acid. You recover your gold.

[00:10:55]Then you recover the silver and you can start over again. You just lost all your lead.

[00:11:02]Well, you know, my friend Yanni has sent me a lot of stuff, gold-plated transistors, gold-plated other stuff that really would work well with the lead bath method. And I can't think of another method that it would work well with. So, people ask, why aren't you using the lead bath method on that stuff? Well, lead is toxic and we're going to produce a lot of toxic lead oxide with the lead bath method, especially during the scorification or compelling process.

[00:11:37]There's going to be a lot of lead oxide.

[00:11:40]I live on a farm, okay? We have a lot of animals. We have a lot of farm workers.

[00:11:46]You might hear them in the background.

[00:11:48]They're working today.

[00:11:49]Um, you know, we grow some of our own food here, too. Um, we're basically a tree farm, but we do, you know, grow some of our own food, but, you know, I don't want to spread poisonous substances around the farm.

[00:12:06]You know, that's that's not good for the animals. That's not good for getting into our food. And of course, it's not good for my own delicate hide to be working around all that toxic lead. Now, I do have PPE.

[00:12:17]I can wear, you know, a gas mask and whatnot, but that's not going to prevent it from getting spread through the environment here on the farm. So, that's why I have been reluctant to do the lead bath method.

[00:12:31]Reluctant. But I haven't totally written it off. If I can figure out how to do it safely, we might do it. But other people are saying, "Well, forget the lead. Get some bismouth. Use bismouth." Bismouth is a lot less toxic. It works pretty good, just like lead.

[00:12:47]So, use bismouth. Okay, I've looked into that. Bismouth is is expensive. My god, I can get tons of lead practically for free. You know, a couple of kilos of bismouth, that's going to cost an arm and a leg. So, uh if uh anybody out there knows where I can get bismouth in bulk cheap, let me know, okay? Leave a comment, send me an email, whatever. Um, but it's going to have to be a little less expensive than what I'm seeing in most places. You know, for uh 5 lb lots or couple kilo lots, they want an awful lot of money for bismouth. All right.

[00:13:27]And it doesn't have to be like 49's pure bismouth. Most of it for sale out there is 49's pure. I'm just going to make it nasty with all kinds of other metals.

[00:13:37]So, it doesn't need to be that pure. So, yeah. If anybody out there knows where I can get some business cheap, you know, let me know. I'm your man.

[00:13:48]All right. So, um, another question I've been getting, and I think it's because of the video I did where I panned out Richard's, uh, gold pay dirt he brought back from his vacation, you know, and I mentioned how I'm an oldtime gold prospector and, you know, I love to go out on the creeks and pan and whatnot. And people are asking, "So, what do you prefer? Gold prospecting or recovering gold from e-waste?"

[00:14:17]Well, I think that's going to depend on your definition of prefer.

[00:14:22]All right. If you prefer having a lot of fun in the great outdoors, fresh air and sunshine, uh, in a, uh, generally scenic environment, gold panning, that's it.

[00:14:36]That's my idea of a vacation right there. I've done it in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming.

[00:14:45]Yeah, I love it. I love it. There's nothing better for fun. Now, if your definition of prefer is making money and stacking gold and silver, well, Ewaste has gold panning beat nine ways to Sunday. Let me tell you um you know even um poor yield gold waste is generally more yielding than the best gold ore. So I made tons more gold and silver processing e-waste than I ever could have imagined gold panning and slooing out on the creeks of the west. So, you know, it depends on uh whether you want to have fun or you want to actually make gold.

[00:15:32]I I you know, it's not an either or thing. You know, I can do this to stack gold and then I can go have a nice vacation and do some gold panning.

[00:15:42]There's a nice creek near our place in Wyoming. My wife and I have been out there gold panning. I plan on getting back out there and doing it again. So yeah, you know, it depends on your definition of prefer. All right, so let's see.

[00:16:05]Another question I'm getting is why have the videos slowed down? Well, yeah, there was a period there where I was releasing about two a week. It's been a while, but yeah, there were about two a week coming out. Well, during that period, I wasn't working near as hard as I am now, and the weather was fantastic.

[00:16:25]Okay?

