Cyanide Leaching

Dr. A.K. Williams, Ph.D San Pedro, Costa Rica

Introduction
The first chemical leaching of gold occurred in the late 1800s with the introduction on the market of "DuPont Mining Salts". It did extract gold as gold chloride. It was slow and cumbersome to utilize. Just a little later, around the turn of the century, it was discovered that gold could be dissolved in solutions of sodium cyanide. This method was superior because of its simplicity, availability of chemicals, and low cost. After all, who knew what "Mining Salts" were composed of? The success of cyanide leaching is attested to by the fact that, for most purposes, it is still the preferred method of gold extraction and by the fact that about 80% of the world production of gold is obtained by this method. Cyanide has, I think, received a very bad rap at the hands of "dogooders", zealots, the well meaning but mis-informed, and some who are just plain stupid enough to believe the latter without checking out the facts. Im afraid that many of our public officials fall in to the latter category. The success of cyanide is due to several characteristics that we should mention. It is an extremely versatile method. It can be successfully used as a means to assay in 1 quart fruit jars, in small-batch production such as extraction of a few tons of good ore or concentrates in a small cement mixer, or in mega-ton heap-leaching operations. It is a relatively simple process. A person can be trained in a day or two to oversee the extraction and recovery in a safe and efficient manner. For those of you who work in areas where there is good gold but it is so fine that it is near impossible to catch it by gravity, you should read on, open your mind, and think of the possibilities

Some Facts about Cyanide

y

y y y

Sodium cyanide is a very simple chemical composed of one atom of sodium, one atom of carbon, and one atom of nitrogen. Its chemical formula is NaCN. Sodium cyanide is a white solid that looks like confectioners sugar. It will be converted to hydrocyanic acid, HCN, if it contacts acid. HCN is a gas, poisonous and is the stuff that was used to execute condemned prisoners that is probably where it got most of its bad reputation. There are dozens of toxic gases, which would have done the job faster, but cyanide is cheap. It is toxic. It is classified, I believe, as a class two poison. The

y y y y y

"rotten egg" odor of Hydrogen sulfide often emitted from industrial plants or from the catalytic converter on your car is a class one poison. Much more toxic. Cyanide occurs naturally in many plants. It is found combined with the sugar glucose to form a chemical known as amygdalin. When amygdalin contacts the enzymes in your intestinal tract the cyanide is split away from the sugar and is released as HCN. Cyanide reacts with the hemoglobin in your blood. It takes the place of oxygen. Oxygen combines with hemoglobin in the lungs and is transported to the muscles etc where it releases its oxygen to be utilized in energy producing metabolism. The hemoglobin is now returned to the lungs to pick up another load of oxygen. Cyanide, as opposed to oxygen, can not be released from the hemoglobin, thus, the hemoglobin cannot carry anymore oxygen. Hemoglobin combined with cyanide is essentially dead. If enough cyanide reacts with your hemoglobin the blood will be unable to transport enough oxygen to maintain your body and you will die of asphyxiation. As in the "gas chamber". When I was a kid growing up in south Georgia, we used to go fishing with nothing more than a sugar sack, a few black walnuts, and a couple of rocks. You simply put the walnuts (with the husks) in the sack, find an area where the water is not moving too fast, smash up the walnuts with the rocks, and throw it in the water. In a couple of minutes you scoop up the fish. The fish are perfectly safe to eat, since the HCN has already bonded with the fish's blood. You can use peach pits, wild cherry leaves, bitter almonds, and numerous other plant materials. Its the amygdalin that is doing the job. Remember the "miracle" cancer cure derived from apricot pits, "Laetril", that made millions for Mexican scamsters a few years back. Amygdalin! Nothing else! Cyanide is destroyed by many naturally occurring chemicals as well as by oxidizing agents such as clorox. Cyanide is destroyed by sodium thiosulfate or sodium nitrite. An average fatal dose of HCN is about 50-60 milligrams. Cyanide dissolves both gold and silver from alkaline solution. Cyanide is a very "clean" extraction system, as it does not extract many of the base metals such as iron. This is in contrast to halide extraction, which dissolves large quantities of iron, aluminum, and other metals.

A Little About pH
I think we should take a little excursion into the world of acids and bases, pH, and titratable acid/base. So, what is an acid? To put it in its simplest form it is any substance which when dissolved in water will have a pH of less than 7.0. What is a base? Just the opposite. Any substance which when dissolved in water will have a pH of more than 7.0. So what if the pH is exactly 7.0? Then the solution is neither acid or basic, it is

neutral. The scale that is used to measure pH goes from 0-14. Any pH below 7.0 is acid and any above is basic (or alkaline). If we are going to work with pH there is one point which I must make and sometimes people have a little difficulty in understanding it. The pH scale of 0-14 is logarithmic not linear. In other words, most folks would assume that a pH of 1 has twice as much acid as a pH of 2. This is wrong. It is 10 times more acidic. Following this logarithmic scale, a pH of 1 is 100 times more acidic than a solution of pH of 3 etc. A pH of 9 is 10 times more alkaline than a pH of 8. Well, thats O.K., If we have a solution of alkali that contains 1 gram/liter of lime and has a pH of say 12 and we want to adjust it to 13 we simply add 10 more grams of lime, right? Well, I set you up again. I wish I could say this was the case but it just wont work out that way. You will find that it will take more lime than you thought. This is the difference between pH and "titratable acidity or alkalinity". Without going into a monologue just let me say that this is due a thing called "buffering". If anyone wants to pursue this subject get in touch and we will climb that tree as high as you want to go. Just be aware that frequently the amount of acid or base that you must add to your reaction will not be what you expect.

Cyanide Extraction of Gold and Silver

First thing to consider is what sort of chemicals, facilities, and equipment that you will need. You will need a supply of Sodium cyanide. You will need a much larger supply of slaked lime (calcium hydroxide). This is not limestone, or quicklime. Frequently these terms are used interchangeably. You will hear terms like "agricultural limestone" etc. Just be sure you have Calcium hydroxide. The cheapest grade that you can buy. Do not underestimate the amount that you need. Its cheap and you do not want to start an extraction and run out of lime. Your material could start to go acidic and you would be caught with no alkali to counteract the acid. This could be bad because if the solution should become acid enough the cyanide would be released into the air as HCN and your values would fall out of solution. It would be prudent to have a supply of sodium thiosulfate for just such an emergency. If things start to get out of hand just dump in an excess. Your values will still fall out of solution but you will have destroyed the cyanide in the extraction vessel and precluded complaints etc. Its just good procedure. You will probably never have occasion to use it. You will need some way to determine the approximate pH (acidity/alkalinity) of the reaction. On a small laboratory or pilot-plant scale you should be able to get by with "pH paper". This is paper in strips

or rolls which when dipped into the solution is then compared to a color chart on the paper container. You match the color of the strip with a color on the chart and read off the pH. Many of these products will only work over a certain range of pH. You would prefer a wide range paper going all the way from 1-14. You will be operating in the range of 9-12. You will need something to keep the solution stirred, agitated, mixed and aerated. On a very small scale such as a quart to a gallon size jug you can probably do it by hand. Just shake or stir the material every few minutes. In somewhat larger scale extractions I recommend a cement mixer of a size appropriate to the amount of material to be treated. On a cement mixer scale you might also have to adjust the cyanide concentration to maintain its concentration at about 0.4%. For this you will have to determine the amount of cyanide present in solution. This is usually done by a simple titration of the extracting liquid and addition of cyanide as it is used up in the reaction. If any of you should need a procedure to accomplish this please let me know. I will try to modify this page to include a section on determination of cyanide in solution. Because this site is primarily for the small operator, we are not going to consider large scale or heap-leaching at this time. You will need some sort of filter to separate the solids from the pregnant (gold-bearing) solution. For a small batch, you can utilize coffee filters and a funnel. There are things called "filter funnels" which are much more efficient than a standard smooth walled funnel. The filter funnel simply has a series of grooves cut from the rim of the funnel down to the spout. These grooves serve as channels for the liquid to escape through. Without these the folded paper will sort of seal itself to the filter surface which acts like a dam so that the only surface area available for liquid to exit is through the very tip end of the paper. This can be frustratingly slow. You can make an acceptable substitute by taking a few thin strips of wood or plastic of swizzle stick or soda straw size. Tie them all together at one end. Carefully spread them to make sort of a "coolie hat" or cone. Put this cone into your funnel and put your folded filter paper in on top of it. Now you have a "Q&D" (quick & dirty) filter funnel. A complete discussion of filters is well beyond the scope of this page. If you have specific questions let me know and well go in to more detail. I highly recommend that anyone who has no experience with cyanide extraction start with about a quart or half gallon size jar with a tight fitting top that does not leak. If you should make some sort of mistake it is much easier to deal with a small mistake rather than a large one. After all, if everything starts to go south you can just throw the whole thing into a bucket of thiosulfate solution. Remember, anytime that you are doing an extraction in a closed vessel you should loosen the top occasionally to relieve internal pressure and allow oxygen to enter. There must be oxygen present or no gold/silver will be dissolved. O.K., now that you have digested that wealth of information maybe

there are a few out there who are truly desperate and got no choice but to continue, lets dissolve some gold/silver. We are going to run a sample to see if there is enough really fine gold present to go after it on a larger scale. Start by dissolving about 10 grams of lime in one liter of water. If it doesnt all dissolve, not to worry. Now weigh out 4 grams of sodium cyanide and add it to the lime solution and allow it to dissolve. Next, fill your container to about 1/3 full with ore. This should be crushed so that there are no large rocks etc. Add enough of the cyanide solution to make thin slurry. The container should not be more than 2/3 full. Now you start mixing. You should now start to use your pH paper immediately. The first reading should be rather high 11 or 12. Within a very short time, no more than a minute, test it again. The pH will probably be falling. If so, add lime with stirring and continue to monitor the pH. You want the pH to stay close to11. After a few minutes the pH will begin to stabilize and you wont have to stay on top of it as in the beginning. DO NOT LET THE pH DROP BELOW 8!!! At this point I cannot give you a cut and dried recipe, it depends too much on the type of ore you have, how fine it has been crushed etc. Just stay on your toes for awhile and dont panic. Its like everything else; it gets a lot easier with practice. After some length of time the gold will be dissolved. The only way you can tell if all the values are dissolved is to set up several reactions and filter them over a period of time such as 1 hr, 2 hrs, 4 hrs, 8 hrs, etc. This will only have to be done once for each type of ore that you test. After that you will know that samples from area X requires 2 hrs for extraction, etc. For our first try lets just extract for 4 hrs and filter it. Another very important thing is that you must wash the solids (pulp) several times to remove all the values. After the first pregnant solution has been recovered, wash the pulp with an equal volume of your cyanide/lime solution that has been diluted 1/10 with water. You should wash the pulp this way three times. Combine all the liquid. This pregnant solution should have the values in solution.

