After all your meticulous attention to detail, you are left with a REETIPS bar. Now you can sell it a mint error and charge 10X the price :) Love your process. It never fails to calm my nerves.
Thanks once more for a great video. As someone with a background in formal chemistry, I find your comments about difficulty dissolving the last of the gold with hydrogen peroxide really interesting. There are a few competing reactions when you add hydrogen peroxide to a mixture of gold and hydrochloric acid. The hydrogen peroxide will be oxidising chloride ions to free chlorine and this chlorine in turn, will be oxidising the gold. The less the gold in the mixture, the longer this process will take. However the hydrogen peroxide will also be decomposing to oxygen gas and water. This process is quite rapid as can be seen by the foaming of the mixture. When there is very little solid gold left, the hydrogen peroxide will largely decompose before there is enough free chlorine to react with the gold.
i think some of that junk could be from the ice cubes, i learned from videos about making clear ice that the air bubbles in the ice cube are created as the cube freezes from outside in, the ice on the outside of the cube is clear because its pure, but as the cube freezes it forces impurities into the center of the cube, creating the bubbles
Love seeing the 'maintenance' involved in precious metal refining, get a good idea of the entire journey from scrap PM to the final waste/recovery portion. As always great work, thanks Sreetips
Man amazing how far over spot your stuff can go for! I was thinking “hmm this one’s small enough maybe I can actually try to buy it” nope already $70 over spot with 13 hours to go! I am not complaining in any way I think it is Really cool that it makes these videos worth your time, and awesome that your brand has truly created value. It’s win for everyone involved! It is easy to have trust when we see every step in the process.
Laying around watching tv is ok for a while, but it gets old fast. I’ll probably work until the day I die. Retirement? There’s no such thing as retirement. It’s a tradition, invented by man.
Thank you for another great video, Sreetips. Though I will likely never refine any precious metals, I have really learned a lot from your excellent channel. I really enjoy your methodical approach to the lab work, the clear and informative narration, and your attention to safety. I also really appreciate the time you put into making and editing your videos, including on-screen text for clarification and the many time-lapse shots. Thanks again Sreetips!
Awesome recovery from those gold waste containers - it would be really interesting to know how much gold you refined to create the waste and calculate something like the loss rate per gram of refined gold. I imagine it's quite low. Great video! 👍
I usually pour off gold during the rinses. I could minimize this by waiting for the gold to settle between each rinse before pouring it off. But this would greatly increase the amount of time.
@@sreetips I suspect your loss is really low though. For example, if you refined something like 40 toz, your loss would be well under 1% and you eventually recovered it anyway.
I'm "Double Dipping" here, but understanding the REFINER is to watch the process HERE,... GOD is STILL "WORKING".....the process isn't finished YET. Must be waiting on some GOLD to drop out of solution lol. Sorry SREETIPS, no tool gets wasted, YOU are AWESOME! (Edited to show GRATITUDE to SREETIPS for tolerance of my posts)
Damn those were crystal clear solutions. Seeing how your Ferrous Sulphate is reagent grade, it would be interesting to see a precipitation with the granules, without making a saturated solution. I have seen it done with wet crystals and the visuals were amazing. Great vid Sreetips, thanks for sharing.
I've been waiting for the waste refining video 🤗 This is going to be good 👍 I am excited to find out how much you lost and now got back 😁 Edit: Not a bad recovery. Great Job 👍
It probably has tiny invisible air bubbles that causes it to float. Gold is about 19 times heavier than water so it should not be able to float on water.
I'm feeling like a kid.... Moooooom.. when is Sreetips time??? Keep watching the older one... Love the Way he talks and How he does Chemistry 🧪 Very useful. My son J.J loves it too. He asked me lately..( quote ) "Daddy... Why's Sreetips written on everything possible?" Could not answer him that...🤣🤣🤣 Keep up with Your great content.. Greetings from Switzerland...
41:39 I have a set of footwear that I only use once a week, which I call my "Sunday-go-to-meeting sneakers". It's nice to hear someone else use the expression.
Little off topic the watch you wear has historical significance pie pan" dial with a history of setting precision records at the Geneva Observatory. That model set the standard for testing. Beautiful piece with a rich history.
No matter the size - those high purity bars are absolutely stunning Kevin. 👍👍👌👌I was wondering - have you tallied up the weight of the AU pours you did in 2022 ??
I’m sorry about that. eBay won’t cover shipments of precious metals going overseas. If the buyer decides to dispute delivery I could be forced to refund and end up with no payment and no gold. Not imply that you’d do that. But there are those who would.
@@sreetips No need to be sorry you need to be covered in all ways. Hopefully in few years postage will change and we can all buy 🤞🏻 love the channel never thought I’d be into this stuff but you’ve got me addicted 😁
great video. My first time seeing the H2O2 dissolution so thanks for that alone! fascinating how it doesn't dissolve it all. Thank you too for showing us the cascade of your waste streams from gold refining waste to the stock pot to the iron bucket. I'm curious about what you do with the final bucket though. You've got "contaminated copper" and iron in solution. Is that safe for general disposal in public sewerage and landfill, or do you have to do something else to it still? Thanks again for the video and well done on what feels like your shiniest bar!