[00:16:27]And well, right now, neither of those is true. I am working some really long hours at work, and the weather has been abysmal. Like I said, I'm recording this between rainstorms right now. You know, we were in our dry season and it was an unusually long and dry dry season.

[00:16:46]Um, we were worried about the trees dying here on the farm. We were out having to hand water them and stuff, but we went like that from our dry season to our rainy season. And it's not unusual for it to rain two, three times a day. Sometimes violently, very violently. And you know, my lab's outdoors. See, I got a roof over my head, but that doesn't help when the rain's coming down horizontal and the wind's blowing a hurricane. So, uh, yeah. So, between the weather and the fact that I am working a lot more hours, we got a couple big projects going on at work. I'm working a lot more hours than I had been. Yeah, that's why there's fewer videos coming out. But, uh, I'm doing the best I can. I'm trying to get one a week out. We might have to skip a week occasionally just because I'm too busy, you know, or the weather's too crummy for me to get out here and work. I'm hoping we don't have any hurricanes like we did a couple years ago that that put us in their bullseye because when the hurricanes come through, we get so much rain that my whole lab floods and I can't do anything out here because the electrics get wet and I have to turn the circuit breakers off and stuff. So hopefully we're not going to have that this year. Uh but you know, just with the the random monsoon season weather here, it's really putting a damper on what I can do out here when I'm not at work. So yeah. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about upcoming videos. I always do that in these Q&A sessions. I talked a little bit about my new design for the silver cell. That's going to be coming up.

[00:18:34]Um, not sure when I'm going to get to it. I've got a couple of other things in process. Working hard on the gold abrasion.

[00:18:42]Um, because I got the 50 kilos of pins that Yanni brought me. I'm only processed a couple kilos of it so far in test runs. The gold abrasion is promising. It's very promising, but like I said, I screwed it up. And we're kind of going back to basics, you know, in a future video here and starting over and seeing what I can change without screwing up the whole process and trying to improve it.

[00:19:09]Um, we're going to work more on the iodine leech for removing gold.

[00:19:15]That's coming up. Um, I just haven't had a chance to get around to that. But yeah, for some stuff where there's internal gold, that's really probably the only thing that's going to work. Okay, everybody asks, "Do you still use Eco Gold decks?" No, I don't. I tried Eco Gold decks. I thought I was an early convert to it, but it just doesn't work all that well for me, I find. And there's just too many steps in the process. And, you know, it's just a pain. You know, I've had trouble getting it imported into the country. It comes from Canada, which is the country next door. You'd think it would be easy, but there's been issues, and it's like, nah, you know, screw it.

[00:20:03]Um, once I heard about the iodine leech, I totally turned my back on Eco Gold Dex. And, um, I think the iodine leech works better. At least it has the potential to work better. Fewer steps in the process, less of a headache. I can make it here myself.

[00:20:20]You know, formula is not proprietary, so I can get all the components I need to make it. And um yeah, I just have less trouble with it.

[00:20:29]So, you know, it's not perfect either, but it's less trouble than Eco Goldex.

[00:20:35]So, yes, I have pretty much given up on Eco Goldex. You're an Eco Goldex fan, that's great. I hope it's working good for you. Let me know what I'm doing wrong. send me some tips and tricks on how to make eco goldex work good for you for me. Okay. Um but yeah, so we'll be doing the uh iodine leech more in the future. Um at some point I need to start turning Yanni silver bullion into um ingots.

[00:21:06]So that should be fun. Um, I'm just starting to sweat pretty good out here because it's close to 100° and the humidity is 100% cuz it rained earlier not that long ago actually. I'm going to wait for the weather to be a little cooler before I try to cast ingots, okay? And start working with molten metal and torches and fire cuz it's just too freaking hot right now. But at some point in the future, we will work on turning Yanni's silver bullion into ingots.

[00:21:38]So, watch for that. So, that's what's upcoming. And of course, who knows what else cuz Yanni is threatening to bring me more stuff in a month or so. So, who knows what's going to be in that. So, anyway, subscribe to see all that stuff.

[00:21:54]And if you guys found this video at all interesting, educational, informative, inspirational, whatever, give it a like, give it a thumbs up, and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks a lot for watching this one. Bye.