Recovering values
There are numerous ways to recover the values from pregnant solutions. We will not attempt to cover them all, just the ones that seem practicable for our purposes.
y

Activated carbon. You must use activated carbon. Ground up charcoal briquettes will not work. Yes, you can make your own carbon but its a grunt and not worth the trouble. Buy or borrow it. You can adsorb the values two ways. First and most efficient is "column adsorption". In this method the carbon is slurried into a column of plastic or other material and the pregnant solution allowed to flow through it. The values should remain stuck to the

column. There are ways to "strip" the column with chemicals but it is frequently unreliable and you usually dont know if you recovered all the values or not. In most cases it is probably better to simply burn the carbon to ash and deal with that.
y

Ion Exchange resin. This is usually my preferred method. This stuff will adsorb like a thousand times more values/unit weight than carbon. It is much more reliable and doesnt vary from batch to batch as carbon does. This is the stuff that they use in water softeners and de-ionizers to produce pure water. Did you know that most "distilled" water is not distilled at all, its usually deionized. The one you want to catch gold/silver is a weak base, anionic resin. Im sure you could get it from a local water processor. Treat it just like it was carbon. Like carbon it can be stripped and re-used. If you have really loaded a lot of gold on it, like carbon, I think its best to simply burn it. Remember, with the resin you dont need much, a very small column will suffice. You can test to know when the column is saturated and will adsorb no more values. This will work for carbon or resin. Catch a little of the column effluent in a test tube or some such and add a little table salt dissolved in weak (1-5 %) nitric acid. If you get a white cloud of silver chloride, your column is saturated and is about to start losing gold. Silver always "breaks through" a column before the gold does. Cementation. This is a tried and true method for recovering values dissolved in almost anything except aqua regia. The term "cementation" refers to the process of replacing the dissolved gold with a base metal resulting in the precipitation of the values. Historically, this process utilized zinc. The reason was simple, it works, and at that time zinc was the cheapest metal in the world. There were two basic systems used. The "zinc box" was a wooden box filled with "mossy zinc" a sort of shredded zinc, through which the value bearing solution was allowed to flow. This was a very efficient method because it presented a very large surface area of zinc so that the reaction time was very fast. As the zinc dissolved and replaced the gold/silver in solution the values precipitated to the bottom of the box where they could be periodically recovered as a black-brown paste. The other way was to set up a box is with zinc plates arranged so that the flowing liquid ran over one plate and under the next. This works perfectly well but was a bit slower than the previous method. The third method, which was used when you had the pregnant solution in a batch rather than a stream, was to simply add small chunks of zinc or powdered zinc to the solution and allow the values to settle out. You can substitute aluminum for the zinc. These "cementation slimes" will contain large quantities, sometimes as much as 75% of the cementing metal but that is easily removed by other means or in the smelting process. It is usually better to remove these contaminating metals. If you should smelt that much zinc all at

once it could create a large cloud of zinc vapor that is unnecessary. The usual method of cleaning up these cementing slimes is to treat the slime with dilute sulfuric acid until most of the metals have dissolved in the acid, leaving your gold behind in the remaining insoluble slime. This can now be smelted with less danger of overexposure to metal vapors

Halide Leaching and Recovery

By Dr. A.K. Williams, PhD. San Pedro, Costa Rica

Introduction
The group of chemicals known as halides is composed of the elements fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine. We will ignore fluorine because it does not dissolve gold. The elements listed above are in order of their molecular weights, density, cost, and reactivity. Chlorine is the lightest, cheapest and least reactive while iodine is heaviest, most expensive, and fastest reacting. Iodine is classified as a rare element. There are no ores containing iodine. It is obtained primarily from extracting seaweed, hence, the high cost. Chlorine was the first commercial gold extracting agent. In the late 1800s it was introduced on the market as " DuPont Mining Salts". Although I have no direct proof, Im sure that this was nothing more than sodium hypochlorite, the stuff that Clorox is made from. It was used by taking ore and chlorine and agitating them in a "Pachuca Tank" or rotating the mixture in lead-lined barrels. This method fell into disfavor with the discovery that cyanide extraction was cheaper and easier for the untrained miner to use. The usefulness of various extraction techniques for the production of gold is attested to by the fact that at the present more than 80% of the worlds gold production is obtained by chemical extraction. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in halide extraction of gold. Partly because of a better understanding of the process but mostly because of the bad rap that cyanide has received at the hand of the do-gooders, zealots and ignorant crusaders. I understand that there is at least one commercial companyare selling a sort of "magic" proprietary chemical that only they can provide at a cost that knocks my socks off. Let me give you a truism about chemistry, MERLIN THE MAGICIAN DIED. THERE AINT BEEN NO MAGIC SINCE!!! You can do the same thing in your carport or out in the mountains. All you need is a little information that average Joe Beerdrinker just doesnt have ready access to. I am going to give you (I hope) all the information you need to do it. So, stay with me. If you will read through all this stuff which, I know, is more than you ever wanted to know I think you will eventually agree that you will have

learned some principles that you can use to great advantage. I really hate to see folks trying to follow a cookbook recipe to the point that when something goes a little wrong it wrecks everything. I'm going to try to give you enough information so that if something unexpected happens you will be able to deal with it rather than panic.

Leaching
O.K., I hate to try to explain the principle of oxidation/reduction or "redox" because I have never been able to put it into words that anyone can understand. But, we have to try to get at least a rudimentary understanding of this or you will never really understand what is going on in gold extraction or any form of metallurgy. There are three ways to look at redox. Oxidation is: 1. The addition of oxygen. 2. The removal of hydrogen. 3. The loss of an electron. Now I know that doesnt mean much to you but it is important. For example when you recover mercury from a solution of nitric acid which you have used to clean some amalgamated gold you usually simply hang a piece of copper or aluminum in the clear solution and mercury plates out on the copper and drips to the bottom of the vessel. In this case the copper is reducing the mercury in mercuric nitrate to mercury metal and oxidizing the nitrate to copper nitrate. When something is reduced something also has to be oxidized, they are simply the opposite of each other. This is how a battery works. In the case of metals, which are cations, that is they carry positive charges, the pure metal is the reduced form. That is, iron metal is the reduced form of iron. The rust that is on it is its oxidized form because it has combined with oxygen to make iron oxide. If you take iron oxide and put some rust remover (reducing agent) on it you remove the oxygen and reduce the metal back to pure iron. Now, halides are not metals. In fact they are the opposite. They carry negative charges and are anions. So, In their elemental form they are oxidized. Just the reverse of metals. Why is all of this important to you? Because if you are going to use these chemicals you must be able to use them. If you want to store iodine, it is much better to store it in its reduced form so that it wont evaporate. And, if you want to dissolve gold with it, it must be in its elemental or oxidized form. To summarize, you must be able to shift the iodine (or other halide) from its oxidized to reduced form. Im going to tell you how to do it. When you want your halide in its elemental or oxidized form, simply add a little Clorox bleach. If you add an excess, Iodine will precipitate from the water solution and settle to the bottom as pure

elemental, blue, iodine. If you want to dissolve the iodine, you must reduce it. This you can do by adding a little Red Devil Lye dissolved in water. The blue iodine will begin to go in solution so that the solution will first turn bright blue and upon addition of more Lye it will become colorless as all of the iodine is reduced to sodium iodide. Hey. Great! Now we know how to convert/handle it. As my son tells me re computers, you can make it do what you want it to do. Now you have control. Now for a couple of facts re iodine. Elemental (oxidized) iodine will not dissolve in water. So if it wont dissolve, how are we going to use it? It has another characteristic. It will dissolve in solutions of sodium iodide. I didnt do it, it just works that way. That fact gives us our way to dissolve gold. We will pursue that a little later. I should say that there are differences in the way the halides behave but they are very minor differences. For example, chlorine and bromine will not precipitate from solution when oxidized. That makes them a bit more difficult to handle and recover, as we will see later. I am simply using iodine as my example.

Recovery of the Gold

Now we have our ore with a nice red-brown solution of iodine and, hopefully, a whole bunch of dissolved gold in the solution. We cant sell it that way. Got to get it out and make it look like gold. First we have to get rid of all the material that we have been extracting. This can be done in a number of ways but probably the most Basement way is to filter it. Depending on the scale that you are working you can use a coffee filter in a funnel or a piece of canvas in a 20 ftdia tank. Anyway, filter it and try to get a rather clear solution. Remember that the solution must still be redbrown. If it isnt, you have left your gold behind in the filter. This is why I insisted on your being able to oxidize or reduce at will. KEEP IT REDBROWN. Once you have your red-brown solution free of material, now, you can let it go colorless or make it go colorless by addition of the Lye solution. Your gold will now slowly settle to the bottom as a black powder. Or, you can filter the solution through a fine filter to recover the gold. Great, we got a whole bunch of gold but if we lose that iodine we are still going to be in the hole. Remember, at this point it dont look like iodine but it is still there. By this time you probably have a pretty good volume of liquid with the iodine in it. If its more liquid than you want to deal with simply dump in an excess of Clorox , let the iodine settle to the bottom, pour off most of the water, add some Lye solution and you have your sodium iodide in a concentrated solution which is the way you want to store it anyway. Ready for another extraction.

Of course, no one is going to buy that black powder from you. " Sure its gold, anyone can see that! Take it somewhere else"! To make this stuff look like gold again simply smelt it. I assume most of you know how to smelt. If not, please contact me. Hey guys, It aint brain surgery. You can do it as well as me. Please let me know how it comes out or if you have problems.