The final waste will always be a concern for me. Once all the copper has cemented, I guess all is left is an iron compound like iron sulfite (?) most certainly contaminated with other metals (lead, zinc, tin, nickel, rhodium, manganese, tungsten, etc.). How do you dispose of it?
All the metals in your list (except magnesium and zinc) are below iron in the reactivity series. They will cement out as metals along with the copper. The acidic iron solution is dropped with sodium hydroxide. The dehydrated metal hydroxides are thrown away. The caustic liquid is adjusted to pH 7 with swim pool decreaser and added to the normal waste stream. Nothing acidic or toxic gets poured down the drain.
Two “out of curiosity” questions. 1. Has the results of that button of unknown metal come back? 2. Was there a reason you didn’t just put both solutions together in the beginning?
1. Waiting to send it in. Thanks for the reminder. 2. The best way to get it all is to dissolve it in the bottom of container. So I left them separate for that part.
I have a crazy question? Stannis chloride is tin chloride I think. In the presence of gold it turns black. Find a long time ago that if you rub a gold ring across a woman's face who's wearing makeup you'll get a black line. I wonder if foundation or the base makeup women use has tin chloride in it?
Would it be possible to soak the test strips in the stannis solution, and have them dried and used later. Would they still turn black if dipped in a gold bearing solution? Just a thought. Edit: I guess it could contaminate the gold bearing solution, so maybe not such a good idea.
Thats a really cool idea. It does expire, but it would be very interesting to see if it worked immediately after drying. Edit... Maybe dropping the solution onto the test strip, rather than a dip.
Interesting idea, but not possible. The stannous chloride solution is made up from stannous chloride crystals, water, HCI, and tin (as a preservative). That solution dried out wouldn't have the same reaction.
Nobody wants it. It’s literally just trash. There are those who might take it. But when they see the difficulty in trying to get it clean, they’d just end up doing what I do with it - throw it away.
I still think, its just from waste. I can remember doing some testing for a sewer system for an industrial waste water permit for a college, I was finding huge amounts of copper. The funny thing the building that was causing it was not the labs or the filter system for the dental training area, no it was the HVAC drain units and all the copper drainpipes that were reacting to the condensate that they drained away.
All the copper pipes in my house eroded over thirty years and began leaking so I had them replaced with pvc. Copper does get in the drinking water from copper pipes.
@@sreetips The pipes had accelerated corrosion from draining into mop sinks, and one floor drain. If they drained into the plumbing system, they would not have had as much corrosion due to the air getting in. Now the labs had glass drains to the treatment system that a few years later failed spectacularly or blew up. One of two times I ever got into a Class A protection. Yellow bubble suit with O2 tank. The other was an abandoned Crome plating operation and some of the waste chemicals in plastic barrels had reactions producing gas since they were not cleaned out of the previous chemical before filling.
A serious one today. I see that first pour off of the waste solution after precipitation often looks like it has particles floating on the surface tension. Is that how some of the precipitated gold gets into the waste collection? If so, I see the prospecting guys use detergent for this problem for flour-gold. Would that mess with your chemistry at that stage?
I noticed that your ice is cloudy. It it’s pure water there shouldn’t be any cloudiness as there’s nothing to make it. Your fume hood is so much quieter than previously. Now it’s just air movement instead of 60hz humm. 👍
I wish I was closer to where you live. I'm sure you're nowhere near Southwest Washington anyways. At the farm I used to work at we had a copper sulfate additive for the water. We had buckets of 16 ounce packets of "acidified copper sulfate". It's copper sulfate mixed with citric acid. I do copper and aluminum bronze casting. So I put some of that copper sulfate in some buckets of water and threw some pieces of iron in there. Melted down the copper and used it for casting. If we were close to each other I'd be more than happy to pay you forty bucks for that scrap copper. Your trash is my treasure in this case haha.
Keith, my insanity got the best of me. I’ll probably never shoot another video about the copper in my waste bucket ever again. Seems to get folks riled up when I admit to tossing the nasty, dirty copper that’s in it.
@@sreetips I wasn't trying to gripe. Just suggesting it might be useful to somebody in your local area that does artistic metal casting. I always enjoy watching your videos amd appreciate the effort it takes.
I've been binging your videos, now, long enough that I'm loathe to admit, but they're mesmerizing. That "stubborn" gold that won't go back into solution--even after adding more H2O2--is that just a result of the purity being so high (the limits of refining), or is it a matter of the liquid being in a state of saturated solution? It's probably an elemental question--if it were a saturation issue, you could just add more solvent to allow "space" for the more intransigent precipitant--but you're the only expert I know to ask.
Even though refining copper is of low metallic value, I believe it is of great educational, & entertainment value. It would be great content for your channel. Please reconsider. Cheers!!
Is there a problem with Lead building up over time? If every thing ends up in the stockpot and then that is processed and the East from that ends up in the next stockpot.. over time won’t it build up?
Only lead in the gold. It gets filtered out and the filter gets added to my paper storage. That’s lead sulfate. Any lead that dissolves in the nitric boils follows the copper into the waste treatment bucket and gets cemented out as metallic lead on the iron in that bucket.
what you do with your copper sreet? id wash it and keep it as a powder for when prices go up which they will copper is gonna be needed as much as silver to go green