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Gold Chloride - DIY. A bit of hard won advice

kb3lms

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In a word - DON'T!

As we all know, gold chloride is sort of expensive. Having access to piles of scrap gold plated electronics connectors, I looked for a possible way to extract some gold and make some gold chloride. Well, if you google this subject you will find that it is indeed possible and at one stage in the process you even end up with gold chloride - exactly what you want! And I have enough outdoor space to do this well away from other people and enclosed spaces. So, what the hell, right? Well, when things sound too good to be true, they usually are.

The process involves reverse electroplating off the gold plating, filtering and gathering the residue from this process and then dissolving the gold out of the residue in chlorine to gather the gold. If you want actual gold you can go one step further and precipitate out elemental gold, which you will eventually find that you will need to do because of nickel and copper impurities. Now you won't come up with troy ounces this way, but you ought to be able to generate enough for a respectable batch of AuCl3.

Chlorine should be your tip-off here. If you don't know why, go look up Chlorine on Wikipedia. If you still don't know, make some, and you or your next of kin will soon figure it out.

Well, I can tell you all that this does indeed work and I have here a bottle of liquid that for all accounts looks to be gold chloride. Unfortunately, the process is a path of chemistry generating poisonous fumes, hazardous chemicals, a ton of time and is a complete and utter mess. Gold prospectors of the 19th century EARNED their money. I'm not squeamish about chemicals - treat them with the proper respect and you should be OK. Making silver nitrate wouldn't bother me - or at least I don't think it would since I haven't tried. But stay away from this one.

So long story short, buy the gold chloride. You won't save any time and you won't save much, if any, money. If you are just hellbent to harvest gold scrap to get yourself gold chloride, then go right ahead! Harvest the scrap, clean it up and sell the stuff to someone who refines scrap metals for real. Use the money you got to buy the gold chloride and the time you saved to take some pictures, make your emulsions or whatever it was you really wanted to do in the first place.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
kb3lms said:
Making silver nitrate wouldn't bother me - or at least I don't think it would since I haven't tried.
Click to expand...


I'd strongly suggest avoiding that too: Dead Link Removed (X_X)
 
Well, I am certainly not advising that anyone should try to make either AuCl3 or AgNO3. Quickly looking at the costs of the materials needed for making AgNO3, unless you had the silver and Nitric Acid on hand, there wouldn't be any savings. Even so, making AgNO3 appears to be a "dissolve the silver and let the result evaporate process" and you have your material. This AuCl3 refining process is a whole magnitute of disaster above that.

Buy the stuff. Mix up developers or emulsions if you want to play chemist. Metals refining is a mess.
 
Nitric Acid

Be careful when working with Nitric Acid that you do not spill any on your skin. It reacts with an amino acid in your skin to form a yellow dye that's much the same color as a yellow highlighter. My college chemistry professor called this "dinitroskin." Your skin may get hard where this happens, but fortunately it only gets the top layer of your skin. Nitric acid will burn you if you don't rinse it off right away (but the yellow compound will have already formed by this time).
 

From Wikipaedia: TNT [of which nitric acid is a constituent] is poisonous, and skin contact can cause skin irritation, causing the skin to turn a bright yellow-orange color. During the First World War, munition workers who handled the chemical found that their skin turned bright yellow, which resulted in their acquiring the nickname "canary girls" or simply "canaries."

A useless piece of information I learned during a visit to the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey last week! It promotes itself as 'Secret Island' to attract the kids, but if you get past that (or not!) there's a fascinating amount of history there. Well worth a visit.

http://www.royalgunpowdermills.com/history-and-heritage/

Steve
 
I produced large quanties of Silver Nitrate and Gold Chloride when I worked in precious metal recovery and you need the right equipment and most importantly fume extraction. It's not difficult just hazardous.

With access to a prperly equipped lab I'd make my own again but it's not something you can do at home.

Ian
 

Are you sure you don't mean picric acid? It was used in British munitions under the name Lyddite; another use of picric acid was dyeing silk yellow.

TNT is a nitrate of toluene, and while nitric acid is used in the process, it cannot properly be called a constituent.
 
There is a worthwhile difference between the cost of commercial AgNO3 and making your own. I have been makiong my own for several months now, and getting a "whiter" product than any I have purchased already made. I save about 30% on the cost. One needs to shop for the best price for silver(not sterling). Also the cost of the nitric acid is all over the place.
My results, as far as silver emulsions is concerned, are totaly comperable to purchased silver nitrate.
Bill
 
To clarify, Nitric Acid is not an ingredient of TNT but rather a precursor which is used with Toluene to generate TNT.

As for the OP, why didn't you just ask one of the chemists here before you started? You might have saved a LOT of time and well, sanity!

PE
 
A question to chemists:

I came across a video with rather simple example of obtaining gold chloride from gold using hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, heating
2Au + 6HCl + 3H2O2 = 6H20 + Au2Cl3
Can this be done with e.g. gold from jewellery shop to produce usable gold chloride for toners? Is it worth it?

PF price for gold chloride is 45 USD per gram, it looks like 150% increase since 2005:
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/gold-chloride.1562/#post-20369
 
Gold from Jewellery is blended with Silver, Copper and Zinc depending on the Carat. Indian jewellery is usually pure gold. None of these processes are for home use.

The price (value) of Gold is set on the Spot market in London twice daily, that affects the price of Gold Chlode and is the reason for the rise over the years.

Ian
 

The resulting Gold Chloride would be unusable due to the impurities, as Ian mentions above.

PE
 
I've made silver nitrate. It's easy if you have access to a fully equipped lab and someone else is paying for everything. There are companies that make gold chloride solutions to add value to scrap gold they refine, prices are very reasonable. Silver nitrate DIY only makes sense if you use it in large quantities.

The SpaceX capsule that blew up in Florida the other day. Those clouds of orange gas, nitrogen dioxide, you will see this when you try to make silver nitrate . The oxidizer used in the capsule decomposes to lovely NO2 at room temperature. Bad news

I got two 15 grain vials of gold chloride off Ebay for 23 bucks. First rule of Ebay learn how to spell chloride
 
Thanks for your answers.
There is no problem of getting silver nitrate over here (~0.6 USD per gram) but getting gold chloride is rather difficult..
 
Wouldn't that be a safer, although more expensive way to tone for permanence then?
With normal prints I see almost no color shift gold chloride, but the contrast increases slightly.
With lith prints I see a drastic cooling off and contrast increase.
 
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