The other Two Halides

Now, I have talked almost entirely about iodine. 99% of what I said about the use of iodine applies to both chlorine and bromine. The significant differences are;
y y

The price as discussed previously. Solutions of chlorine are colorless so you cannot rely on the color to tip you off as to the eH of the solution. With chlorine you will have to use an eH indicator dye which will not be readily available, or (would I leave you with that problem?), you can use your nose instead of your eyes. You will have to add oxidizer to maintain a little chlorine smell coming off the extraction. So, what oxidizer do I use? Same as with iodine. You use chlorox. However, chlorox is very weak and you would have to use great volumes of it to maintain some chlorine in solution. You should use the stuff that chlorox is made of, sodium hypochlorite. This is a solid, white powder which in a 5.0% solution is chlorox. This chemical can be obtained at any chemical supply. Now if you cant or wont go to that effort there is still another alternative. You see, we never leave you hanging without another way to skin the cat. Almost as good as sodium hypochlorite is our old friend, swimming pool chlorine. This is calcium hypochlorite. It works very well. It just doesnt dissolve very well. Again, we never leave you without a way to escape. Just add a little lye solution and it will go right in. You have converted it to sodium hypochlorite. Dont add too much, just enough to put it in solution. Remember chlorine is very slow. You will have to maintain this system for several hours to a day or more. Like all of the halides, if you allow the solution to go acid, the chlorine will rapidly boil off and if you are close by will be extremely uncomfortable. Bromine and iodine are not so bad. They are not nearly so volatile and will give you a little more time to rectify the situation by addition of a little lye water. If you are extracting with halides, in particular, chlorine where

you have no visual reference as to what is happening, you should have some hydrochloric (muriatic) or sulfuric acid at hand. If your reaction should start to slow down and you are sure you have an excess of halide in solution you might have to add a little acid in order to liberate the halide from its salt form in order to keep sufficient free halide to ensure a good extraction. If you can keep the pH at say 8.5 you will be about right.
y

If chlorine production should get out of hand, you probably should have some solution of sodium thiosulfate on hand. It can be bought from any chemical supply. This is the stuff that tropical fish freaks use to treat tap water to destroy chlorine. You will need much more than they use however. This is a good way to neutralize any solution you wish to dump. Your neighbors will probably appreciate your thoughtfulness. Just a little about bromine. Its a bit expensive so we are not going to throw it away, right? Bromine is rather nasty stuff to handle in its elemental form. It is a liquid, which is sold sealed in 1-LB glass ampoules. When you break the container you have to use it or contain it some other way. It has a way of fuming right through the tightest bottle-cap type seals. The only way you might do it successfully is to seal around the cap with hot paraffin. Lets dont do it that way. Always an option, right? Since we are rather knowledgeable about oxidation/reduction we can handle it in a more sophisticated way. We can buy it in its reduced and cheaper form, sodium bromide. After all, we know how to convert it to elemental bromine; it just takes a little clorox, right? After all, thats what we are going to store it as anyway. When Clorox is added and the bromine oxidized to its active form, like iodine; it exhibits a distinctive color, deep red. We are now a bit smarter than the average bear

Now that we can jump around in redox reactions like a monkey in a fig tree let me add just one final "consejo". Whatever you decide to do with these extractions, please. Read the above several times until you are certain that you understand it well enough to control the reactions. Its not hard, use common sense, and if thing start to go sour dont panic, fix it.

Using Mercury
By Dr. A. K. Williams San Pedro, Costa Rica

Specifics
y y

Mercury is the only metal which occurs as a liquid at ordinary temperatures Mercury is one of only two metals which occurs naturally in both its metallic and oxidized state, The other being copper.

y y y y y y y y y y y y y y

y y

Mercury will form amalgams with almost all metals except Iron and Aluminum. Occurrence in earths crust 0.5 ppm. That is 0.5 mg/kilo. Melting point is 38.87 C. Boiling point is 356.72 C Density at 25C 13.534 gr/cubic centimeter (cc) Vapor pressure at 25C 2 X 10 3 mm Surface tension 484 dynes/cm Electrical resistivity 95.76 microohms/cm Does not tarnish in air at normal temperatures, but when heated near the boiling point will convert to Mercuric Oxide It will react slowly with sulfur at normal temperatures to form Mercuric Sulfide. It will react with Nitric Acid and with hot concentrated Sulfuric Acid. It will not react with dilute Hydrochloric Acid, cold Sulfuric Acid, or Alkalis. It will react with ammonia in the presence of oxygen. Metallic Mercury can be recovered from solution by the addition of hydrogen peroxide in the presence of alkali hydroxides such as Caustic Soda or Lye. Mercury can be recovered from solution by cementing with Copper, Aluminum, Zinc, etc. Mercury will react rather violently with Aluminum. Do not use Mercury in an Aluminum Gold pan or try to store it in an Aluminum vessel.

Toxicity
Mercury like all heavy metals is toxic. It behaves just like other heavy metals such as Lead, Copper, Arsenic, Zinc, etc. Heavy metals have the characteristic of not being easily excreted from the body. If you ingest a large amount of Mercury for example it will stay in your body for a long time. If you ingest a little Mercury each day it will accumulate in your body until if, you take no action, it could produce toxic symptoms such as hair loss etc. Mercury has a relatively high vapor pressure, which means that at normal temperatures if you left a bowl of mercury out in the air a significant amount would vaporize and would be in the air. If you continued to breathe this Mercury containing air you certainly would ingest a significant amount of Mercury. The most dangerous thing about Mercury is that the lungs readily absorb the vapors. This you must avoid. So far as I can determine metallic Mercury is only slowly absorbed through the skin or mucous membranes. In fact, Mercury in various forms has been used for medical purposes for 100s of years. How many of you have used mercurichrome or merthiolate to disinfect cuts etc or to swab out a sore throat? There was at one time a much-used medicine called "Blue Pill or Blue Mass" which was a mixture of metallic Mercury and honey. Merck Index states " occasional swallowing of Mercury is without harm". I am not saying that Mercury is not toxic. It definitely is but so is almost

any chemical that you come in contact with; It is just a matter of amount. There are a few precautions that you must follow when working with Mercury. These will be discussed in a following section. What I'm trying to say is that Mercury deserves respect but not fear. It has taken a very bad rap at the hands of the dogooders whose only knowledge of ,or experience with it is that they once took their temperature with a rectal thermometer. If any one of you feel that you have a problem with heavy metal poisoning, hair loss, loose teeth, kidney damage, muscle tremors etc please have a check for heavy metal intoxication. Its simple and inexpensive. If you have a problem there is a treatment which involves infusing EDTA (ethylene diaminetetracetic acid) into your blood. This is a treatment known as "chelation" and it will very effectively remove the heavy metals from your system.

Precautions
y y y y y y y y y y

When working with Mercury always use latex gloves, its cheap and is good procedure. Always store Mercury in tightly closed containers (not Aluminum). Always put a layer of water on top of the Mercury unless it is charged Mercury. Never heat Mercury or amalgam in an enclosed space. If you must heat Mercury do it in the outdoors or a well-ventilated space. Always stand upwind of hot mercury. Do not breathe the fumes. Do not let Mercury contact Aluminum. It will destroy it. Avoid spilling mercury. It is very difficult to clean up. Never heat Mercury indoors or in any enclosed space. Never try to distill (retort) Mercury in a glass retort.

How to Clean Mercury

The term "clean" can mean different things to different people. It can mean simply Mercury that has no black crud floating around on top of it, or, it can mean that the Mercury is mirror bright, silvery without the usual yellow film of mercuric oxide floating on top. Or, it can mean that the Mercury is pure Mercury and contains no other metals dissolved in it. In order to remove the usual black crud that inevitably floats around on top of your Mercury is very simple. Get yourself a funnel and a coffee filter. Take the round filter and fold it in half twice. Open it so that one side has one layer of paper and the other has three layers. Put this cone filter in the funnel. Now take a pin or needle and put a very small hole in the very tip of the paper. Pour in your cruddy Mercury. The Mercury should pass through the filter in tiny drops. If it does not pass through, open the hole just a bit. If it runs through in a steady stream, the hole is too big and you will have to start over. This method will remove all of the floating oxides etc and give you Mercury that you can work with.

Second. If you have Mercury that has other metals amalgamated in it and is sort of thick with what appears to be "clots" floating around on it you can filter these amalgam clots by several methods. The first and easiest is to purchase a syringe (10 ml or larger) from the drug store. Make a ball of absorbent cotton and push it into the bottom of the syringe. Push in the plunger to pack it as tightly as possible. Pour in your Mercury and force it slowly through the cotton with the syringe plunger. The residue on the cotton will contain most of the amalgams including Gold. Probably the best way to recover the amalgamated metals including gold is to simply take the cotton ball from the syringe and burn it with a propane torch or other. Be sure you are outside or in a well ventilated space. A second way to remove amalgamated materials from Mercury is to squeeze it through a piece of chamois. Be sure to wear gloves when using this method. This method is somewhat cleaner than the cotton filter in that the amalgam usually separates from the chamois and you eliminate the need to incinerate the cotton. Remember, although you have filtered your Mercury, you still have metals in the Mercury, which are in true solution and that cannot be removed by filtration. In order to remove all the dissolved/amalgamated metals from Mercury you will have to retort or distill it. In order to distill Mercury you should purchase a Mercury retort. They are relatively inexpensive. Yes, you can make one from pipefitting etc, but they are usually rather clumsy, massive affairs, which are a bit of a grunt to use. Theyre two types of Mercury retorts. Vented and non-vented. The non-vented type is simply a boiling vessel and a cooling tube from which the Mercury drips into a catch vessel. With this type of retort NEVER put the exit end under water in a catch vessel. If you do, a very slight drop in the temperature of the boiling Mercury will create a vacuum sufficient to suck water back through the system right into the boiling Mercury at 675 F. Please believe me when I tell you, that is BAAAAD! It will ruin your whole day and probably put you in the hospital (if you are lucky). The vented type of retort is made specifically to prevent this problem. In this type, near the exit end of the retort there is a very small tube, which extends upwards a few inches. The purpose of this tube is to allow you to immerse the exit end of the retort in water. If your heat source should fail and the temperature in the "hot vessel" drop, air will be sucked in through the small tube instead of water through the exit. In any case, If you retort your Mercury you will now have Mercury, which is, for all practical purposes, clean and pure. Any amalgamated metals such as gold will be left behind in the retort. Actually, in order to have Mercury which is considered chemically pure it must be distilled three times. Triple distilled Mercury. This has no practical value for mining.

Applying Mercury to Copper Plates

Every time I see someone trying to apply Mercury to a copper or brass plate it makes me react just like they were scraping their fingernails on a

blackboard. I see people spending hours trying to clean the plate by sanding, scrubbing with steel wool, washing with acid, etc. Then, worst of all, trying to put metallic Mercury directly onto the plate by chasing it all around with rags, sponges, squeegees, and any number of other devices. Of course, most of the Mercury ends up in their shoes, in the water, on the ground, everywhere except on the plate. Gentlemen, this is NOT the way to do it.The simple, effective, professional way to coat one metal with another is to apply a solution of metal salt onto the other metal and let the resulting battery action reduce the salt to metal which will then coat the base metal with a even, thin film. If this seems complicated, its because I sort of set you up. Its so simple as to make your old method seem like building a H bomb. All you need is a little nitric acid and some Mercury. Dilute your nitric acid with an equal volume of water; put it in a plastic bottle with a good tight top. Now put a small glob of Mercury in the bottle and let it stand for awhile. When you are ready to apply the Mercury to a plate simply be sure there is no grease on the plate by wiping with a detergent solution. No matter how cruddy the plate looks, not to worry, simply dip a swab into the acid solution and wipe it onto the plate. MAGIC. Your plate is now coated with Mercury. A bottle/swab such as shoe polish comes in works nicely for this. I think that most folks believe they should have a thick coat of Mercury on the plate. Actually, the opposite is true. You should remove excess Mercury with a squeegee or other because as gold sticks to the plate the mercury film gets thicker and thicker. When this happens, gravel, which is usually moving over the plate, will scrub the excess off the plate and you will lose mercury and any gold that it contains. Erosion of thick amalgam layers from sluice plate is a common problem and one that usually goes unnoticed.

