Dismantler refining directly possible?

Originally Posted by Porsche993

@armygreywolf, So it seems you may have gone thru the same thing as I am trying to figure out. Did you reach out to the refiners and they turned you down? What do you do with the converters? Sell them to middlemen?

I deal with a refiner for by board scrap, it still takes me a while to accrue the weights they require but thats what we do. Cats are no different. Except it takes me much MUCH longer to acquire enough weight. It's not my specialty, our primary source for PGMs is industrial catalysts and we deal with that a few times a year, so when we do our regular outbound I send my partial gaylord box of cats along with it.

Its a matter of math, and the big players that buy cats here will tell you the same thing, the refiner wants 40,000lbs of combs to give you the best possible prices and the most accurate returns. It can be labor intensive and machine intensive at scale too so more weight is better for everyone.

Please don't do what Alloy is doing if those are his pictures. This forum is supposed to ban advocacy of using chemical processing for safety reasons and because of the venue, people at random can see and search this with no experience in staying safe. We just had a lung scarring case at my wife's hospital trying to home game with chemical refining. I dont know what he was doing outside of home gamer caustics.

If your person has a high level of confidence in what they are buying, such as pricing from available catalogs, then yes, you can enhance your returns decanning and sending the combs out to a known refiner. Most have a 10,000lb minimum for PGMs, some will do 80 or 85% of assay value down to 2500lbs or so. It depends on who your dealing with. But ask the pertinent questions, note Alloy's assay, (although the presence of gold might mean he had other things in the assay material?) the point is make sure you get a clear answer on what materials they will recover and what they agree to pay by percent OR what the per lb charge is. Its not going to be like PCBs where high weights usually get you below the one dollar a pound refining cost...so you really need an answer to those questions on paper.

Anyways, he missed some major refiners, BASF is out in South Carolina, up until recently they only really did filter cake and industrial catalysts, but they can process combs too. Another option if you would rather the refiner do the decanning and provide you with assays by group (They have done it for us on oil refinery catalysts) GRG West is in north los vegas, they are also owned by a company that does cat buying, so lots of their work is already known value. Same as before though, you need to produce material quantity they are looking for, which is A LOT.

I'm not hear to step on toes or make people mad, there's enough of that to go around already. My goal is to do as much domestically as we can get away with. Foreign exchange of commodities always detracts.

Originally Posted by armygreywolf

I deal with a refiner for by board scrap, it still takes me a while to accrue the weights they require but thats what we do. Cats are no different. Except it takes me much MUCH longer to acquire enough weight. It's not my specialty, our primary source for PGMs is industrial catalysts and we deal with that a few times a year, so when we do our regular outbound I send my partial gaylord box of cats along with it.

Its a matter of math, and the big players that buy cats here will tell you the same thing, the refiner wants 40,000lbs of combs to give you the best possible prices and the most accurate returns. It can be labor intensive and machine intensive at scale too so more weight is better for everyone.

Please don't do what Alloy is doing if those are his pictures. This forum is supposed to ban advocacy of using chemical processing for safety reasons and because of the venue, people at random can see and search this with no experience in staying safe. We just had a lung scarring case at my wife's hospital trying to home game with chemical refining. I dont know what he was doing outside of home gamer caustics.

If your person has a high level of confidence in what they are buying, such as pricing from available catalogs, then yes, you can enhance your returns decanning and sending the combs out to a known refiner. Most have a 10,000lb minimum for PGMs, some will do 80 or 85% of assay value down to 2500lbs or so. It depends on who your dealing with. But ask the pertinent questions, note Alloy's assay, (although the presence of gold might mean he had other things in the assay material?) the point is make sure you get a clear answer on what materials they will recover and what they agree to pay by percent OR what the per lb charge is. Its not going to be like PCBs where high weights usually get you below the one dollar a pound refining cost...so you really need an answer to those questions on paper.

Anyways, he missed some major refiners, BASF is out in South Carolina, up until recently they only really did filter cake and industrial catalysts, but they can process combs too. Another option if you would rather the refiner do the decanning and provide you with assays by group (They have done it for us on oil refinery catalysts) GRG West is in north los vegas, they are also owned by a company that does cat buying, so lots of their work is already known value. Same as before though, you need to produce material quantity they are looking for, which is A LOT.

I'm not hear to step on toes or make people mad, there's enough of that to go around already. My goal is to do as much domestically as we can get away with. Foreign exchange of commodities always detracts.

Think on the following statment long enough the light will come on, eh maybe - maybe not.

Originally Posted by alloy2

To the best of my knowledge there are only two smelters on the USA than handle the platinum group metals.