OK, I agree with all thats written above. (& I Love the pics..)
I have 'mucked around' with the HCL acid & gold plated copper/brass.
It takes ages & every move you do can be the first tenth of a second of a complete disaster. I don't mean disaster as in loosing your gold.
I mean disaster as in loosing your eyesight, hearing, taste & very sizeable amounts of your face, arms, skin & sanity. & friends as no one will look at you the same as they did before.
Even the fumes of HCL acid do things you don't know of.
Like turn your shed/room/garage/laboratory & everything in it into a complete rust pile. Like that $20,000 car, one week & you will have seen the value drop to about $3,000 as thats what the usable parts are now worth.
Everything rest of the car looks like its been dumped into the sea once a week for 6 months & then left outside....
2 of my mistakes that coulda caused all of the above.---------
I put a small Erlenmeyer flask, and if you don't know what that is, don't get involved with gold refining.
(hell, I had to look it up to check the spelling, at first I was thinking it was actually a florence flask, but I had the name wrong...)
I put a 250ml flask on the stove & let it simmer to dissolve the copper, I put a stopper loosly into the mouth so as to keep most of the HCL fumes inside it, I mean loosly...
So... The flask heats up, expands the mouth, stopper drops in, neck cools down, shrinks, grabs the stopper, the HCL acid stops simmering as its now under pressure, so I up the heat a little & walk off for a short time...
Big POP! & I hear the stopper get blown out as it hits the ceiling...
Now I have a 6 foot tall geyser of copper, Hydrochloric acid & the rest of the gold that hits the roof & sprays in a 360 degree splash & as it falls & covers everything in the area....
All that time spent clipping the pins off the board, cleaning them down, setting up & obtaining the glass ware & chemicals.
At least I wasn't hurt, if I was in the room at the time I would have been covered in acid without even enough time to close my eyes.
2nd mistake, Putting a 500mls erlenmeyer flask 1/3rd full of hot HCL acid into the microwave & smacking the bottom edge of the flask on the microwave platter...
It didn't break, I still can't believe it didn't. Microwave is at shoulder height, flask at eye height.....
And thats just the HCL acid workups..............................
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