How Amalgamation Works

I get a distinct idea that most folks have a distorted idea of just how amalgamation works. First of all, the way we in the gold business talk about amalgam is a bit of a misnomer. A true amalgam is when one metal is actually dissolved in another in which case we would not be able to filter out the gold from our amalgamated concentrates. It would simply pass right through the filter. We normally utilize the unique properties of partially amalgamated gold in order to recover it easily. Visualize a gold particle like a golf ball. When it comes in contact with mercury the mercury begins to dissolve in the gold. Now we have a gold particle with a layer of mercury sticking to its surface because of the very high surface tension of mercury. The mercury will now continue to dissolve in the gold and penetrate deeper into the particle. This process, however, is rather slow and the deeper it penetrates the slower it goes. Yes, if you have enough mercury and enough time the gold will eventually dissolve into the mercury (or vice/versa). However, in our theoretical particle what we now have is a center of gold/no mercury, a surface of gold/mercury, and on top of that a layer of mercury/no gold. Right, we have our amalgamated gold and now we want to get

rid of the mercury. We just need to heat it, right. Yeah, but look what happens. As we heat it the excess mercury coating boils off. Now the true amalgam at the surface gets hot and the mercury boils off leaving the gold, right? Dead wrong! What happens is as the mercury evaporates from this surface area the gold which was dissolved in it falls away from the parent particle and is left as a usually black powder which you normally throw away because it dont look like gold. This same effect is true if you use nitric acid to remove the mercury. So, the fact is that every time you amalgamate gold particles and recover the gold the particles get a little smaller. If you have any doubts try it. Take some rather fine gold and amalgamate and recover it several times. After three or four times you will notice that the particles get smaller and smaller. If you continue this process, eventually you will end up with very fine, black, gold powder and no yellow particles. Of course the finer the gold that you amalgamate the more you will convert to the black powder form. This is because the finer the gold particles, the more surface area that is exposed for amalgamation and the larger the percentage of conversion (or loss).

Recovering Mercury from Solution

Im sure that all of you who use mercury for catching or cleaning up concentrates also occasionally use nitric acid also. This means that you surely will end up with nitric acid solutions, which contain mercury. Please let me encourage to not throw this solution away. O.K. Im the same. I dont have time or inclination to spend the time to recover a couple of grams of mercury. What I do is that I have a "stock pot". A plastic jug in which I put any leftover mining chemicals. No matter what, acid, caustic, mercury solutions, anything that even might have something worth recovering or things that I dont want to pour down the sink. When I feel like it I recover the mercury by cementation usually with a copper strip suspended in the waste. Assuming that the waste solution is not too acidic, the mercury will drip to the bottom ready for use again. You can also use aluminum. You can drop in a little table salt and a white cloud of silver chloride will settle out. Filter this off and store it for later silver recovery. If you think there might be some gold in the solution you can filter it through a coffee filter add some powered zinc, mossy zinc, or just chunks of zinc. Any precipitate you get might contain gold. Im sure most of you have your own pet methods and thats fine, just dont throw all that stuff away. Keep it for when the weather has you housebound.

Charged Mercury
Now we have arrived at the mystery of mercury. A lot of folks have heard of it. Most havent. Most that have heard of it respond " oh yeah, thats the stuff that company X sells (for a lot of $s). Its some mysterious stuff that you cant get anywhere else". Baloney! Merlin the magician died a long time ago and there just aint been no magic since. You can make all you want right in your carport and it shouldnt cost you more than $5.00 tops.

First thing is that I dont like the term "charged mercury" but since I cant think of a better one, we will use it. Now we all understand amalgamation, right? We also understand that gold is not the only metal that will form amalgams with mercury. Mercury will form an amalgam with two other metals of interest. Sodium or potassium. Doesnt matter which, they are very similar and for our purposes it doesnt matter which you use. "Charged mercury" is nothing more than a mercury/sodium amalgam. The trick is how do we make it? O.K., you could just take some sodium metal and drop little chunks of into hot mercury. However, there are two things wrong with that procedure. First, dumping anything into hot mercury is a little hazardous since it tends to make little mini-explosions. Second, sodium is a metal, white, very soft, can cut it with a knife, it would be a little hard to lay your hands on. Its not a common material. Also, you would have to store it under oil or kerosene because water vapor in the air will cause it to burn. It reacts violently with water and can cause explosions. Not to worry, there is a better way. There are many ways to skin a cat. The problem is that first you must catch the cat. We got him! Actually, a gentleman/scientist named Faraday caught the cat for us. If I can paraphrase Faradays Law it states in effect that for every 28.6 ampere/ hrs of current you can deposit 1 mole of metal (in the case of sodium, 23 grams) from solution onto the cathode of an electrolytic cell. Well that certainly is impressive. So, what does it mean to us? It gives us a way to produce all the sodium amalgam that we want cheaply and easily. This will be discussed in detail later. What can this "magic mercury" do for us? Sodium amalgam is one of the strongest reducing agents known to science. If you take a metal oxide such as common rust (iron oxide) and you "reduce" it you will end up with metallic iron and oxygen. Sodium amalgam will cause this reaction to occur. It is the absolute best rust remover that you could ever devise. It will also reduce other materials such as zinc, magnesium, manganese, sulfides, etc. This charged mercury" or mercury amalgam will always be mirror bright and shiny with no yellow film of mercuric oxide floating on the surface. In order for mercury to amalgamate with gold the two metals must be able to come in contact with each other. If either the mercury or the gold has a coat of anything on it you will never get it to amalgamate. Its like the gold is enclosed in little plastic bags. They just cant get together. Now the mercury surface is perfectly clean due to the reaction of the sodium with the water. When this stuff touches a particle of gold which has its own coat of iron or other metallic oxide or sulfide, it will immediately reduce that too, leaving only the fine powder metal that will wash away leaving a nice clean gold surface just waiting to be amalgamated by the mercury which is also present. One thing that the amalgam will not remove is oil/grease. For that you will have to use a detergent. When you get some of this stuff and put it in water you will note that it fizzes giving off hydrogen gas. That is why it works. As we said before, sodium reacts with water. What we have done is to make a sodium battery. When the fizzing stops it means that all the sodium has reacted and it is now "discharged" to ordinary mercury. Now you must recharge it.

"Charging " Mercury

Charging mercury is such a simple procedure that it is amazing that almost

no one knows how to do it. Yes, there are a few folks out there who manage to obtain a tiny fraction of their mercury as sodium amalgam. Usually, less than one percent. It does work but it cant work for very long before it is discharged and must be recharged. Maybe there are a few of you who know much more than I do about it. If so, please contact me. In order to charge your mercury you must have a charging vessel. I will be glad to sell such high tech vessels for only $29.99 plus postage. Also I will sell you the necessary "charging salts" for the amazing price of only $9.99 plus postage. For those of you who insist on making your own I will provide instructions free of charge. Hows that for a deal! (Im working on a kickback deal from your local supermarket). It will require a trip to the super. You should purchase an "Old Fashioned" tumbler glass of the hard, clear, plastic type. Dont try to get around me by using one of those soft, polyethylene "tupperware" types. They wont work. In order to save a trip back to the store, buy a container of good ol Red Devil Lye. You now have 90% of your materials in hand. If you dont have any epoxy glue, you should pick up a tube of that too. Now you should drill or melt a small hole in the glass at the very bottom of a size such that a solid copper wire of size # 14 or so can be inserted in the hole and extended to the opposite side of the glass. Seal around the wire at the hole and glue the loose end of the wire the bottom of the glass. This will be your reaction vessel with the cathode or negative terminal. You now must make an anode or positive electrode. This can be piece of re-bar, a steel bolt, an old screwdriver or whatever. I recommend using a bolt with two nuts and a disc of steel a bit smaller than the vessel. Cut a hole in the center so that it can be sandwiched between the nuts. While this is not absolutely necessary, It will allow a bit more current to flow through the cell with a resulting faster charge rate. Now fashion an anode clamp to hold the anode and prevent it from falling into the mercury. A piece of wood with a tight fitting hole works fine. The following drawing illustrates whatthe vessel should look like. .

The Charging vessel.

Now all you have to do is connect your reactor to a source of DC power capable of delivering at least 1 ampere of current. A 12 volt car battery is convenient for this purpose. You can use a battery charger if you like. If you have two batteries you can connect them in series and cut your charging time in half. You should watch the system in the beginning just to be sure you are not pulling too much current which will cause the cell to get too hot and maybe boil. Dont let it get that hot. This is not usually a problem and is easily fixed by simply reducing the amount of lye in the water layer or putting a light bulb in series with the system. The amount of mercury in the cell and the amount of current flowing through the system determine the time required. You will know when the mercury is well charged because it will be a gray, solid, putty-like mass. Not a liquid. At this point put on gloves and pour off the water/lye layer, wash the mercury surface with clean water and immediately dry it with an absorbent paper towel. Store it in a clean, dry, tightly closed plastic bottle or jar. Usually, no matter how tight the bottle some water vapor will get in. You can fix this problem by putting a packet of drying agent such as silica gel, calcium sulfate, or calcium carbide in the container with the mercury. These materials will effectively scrub out any water, which gets in.

A Few More Thoughts

I t might be worth while discuss the subject of surface area as it of paramount importance when amalgamating. First let me explain that liquids always try attain a shape that results in the least surface exposed. What shape would that be? Spherical. When anything liquid or solid is in the shape of globe or sphere there is no way to reduce the surface area more. If you change the shape of a sphere to some other eg, A cube, a cylinder etc the surface will increase to some extent. However, If you want to increase the surface area by millions or hundreds of millions you simply divide it into several separate pieces. If you take a marble and divide it into 1000 smaller marbles the surface will increase by 100,000 times or so. Dont hold me to these numbers they are only for example. If you had divided it into 1000 cubes the area would have been much more than the marble or the 1000 spheres. If you want to increase it still further just grind it into finer and finer particles. I think I recall reading that one lb of carbon ground to face powder size or less would have a surface area more than that of the entire earth. Something like that. Amalgamation is very dependent upon surface area. Especially of the mercury. If you keep your mercury in a single glob it will cause you less headaches because there is less surface to corrode which can cause "flouring". Also that single glob of mercury will take much longer to contact all the gold particles. If you use charged mercury to recover gold from concentrates its all right to allow it to break up into smaller globs. Things will go much faster but you should try to get the mercury back in one glob before it is discharged or the globs will corrode rapidly and will be much more difficult to recover.

So, the more that charged mercury is spread out or its surface area increased the more of the sodium is also spread out and the more contact it has with the water. The more contact it has with water the faster it reacts and the faster that it discharges. That is bad for us. I wish I could say that you could use charged mercury on a copper plate at the end of your sluice. Well, you can but it wont work very well. That little glob of charged mercury that would last 30 minutes in your pan, when spread in a thin film on a plate probably will last no longer than 30 seconds. I can already hear some folks saying, "he aint so smart, Ill just take a battery and connect it right to the sluice plate and keep the mercury charged all the time". I wish! It wont work because if the mercury is not discharging its not a reducing agent and will not clean either itself or the gold. It only works when it is discharging. I must admit that I have sort of an idea how one might be able to use charged mercury on a plate but like a lot of my ideas I havent put it to the test yet.

This document maintained by A.K. Williams. Material Copyright 1999 A.K. Williams Optimized for use with Communicator 4 and Internet Explorer 4.0

Assaying and Smelting

Dr. A.K. Williams, Ph.D San Pedro, Costa Rica

Introduction
O.K. guys, we are going on a little excursion into the world of titration. What is "titration"? Well, its a method of finding out something that you want to know by setting up an experiment in graded steps so that we can know when a certain event takes place. For example, If you are near deaf, like me, and go for a hearing test one the things that they test for is the frequency range that your ears respond to. A person with normal hearing can detect frequencies of about 20 to 20,000 cycles/sec. As we get older we usually start to lose our high frequency acuity. When I got out of the Navy, after being around aircraft at high-power turn-up, for 4 yrs, my hearing acuity was about 20- 14,000 cps. Now, I suspect its about 500-10,000 cps. Well guys, how the hell did we get to this point? We started out to just explain some facts about mercury. Its your fault. Well, maybe just a little bit mine. Fact is, now that I have created a whole new group of

basement chemists out there (I take credit for that). But, you keep sending requests for more and more info so it sort of means that a lot of you are hooked on basement chemistry and might never be the same again. Lets get on with it. First, what do we mean by the word "assay"? It means determination of what is present in whatever sample you are working on. Doesnt have to be gold. We can assay for silver, rhodium, sulfur, water, bubble gum, anything. Now you must understand that there are two basic classes of assays. Qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative tells you what. If someone brings in a sample of quartz rock and says, "I want to know what is in it". We take it to the basement and run it through our procedure and issue a report that says "sir, you have quartz, sulfides, arsenic, silver, copper, and gold". This is a qualitative assay. Of course, our client who is a prospector immediately asks "how much gold"? Our reply has to be "who knows". $63.00, Will that be cash or credit card? "But I have to know how much gold is in it. Great, now we can run a quantitative assay for only $89.99. Gold only. Quantitative tells you how much. Now Im not telling you that everyone should run out and start buying equipment to install an assay lab in the basement. I just thought that you might like to know what is involved when you take a sample to an assay lab and why it costs what it does. Im going to put in also some Q&D methods that you can do in the field to help you determine what spots have more fine gold than others do. You are going to hate me because Im not going to tell you where this gold mine of information is located on the page. Hence, you will have to read the whole thing in order to obtain this very necessary information. You wouldnt want to miss it, would you? That might allow your partner to know more than you. Wouldnt want that. Naaah, you are a basement chemist and are hooked on information. This page is going to be very difficult to write and its going to take time but you guys seem to be worth it, so--- if you will hang with me we are going for a MAGIC CARPET RIDE!!

Types of Assays
There are a few different ways of assaying for precious metals. Some of these are relatively new such as "ion probe analysis". This is where you take a sample (it has to be in one piece) like a little BB of metal to a lab and they put it in the Scanning Electron Microscope and push the button. ZAP!! It spits out a chart with a plot of all the precious metals that are in

the BB and the amount of each. Another is a method whereby you take ground sample and put it in a little instrument called a Fluorescence Spectrometer. This will give you an instant readout of the amount of gold etc in your sample. We are not going into the details of these hi-tech methods. We are going to concentrate on the tried, true and more available methods such as "Aqua Regia Assay" and the more familiar "Fire Assay". We will also look at an old "sourdough" method that can be very useful.

Aqua Regia
In this method a weighed amount of the ground sample is covered with about 2-3 volumes of Aqua Regia and heated for a specified time. The cooled sample is then filtered and the remaining solids washed 3 times with dilute hydrochloric acid. All the liquid is pooled and evaporated by gentle heating until only a very small amount is left. Then, hydrochloric acid is added and the evaporation repeated. This Hydrochloric reduction is repeated 3 times to be sure that all of the nitric is gone. Now you have the values in a solution of concentrated hydrochloric acid. Now add about two volumes of water. If there was silver in the ore it will precipitate as a white cloud of silver chloride. The silver is removed. At this point there are several options as to how the next step is accomplished, but the usual is to extract the gold chloride into an organic solvent, make it up to an exact volume and put it into an instrument called an atomic absorption spectrometer that measures the gold content.

Fire Assay
In this type of assay ore is ground and a weighed amount, usually 30 or 40 grams is mixed with an assay flux. We will go into fluxes later. The ore and flux is placed in a clay crucible and heated at about 1100 C or 1850 F for about an hour or until it is a thick, homogenous liquid. This melt is then poured into a cone shaped mold. This cone will consist of a bottom piece of lead with all the values dissolved as an amalgam. This cone of lead is called a "prill". The top or wide end of the cone will consist of a lump of glass containing all sorts of impurities. The lead is separated from the glass by simply smashing it with a hammer. The lead is further pounded into a cube. This cube is weighed. The lead cube containing the values is now put into a sort of a cup with a very thick bottom, made from bone ash or cement. This cup is called a cupel. That is Q-ple not cup-l. If you drop this info at a cocktail party you

wouldnt want to mis-pronounce it. The cupel with the lead is placed back into the furnace and heated at 1000 degrees or so. The door to the furnace is usually left open a crack so that air can enter. At this temperature the lead rapidly combines with the oxygen in the air and is converted back into lead oxide. You see, another redox reaction. First it was reduced from lead oxide to metallic lead and now it is being oxidized back to lead oxide. Ill explain this better when we get to fluxes. The molten lead oxide now soaks into the cupel. Dont ask why, its just the nature of the beast. Bone ash or cement will absorb large quantities of lead oxide. When all of the lead oxide has soaked in you will be left with a very small sphere of metal. This sphere contains all of the precious metals except for Osmium. In the trade they say, "if you can cupel it, you can sell it". Anything that remains after cupeling is precious metal. Now this tiny lump is weighed. Next it is flattened by smashing it with a hammer. This is to increase the surface area. Remember about surface area? The flat metal piece is put into a small porcelain dish and treated with 50% nitric acid until there is no more reaction. The remaining piece of metal is dried and weighed. The reason for weighing before and after the nitric acid treatment is that you probably want to know how much silver you had in the sample. Since the nitric acid removes the silver the difference between the first weighing and the second is the amount of silver that was in the sample. The metals remaining after this acid treatment are gold and the platinum metals.

How they do that

The thing that makes a fire assay work is the flux. What is a flux anyhow? Why do we need it? A flux is (usually) a mixture of common chemicals that react to produce a desired result on the metal of interest. It can reduce it or it can oxidize it. We must use fluxes because it is imperative to provide the right environment for the precious metals to be recovered for whatever purpose we desire. For example, If we are assaying a sample of ore for gold we must first divide all the ore as well as possible by grinding it. Usually, 30 grams of this ore is mixed with the flux. The flux is composed of a calculated amount of silica (white sand), lead oxide (red lead or litharge), sodium carbonate (washing soda), and flour, cornmeal, or cornstarch. That is not a mistake. All the ingredients including the sample are mixed thoroughly and put into a clay crucible. The crucible is put into a muffle

furnace and heated at 1100 C or 1850 F until everything is melted and is a thick liquid. Now, in order to understand what is happening it is necessary to review in detail the things that are taking place in this fearsome mixture. Guys, we are going to get inside a melted, boiling mixture that will reduce anything. As the dry mixture melts, some very interesting things start to happen. First let me say that the carbonate is in the flux simply to keep the pH on the alkaline (basic) side so that you cant lose your gold as a vapor of gold chloride. The sand (quartz) is there to make the melt liquid so that it can be poured into a mold and to form a glass with impurities that can be removed after pouring. Are you still with me?? It aint particle physics, but it is pretty good chemistry. Apart from the sand and carbonate, that are sort of inert ingredients, what do we have left? Well, we have the precious metals, the flour, and a large quantity of lead oxide. What is happening to those? Of course you remember the other pages where we talked about redox (oxidation/reduction). You also remember that I told you that if you were to understand anything about metallurgy/chemistry you had to have a concept of redox. If you forgot, go back and read it again. O.K., as our mixture starts to get hot the flour starts to try to burn but it cant. Why not? Well, there just aintno oxygen available. At the melting temperatures of these materials there is no air (oxygen) in the furnace. At these temperatures, the flour is crying to burn. So what does it do? Its desperate. It finds the only oxygen available to it. That is, the oxygen that is contained in the lead oxide (PbO). The flour becomes a reducing agent. In other words it strips the oxygen from the lead oxide and burns to carbon dioxide. Well, that leaves the lead with no oxygen. The lead has been reduced to metallic lead instead of the salt, lead oxide. This is a rather traumatic change for the lead. One minute it was a happy contented salt of lead, a paint pigment. Now it is a heavy metal. As a metal it is now heavier than any of the quartz or carbonate so it has no option, it heads for the bottom of the crucible. Now the lead was reduced in very tiny droplets that now sort of "rain" down through the melt. As they pass through the thick, viscous melt they amalgamate with any gold, silver, or platinum metals that they encounter. The lead/precious metals are now in the bottom of the crucible with the sand/carbonate/impurities "glass" floating on top. This mixture is poured into a mold and allowed to cool. You now have a lead "prill" containing all the precious metals. The prill is cupeled as described above to determine the precious metal content. WOW! I got here, is anyone still with me? If not, take a break, have a beer, read it again, thats what Im gonna do. After all, If you are going

to be a Basement Chemist you gotta be willing to suffer a little bit. Twice in my life I have encountered statements which left me speechless. Many years ago while inspecting a new car then called an "economy car"; I told the salesman that I thought the price was a bit steep for the rather shoddy workmanship. With a deadpan face he replied "sir", if you want an economy car, you must to be willing to pay for it". What do you say to a naked lady? Its like this site, if you want to know what is going on, you gotta be willing to suffer just a little. Spread it out, it wont hurt so much.

Assay Fluxes
There are certainly more fluxes than there are people using them. Why? Well, you have to have more than one flux. The composition of the ore sample determines the composition of the flux. That is, the flux must be "tailored" to the sample to be run. If the sample contains lots of oxidizing agents then your flux must contain more reducing agent (flour) than usual. Remember that the oxidation/reduction system must balance out. In contrast, if your sample contains lots of reducing minerals you will need less reducing agent. Well how the hell does anyone ever know what kind of flux to use? You will soon know. You realize that from this one website you will have enough information that you will not be able to "drop" all of it at cocktail parties for the rest of your life. The flux is calculated to contain enough lead Oxide (litharge) so that if it is completely reduced, it will produce a prill weighing (usually) 2528 grams. How do I know how much that is? Im going to tell you. Aintgonna be no more igerunt prospectors out there. Litharge is composed of one atom of lead and one atom of oxygen. We represent it as PbO. Pb being lead and O being oxygen. Lead has a molecular weight of 207 and oxygen 16. Since they are combined the molecular weight of PbO is 223 (see link for Periodic chart of elements). In other words pbO Is 98.2% lead. If we reduce it to metallic lead then for every 100 gr of pbO we will be left with 98.2 gr of pure lead. Does that help? Well, it helps me because I know something that you dont. I know that we want a prill of around 25-28 gr. So I am going to put 26 gr of PbO in my flux. When this PbO is all reduced by the flour/ore it will produce a lead prill of 25.79 gr. That is plenty close enough for government work. If we get a prill that only weighs 18 grams, we know that some of the flour must have been used up in reducing, not the litharge, but the sample. There wasnt enough flour to reduce both the sample and the PbO. So, what can be done to fix this problem? Simple, we run the sample again and this time we put in a little more flour. How much more? Im going to get to that but right now my ESP tells me that some brains out there are beginning to overheat and some folks are thinking bad thoughts about me and why they ever started reading this to begin with. I think there are two

things that we must accomplish. We must cool down the brain cells and we must adjust the attitude of the reader. I feel this can best be accomplished by a single action. Take a trip to the fridge and recover another (or two) of those cool, soothing, foamy, unguents that I know you have squirreled away. Hey guys, we aint playing now. This is "Jet Airline" stuff. Now that things are back to normal (do I hear muttering out there?), Im going to give you a recipe for a flux that will, with minor adjustments, work most of the time. I know you arent going to set up an assay lab but this is what happens when you send in a sample to be assayed.

This is a good starting flux for quartz or "neutral" ore samples. Ground sample ---------30 gr Litharge (PbO) --------- 30 gr Soda (Na2CO3) -------- 30 gr Flour ------------------------ 2 gr Silica Sand -------------- 10 gr

The amounts used are not correct for all ores. If your prill is too small, add more flour. I happen to know that 1 gr of flour will produce about 12 gr of lead from the litharge. So, if your prill is 10 gr too light you should add another gram of flour to the next assay. Itll be close enough. Another thing that can go wrong is that sometimes the ore produces a melt that is too thick and viscous to pour properly. Could probably add more sand or, more effective, would be to add a couple of grams of Borax. Borax produces a thinner, more liquid melt. If borax is used you should be aware that it attacks the clay crucible so dont use so much that you get a hole in it. I should also mention that molten Litharge will dissolve the crucible and the firebricks that line the furnace. That is another reason for the quartz sand in the flux. It protects the crucible. So, in reality, the business of Fire Assay is some science, some art, some patience and a little luck. I never intended to make assay chemists of you. This page is intended to, hopefully, give you a little insight as to what goes on in those mysterious backrooms that you never get to see at the assay laboratory.

Smelting

I think a lot of folks get confused between assaying and smelting. In fact, smelting is sort of the opposite of assaying. They both are carried out at high temperatures. I think, perhaps this is where the confusion begins. In an assay melt, as I have explained, the environment that is created in the melt is reducing. In fact, it will reduce almost anything known to science. In a smelting melt we accomplish just the opposite. We want to oxidize everything except the precious metals. As all the base metal salts are attacked or oxidized by the smelting flux they dissolve in the flux where they remain until the melt is poured into a mold. These base metals will end up in the slag or glass that floats on top of the gold. As in assaying, the flux depends to a large degree on the composition of the material to be smelted. The term "smelt" seems to mean different things to different people. To many the word brings up visions of smoking, boiling, caldrons of metal. To others it refers to any purification which results in the separation of the gold from most of the contaminating materials. The gold that most of us will be working with is in pretty good shape to begin with. Sure, it probably contains some black sand and maybe a few other minor contaminants but not 50% black sand etc. Furnace smelting is usually carried out using a crucible made of graphite (a crystal form of carbon). Of course I dont have to tell a basement chemist why we prefer to use graphite, but for any casual visitor I should explain that at high temperatures the graphite (carbon) becomes a reducing agent that helps keep gold and platinum metals in their reduced or metallic forms. Some silica sand or ground glass is usually added so that there will be a glass matrix that floats on top of the metal. Some sodium nitrate (Chilean nitrate or Saltpeter) is added. This nitrate is a rather strong oxidizing agent. When hot it will oxidize almost any metal, except for gold and the platinum metals, to its nitrate salt. These salts combine with the molten sand. Usually some borax is added to thin the viscous, molten glass. This mixture is heated until the melt becomes "quiet" with no bubbles, foam, or lumps in it. The precious metals are now poured into a mold and the glass or other "gangue" is removed. The black sand that was in our melt was oxidized to iron nitrate by the sodium nitrate and is now dissolved in the glass that we discard. Your gold, at his point will not be 100% pure. It probably contains small amounts of copper, silver, tellurium, etc. The good news is that it looks like gold and should be of fairly high quality. Plenty good enough to sell.

A field assay that you can do

The old prospectors might have known a few things that we dont usually give them credit for. They knew about fine gold and they knew that it was worth just as much as coarse or nugget gold. They also had a very simple method of determining about how much of this fine gold that was in the ore that they were currently interested in. I have no idea where they learned how to do this assay, who told them about it, or where the procedure originated. I never hear of anyone using this method anymore. Dont know why. If you read my page on halide leaching you know that solutions of Iodine will dissolve fine gold very rapidly. Well, the old sour-doughs knew this too. And, somehow they devised the following method for using it as an assay tool. All you need to do this assay is get some "Lugols Iodine". This is simply Iodine dissolved in a solution of Sodium Iodide. You can buy this from any pharmacy. Just be sure that it is in water, not "tincture of Iodine", that is in alcohol solution. You can make it yourself (see page on Halides). You will also need a little dilute nitric acid, 2 normal or so. Now, just take some material that you think might contain a significant amount of fine gold and grind it, pound it with a rock or a hammer, or whatever until it is as fine as you can get it. Take a measured amount of the sample and put it in some convenient vessel such as a large test tube, a small baby food jar, or other. You can use whatever measure is convenient for you. Five level tablespoons, one coffee scoop, etc. You do want to use the same amount each time so that you will have some idea of the amount of gold in the ore. At least you will be able to say that this ore has more than that one. Now, your ore is in the jar. Pour in the Iodine solution so that the ore is well covered. Shake it occasionally for some time, maybe to 1 hour. Now you must remove the ore. You can let it settle and pour off the Iodine containing the gold or you can filter it with a small funnel and some coffee filter paper. The idea is to get the solution as clear as possible. Now you add a small glob of mercury and shake. At some point the solution will lose it's red-brown Iodine color and become a (usually) clear yellowish liquid with sediment of heavy floured mercury in the bottom of the jar/test tube. Allow this to settle for a few minutes and then carefully pour off the liquid. Add some water to the mercury, shake, allow it to settle, and pour off. Dont throw the liquids away. Now you have your precious metals amalgamated in the floured mercury. Now you simply add some nitric acid (not more than 50/50 with water) and dissolve the mercury. When the mercury is all dissolved you will be left with a black or brown material that you cannot dissolve. This is your precious metals. Dont throw the nitric solution away. Now take a good look at the black sediment. Try to get a feel for how much there is so that you will have a comparative idea of how much you have. You can buy, from chemical supply companies, a graduated, conical test tube. If you run the assay in this you can simply read off the quantity of precious

metals on the scale engraved on the tube. Its a nicety that the old timers didnt have but it is convenient. The reason I told you to save all the liquids is simple, we are going to recover all your Iodine and mercury. The solution that contained Iodine is treated with a few drops of clorox. The Iodine will settle to the bottom. The liquid is poured off and then you add a little lye water until the solution becomes clear and colorless. Your Iodine is in solution ready to use again (see the page on Halides). The nitric acid solution of mercury is treated by your favorite method to recover the mercury (see the mercury page). You see, now that you have become a basement chemist, you dont have to stay in the basement, You can take it right out into the field with you. O.K. now we know a few things that the old-timers knew 150 years ago. The question is how many of you knew about or have used this method? Give it a try, it works.

Rules of Solubility
Dr. A.K. Williams, Ph.D San Pedro, Costa Rica

Introduction

This will be a very short page. It could also be a very important page in that it applies to all the other pages on this site. As is most fields or endeavors there are certain rules that apply. In many cases, I don't like rules. Rules that are imposed for no good reason are, in my opinion, not only worthless, but also despicable. As we used to say in the military, rules are for damn fools and second lieutenants. This referred to useless or counter-productive rules. There are, however, other kinds of rules. Rules that govern how things work. Man did not make these rules. He just discovered them. They were made and employed by whatever force created the physical world. I want to provide you with a few simple rules concerning chemicals and how they behave when they are mixed up with water. With these rules you can predict whether or not any inorganic chemical is going to dissolve in the water or whether it is going settle to the bottom and just lie there. If it settles and you want it to dissolve, you must change it's salt form. If your Silver Chloride is lying in the bottom of a flask and you want it to dissolve, these rules will allow you to dissolve it without

having to even e-mail me. The rules will tell you that if you simply convert it to a nitrate instead of a chloride, it will dissolve. We all know that all you have to do is add a little nitric acid to make this conversion. The Silver will now dissolve in water. Ha!!, you say, so that's how ol KEN in cr does it! He just has a few rules that are not generally available to the rest of us. That is absolutely correct! Read on and I will impart to you the secrets of inorganic solubility that were made before the first glob of molten Gold was spewed from a volcano The beauty of it is that you don't have to memorize the rules. Just print a hard copy; stick it up on the basement wall for quick reference. Might put a copy in your pocket too, so that you can impress less-knowledgeable friends. O.K., here it comes, deez ah de rules!!

Rules of Solubility

1. Nitrates, chlorates, and acetates of all metals are water-soluble. No exceptions. 2. All Sodium, Potassium, and ammonium salts are soluble in water. No exceptions. 3. Chloride salts of all metals except Lead, Silver, and Mercury 1 (ous) are water-soluble. E.g., Mercurous Iodide is insoluble. Water insoluble Chlorides, Bromides, and Iodides are also insoluble in dilute acids. 4. Carbonates, Phosphates, Borates, Sulfites, Chromates, and Arsenates of all metals except for sodium, Potassium, and Ammonia are water-soluble. 5. Sulfides of all metals except for Barium, Calcium, Magnesium, Sodium, Potassium, and Ammonia are water-soluble. 6. Oxides and Hydroxides are water insoluble except for Sodium, Potassium, and ammonia. (Hydroxides of Calcium and Barium are moderately soluble in water. Well guys, thats about it. There is a little more info about how to convert these salts from Chloride to Nitrate, Nitrate to Hydroxide, Hydroxide to Iodide etc. Gonna do that on another page that will be about mass action. All this Stuff is Fun, and Educational Too!! Where else can you get that?

Filtering
Dr. A.K. Williams, Ph.D San Pedro, Costa Rica

Introduction
Do you know how to filter stuff? Does anyone? Well, if you keep reading this page, you are going to know a great deal about it. Do you use a "coffee Maker"? If so, you already know a little bit about filtering. Here in Central America the standard way to make coffee is to simply put some coffee in a "bolsa", a sort of fuzzy cloth bag and pour hot water through it. I think it is the ultimate coffee maker. It costs about $0.20, and outperforms any other technique that I know of. Just as an aside, do you know what is the worst way to make coffee? A damned percolator. I think my parents just rolled over and screamed at me. There are so many facets to filtering; it is hard to know where to start. What is filtering, anyway? Well, its a little science, a little knowledge, and a little art. Thats right, art! To define the term we could say that it any method that involves separating particles of different sizes by physically screening them through some material. Are you happy with that? Im not. Why? Because when I said material you were thinking of pouring stuff through paper, cloth, a wire screen, or a bed of sand, werent you? Yeah, you were! You are right as far as it goes but there are other types of filters. Suppose that you had a mixture of pumice and silica sand. How could you put this mixture through a filter and separate them? We assume that the particles are of the same size. What I would do is to simply dump the mixture into a bucket of water. The water becomes a filter medium, not by size, but by density. The low-density pumice floats and the dense silica sinks. We separated it with a density filter. We could make an electrical filter. I could make a device that would separate things by the charge they carry. Positively charged things end up in this pot and negatively charged stuff ends up in that one. YEAH, YEAH, I know we dont usually call this type of thing filtering, O.K., so its all separation technology but on this site we are going to consider it as filtering. O.K. by you? We are not going to consider all these strange methods on this page. Maybe on some other page we will get into chromatography, electrophoresis, density gradient separation, etc. Hey guys, we are in MY field now. This is what I did!

Paper Filters
This is probably the most used filtering method for small quantities of slurry. It is also the method that is most used, most convenient, and most

practical for most of us prospectors. We know how to do that, right? The first point I want to make is what kind of paper are you going to use? Newspaper? Coffee filter paper? Paper towels? Toilet paper? Or, Real scientific "designer" paper? It doesn't matter which you use as long as it works for the stuff you are trying to separate. This is where the "art" comes in. You must pick the right kind of paper for the job you are trying to do. There are literally hundreds of types of filter paper sold by scientific supply companies. They all have unique characteristics that make one better than the other for your purpose. There are "hard" papers, "slow" papers, "fine" papers, "open" papers, etc, etc. Hang with me, we are going to try to sort some of it out for you. When I had my labs, I probably had 150 different kinds/sizes of filter paper on hand. It was necessary to get the job done. Correct filtering is not a simple process and if you don't do it correctly you are going to spend lots of time and energy that could be better spent out in the river. A filter that is not right for your purpose is one of the most frustrating things imaginable. On this page I am going to talk about filter paper and I will, for the most part, talk about "Whatman" paper. There are other Manufacturers with products just as good, for example, Schleicher&Schull. It's just that I am more familiar with Whatman. Before we get into what paper is better for what I would like for you to do a little experiment. It's not complicated, humor me. I want you to find 3 funnels. Take 3 pieces of coffee filter paper (or any other) and fold it in half twice. Open it so that you have a single layer of paper on one side and three layers on the other. Put these cones into the funnels and put the funnels into some container to catch the liquid. Now I want you to take about one tablespoonful of flour in a small pot or frying pan. Add a little cold water and mix well, add more water, repeat until you have the flour in a homogeneous suspension (no lumps). Add water until you have about a quart of suspension. Now measure out one cupful of this stuff and heat it until it just starts to boil and let it cool to room temperature. In your first filter put water, in the second put the non-heated flour suspension, and in the third the heated flour suspension. Now I want you sit back and see how the three filtrations behave. If all is as it should be, the water will drip through pretty fast, the non-heated one will start fast and slow to a slow drip. The heated one will start slow and slow even more to a near dead stop. The point of this is not just to demonstrate that some things filter faster than others, you already knew that. I want to try to explain why it happened that way so that you can begin to get some insight into what might happen before you try filter something. Sure, you are not going to be able to predict with 100% accuracy what will happen, but with a little understanding, you can increase your chances of picking the right type of filter for the job at hand. Any filter that is separating things by particle size is composed of a

"screen". It can be paper, sintered glass, wire mesh, or other. As long as the holes in the filter remain open, not plugged up, the liquid will run through pretty fast. The larger the holes, the faster the liquid will pass. If I took a frying pan and drilled 3/8 inch holes in the bottom, dumped in a handful of marbles and a gallon of water the water would immediately start to gush through the holes. However, as soon as the marbles had a chance to roll around a bit, they would find themselves a hole to sit in and that hole would be sealed off and no longer available as an exit for the water. As more marbles found a hole the water flow would slow until the last hole had a marble in it and the water could no longer pass through. Everything stops! One other concept that I would like for you to grasp is similar but not quite the same thing. If in that same frying pan, I dumped in a lot of water that had a paper thin sheet of Jello floating around in it, just about the same thing would happen. As soon as the Jello got layered on the bottom, the water could no longer get through. This is what happens to filters 90% of the time when they are not working properly. You might be thinking, so what, nothing you can do about it! There are lots of things that you can do about it and we will get to them. After all, that's the whole point of this webpage. In the experiment above, as you would expect, the water having no suspended particles to stop up the pores in the paper, flowed right through. The suspended flour (starch granules) took a little time but just like the marbles in the frying pan, eventually found a pore and closed it off. The heated flour now has a high proportion of soluble starch in it. It's the stuff your grandmother used to starch Granpa' shirts. It's sticky, gelatinous stuff, like Jello. This sort of stuff doesn't really have to find a hole to plug up, it just sort of throws a blanket of sticky goo over the filter paper and shuts it down. ust a general information note at this point. If you want to buy some general use filter paper to use around the basement or out in the field I am going to make a couple of general recommendations. Without giving all the characteristics of these papers let me say that for general use you will find the following to be very useful.
y y y

y y

Whatman #1 This is a fairly fast paper that will stop particles of about 11 microns (millionths of a meter) Whatman #4 This is a very fast paper that will retain particles of 20-25 microns. Whatman #41 This is a fast paper that retains particles of 20-25 microns, It is particularly suited for filtration of gelatinous materials. Whatman #42 This is a very slow paper. It will stop particles of about 2.5 microns. Almost nothing gets through it. Whatman #541 This paper is very fast, stops particles of 20-25 microns. Its difference from #4 is that it can be used with very

strong solutions of acid and base. Always buy filter paper in circles larger than you think you might need. Its easy to cut them down but awfully hard to stretch them. Also, dont buy fluted paper. You can flute it yourself simply by folding it half as many times as you can and when you open it, you have fluted paper. That makes filtering go quite a bit faster due to the increased surface area exposed to the liquid. Did you know that you can't fold a piece of paper in half more than 7 times? No matter how big the paper or how thick or thin it is. Try it!

Filter Aids
There are a number of ways to filter things that just dont want to be filtered. Once a sticky material or any other that tends to stop up the paper gets itself into the pores of the paper, everything stops. You can try to suck it through or you can put as much pressure on it as you like but it will only aggravate the situation. This treatment simply drives the particles or other tighter into the pores. So, what can a feller do? He can prevent those particles from ever getting into the pores to start with. There are a number of ways to do this but the simplest and most common is to employ materials called Filter Aids. What is a "filter aid?" Well, there are many materials used for this purpose. You can often use "pulped paper". That is, filter paper that has been ground or shredded. Sometimes you could use something like clean silica sand. The most commonly used filter aid is probably stuff called "diatomaceous earth". So what is that, you say? It is the skeletons of microscopic marine animals called Diatomes. As these animals die they settle to the bottom and collect in layers where all the organic body parts decay leaving the skeletons that contain billions of cavities, cracks, pores, etc. This, of course, results in extremely high surface area on irregularly shaped particles that cannot pack or compress. There are two basic ways to use filter aids. The right way, that is, of course, our way, and there is a method used by other less knowledgeable folks. We will get to that but lets just say that filter aids, when mixed with a liquid sample tends to provide surface for particles, crystals, gooy stuff, whatever, to get hung up in. It keeps the particles from getting together at the paper surface and stopping up the pores. Sort of keeps all the nasty stuff at arms-length from each other. suppose that I should explain here that these aids are usually used in vacuum filters. That is a filter that has an evacuated flask attached to the stem of the funnel so that the liquid is being sucked down through the filter paper. This not completely necessary. You can do it by gravity but will probably find that you must use a little more filter aid than you

would with vacuum and it will be slower. BTW -- Does anyone know of any other word in the English language that contains two U's in sequence?? O.K., how to do it. I have seen Ph.D.s in the lab use filter aid by slurrying it with some water, pour it into the filter, suck out excess water, and then pour the sample to be filtered on top of it. He has just successfully defeated the whole purpose of using the filter aid. That ain't the way to do it. The way we Basement Chemists are going to do it is to put the filter aid directly into the liquid sample, slurry it around and then pour it into the funnel. How much do we use for any given volume? I don't know! You have to experiment. It depends on what sort of nasty stuff is in your sample. Just guess. If you have 300 ml try about a teaspoonful of aid. You will know if it works or not. If the goo still accumulates on top of the filter aid you will have to use a bit more. Just recover all of the filter aid and re-slurry it. Add another teaspoonful of filter aid and try it again. I told you that there was a little art involved. One word of caution, once you pour the slurry into the filter, DON'T STIR IT. Don't even scratch around on the surface of the packed filter aid. It almost never helps and it can cause things to slow even more.

Multiple Filters
I must comment on a human phenomenon that in the case of filtering is self-defeating. Here in Central America we have many Diesel vehicles. The fuel here is probably not quite as clean as that you are accustomed to in the USA. It is the custom here to put extra in-line fuel filters on all cars etc. Gentlemen, this is dumb. If you put two identical filters in line you do NOT get twice as good filtering. If a particle passes the first filter, it can pass the second. I once bought a used Land Cruiser here upon which I eventually found five in-line filters. Actually what they do here is when you tell the guy to change your filter he doesn't remove the old one. He simply puts another one before it. The same suspect filter is still in the line and still capable of slowing fuel flow. Never will understand that line of thinking. Same thing with paper filters. The only reason to double-up is to provide physical strength. You will never need it with professional paper.

Vacuum Filters
If you anticipate doing very much filtering I highly recommend that you consider the advantages of using a vacuum filter. The most common, and, most useful of these is the Buchner Funnel. It is usually made of porcelain but you can get them in plastic too. It is simply a funnel with a flat plate or bed on which you can lay a piece of filter paper and suck the liquid through the paper with a vacuum. You will find this devise will make life much more pleasant if you are doing much filtering. Actually, there are two pieces to this apparatus. You must have the Buchner funnel and you must also have a Filter Flask. The latter is the catch vessel and

the vessel that is attached to your vacuum source. The other thing that you will need is a rubber stopper with a hole in it to seal the joint between the funnel and the flask. Alternatively, you can buy a set of adapters, just little rings of rubber that will serve very nicely. None of this stuff is very expensive. The following drawing will, I hope, illustrate the device that we are talking about. Now if you decide you want to invest in one of these things, you must decide what size do you want. Well, for average use, I would buy a filter funnel of about 15cm diameter and a flask of 1liter capacity. That is up to you and your needs. O.K., If you buy a vacuum filter you will still have to have a way to produce a vacuum. There is a device that I highly recommend that is called a Water Entrainment Pump. It is a simple-minded device that you can attach to any water faucet to produce a suprisingly high vacuum. They are of metal or plastic and they are really useful. They are also inexpensive. This is the vacuum source that the Buchner system was designed to work with. Now, for those of you who would like a vacuum source for less or maybe free, there is another option. Go down to some place that has used or worn out refrigerators. Some that they about to junk. Find one that still runs but is nevertheless ready to be scrapped. Get the compressor from it. Hook it up and you will find that frequently it will still produce a credible vacuum. You can use it!

Sintered Glass Filters

I think that I must mention that there are filters that are made exactly like the Buchner Funnel but instead of having discrete holes for the liquid to flow through, have a filter bed of porous glass. If you should end up with one of these you will find that after a time the filter will no longer allow even water to pass through it. It will laugh at all your attempts to clean it. However, we Basement Chemists are not to be intimidated by such trifles, are we? When this happens we must resort to our above average knowledge of redox reactions. The first thing to try is to simply dissolve some Nitrate in water and try your best to suck some of it into the sintered glass. Usually you can. Now take the filter (assuming that it is NOT plastic) and put it in the oven. Get it as hot as possible for an hour. This will probably remove all the carbonaceous material that usually causes the problem. You might even have to repeat it. If that don't work we go to a more extreme method to save our filter. For this you will need a little Sodium Dichromate and some concentrated Sulfuric Acid. To the acid add, with stirring, the Dichromate crystals until you get a nice dark red solution. DON'T GET THIS ON YOU!! It will

clean your bones too. Just soak the offending filter for a few hours or days, wash it and see if that got it. There is another general cleaning solution that you can use to clean this sort of thing. As in the above, I can't remember the exact proportions but just make up a solution of Lye (caustic). About 30 grams/liter, add strong Potassium Permanganate solution, with stirring, until you get a dark blue solution. Like the Dichromate, DON'T GET IT ON YOU!! It will do a job on you too. As above, just dunk the filter in it and forget it for awhile. Both of these solutions are used extensively to clean glassware in laboratories. They can be used on pipettes, general glassware, ceramic, porcelain, sintered glass, gas spargers, etc. Aint All This Fascinating??

Filtering
Dr. A.K. Williams, Ph.D San Pedro, Costa Rica

Introduction
Do you know how to filter stuff? Does anyone? Well, if you keep reading this page, you are going to know a great deal about it. Do you use a "coffee Maker"? If so, you already know a little bit about filtering. Here in Central America the standard way to make coffee is to simply put some coffee in a "bolsa", a sort of fuzzy cloth bag and pour hot water through it. I think it is the ultimate coffee maker. It costs about $0.20, and outperforms any other technique that I know of. Just as an aside, do you know what is the worst way to make coffee? A damned percolator. I think my parents just rolled over and screamed at me. There are so many facets to filtering; it is hard to know where to start. What is filtering, anyway? Well, its a little science, a little knowledge, and a little art. Thats right, art! To define the term we could say that it any method that involves separating particles of different sizes by physically screening them through some material. Are you happy with that? Im not. Why? Because when I said material you were thinking of pouring stuff through paper, cloth, a wire screen, or a bed of sand, werent you? Yeah, you were! You are right as far as it goes but there are other types of filters. Suppose that you had a mixture of pumice and silica sand. How could you put this mixture through a filter and separate them? We assume that the particles are of the same size. What I would do is to simply dump the mixture into a bucket of water. The water becomes a filter medium, not by size, but by density. The low-density pumice floats and the dense silica sinks. We separated it with a density filter. We could make an electrical filter. I could make a device that would

separate things by the charge they carry. Positively charged things end up in this pot and negatively charged stuff ends up in that one. YEAH, YEAH, I know we dont usually call this type of thing filtering, O.K., so its all separation technology but on this site we are going to consider it as filtering. O.K. by you? We are not going to consider all these strange methods on this page. Maybe on some other page we will get into chromatography, electrophoresis, density gradient separation, etc. Hey guys, we are in MY field now. This is what I did!

Paper Filters
This is probably the most used filtering method for small quantities of slurry. It is also the method that is most used, most convenient, and most practical for most of us prospectors. We know how to do that, right? The first point I want to make is what kind of paper are you going to use? Newspaper? Coffee filter paper? Paper towels? Toilet paper? Or, Real scientific "designer" paper? It doesn't matter which you use as long as it works for the stuff you are trying to separate. This is where the "art" comes in. You must pick the right kind of paper for the job you are trying to do. There are literally hundreds of types of filter paper sold by scientific supply companies. They all have unique characteristics that make one better than the other for your purpose. There are "hard" papers, "slow" papers, "fine" papers, "open" papers, etc, etc. Hang with me, we are going to try to sort some of it out for you. When I had my labs, I probably had 150 different kinds/sizes of filter paper on hand. It was necessary to get the job done. Correct filtering is not a simple process and if you don't do it correctly you are going to spend lots of time and energy that could be better spent out in the river. A filter that is not right for your purpose is one of the most frustrating things imaginable. On this page I am going to talk about filter paper and I will, for the most part, talk about "Whatman" paper. There are other Manufacturers with products just as good, for example, Schleicher&Schull. It's just that I am more familiar with Whatman. Before we get into what paper is better for what I would like for you to do a little experiment. It's not complicated, humor me. I want you to find 3 funnels. Take 3 pieces of coffee filter paper (or any other) and fold it in half twice. Open it so that you have a single layer of paper on one side and three layers on the other. Put these cones into the funnels and put the funnels into some container to catch the liquid. Now I want you to take about one tablespoonful of flour in a small pot or frying pan. Add a little cold water and mix well, add more water, repeat until you have the flour in a homogeneous suspension (no lumps). Add water until you have about a quart of suspension. Now measure out one cupful of this stuff and heat it until it just starts to boil and let it cool to room temperature. In your

first filter put water, in the second put the non-heated flour suspension, and in the third the heated flour suspension. Now I want you sit back and see how the three filtrations behave. If all is as it should be, the water will drip through pretty fast, the non-heated one will start fast and slow to a slow drip. The heated one will start slow and slow even more to a near dead stop. The point of this is not just to demonstrate that some things filter faster than others, you already knew that. I want to try to explain why it happened that way so that you can begin to get some insight into what might happen before you try filter something. Sure, you are not going to be able to predict with 100% accuracy what will happen, but with a little understanding, you can increase your chances of picking the right type of filter for the job at hand. Any filter that is separating things by particle size is composed of a "screen". It can be paper, sintered glass, wire mesh, or other. As long as the holes in the filter remain open, not plugged up, the liquid will run through pretty fast. The larger the holes, the faster the liquid will pass. If I took a frying pan and drilled 3/8 inch holes in the bottom, dumped in a handful of marbles and a gallon of water the water would immediately start to gush through the holes. However, as soon as the marbles had a chance to roll around a bit, they would find themselves a hole to sit in and that hole would be sealed off and no longer available as an exit for the water. As more marbles found a hole the water flow would slow until the last hole had a marble in it and the water could no longer pass through. Everything stops! One other concept that I would like for you to grasp is similar but not quite the same thing. If in that same frying pan, I dumped in a lot of water that had a paper thin sheet of Jello floating around in it, just about the same thing would happen. As soon as the Jello got layered on the bottom, the water could no longer get through. This is what happens to filters 90% of the time when they are not working properly. You might be thinking, so what, nothing you can do about it! There are lots of things that you can do about it and we will get to them. After all, that's the whole point of this webpage. In the experiment above, as you would expect, the water having no suspended particles to stop up the pores in the paper, flowed right through. The suspended flour (starch granules) took a little time but just like the marbles in the frying pan, eventually found a pore and closed it off. The heated flour now has a high proportion of soluble starch in it. It's the stuff your grandmother used to starch Granpa' shirts. It's sticky, gelatinous stuff, like Jello. This sort of stuff doesn't really have to find a hole to plug up, it just sort of throws a blanket of sticky goo over the filter paper and shuts it down. ust a general information note at this point. If you want to buy some general use filter paper to use around the basement or out in the field I am

going to make a couple of general recommendations. Without giving all the characteristics of these papers let me say that for general use you will find the following to be very useful.
y y y

y y

Whatman #1 This is a fairly fast paper that will stop particles of about 11 microns (millionths of a meter) Whatman #4 This is a very fast paper that will retain particles of 20-25 microns. Whatman #41 This is a fast paper that retains particles of 20-25 microns, It is particularly suited for filtration of gelatinous materials. Whatman #42 This is a very slow paper. It will stop particles of about 2.5 microns. Almost nothing gets through it. Whatman #541 This paper is very fast, stops particles of 20-25 microns. Its difference from #4 is that it can be used with very strong solutions of acid and base.

Always buy filter paper in circles larger than you think you might need. Its easy to cut them down but awfully hard to stretch them. Also, dont buy fluted paper. You can flute it yourself simply by folding it half as many times as you can and when you open it, you have fluted paper. That makes filtering go quite a bit faster due to the increased surface area exposed to the liquid. Did you know that you can't fold a piece of paper in half more than 7 times? No matter how big the paper or how thick or thin it is. Try it!

Filter Aids
There are a number of ways to filter things that just dont want to be filtered. Once a sticky material or any other that tends to stop up the paper gets itself into the pores of the paper, everything stops. You can try to suck it through or you can put as much pressure on it as you like but it will only aggravate the situation. This treatment simply drives the particles or other tighter into the pores. So, what can a feller do? He can prevent those particles from ever getting into the pores to start with. There are a number of ways to do this but the simplest and most common is to employ materials called Filter Aids. What is a "filter aid?" Well, there are many materials used for this purpose. You can often use "pulped paper". That is, filter paper that has been ground or shredded. Sometimes you could use something like clean silica sand. The most commonly used filter aid is probably stuff called "diatomaceous earth". So what is that, you say? It is the skeletons of microscopic marine animals called Diatomes. As these animals die they settle to the bottom and collect in layers where all the organic body parts decay leaving the skeletons that contain billions of cavities, cracks, pores, etc. This, of course, results in extremely high surface area on irregularly

shaped particles that cannot pack or compress. There are two basic ways to use filter aids. The right way, that is, of course, our way, and there is a method used by other less knowledgeable folks. We will get to that but lets just say that filter aids, when mixed with a liquid sample tends to provide surface for particles, crystals, gooy stuff, whatever, to get hung up in. It keeps the particles from getting together at the paper surface and stopping up the pores. Sort of keeps all the nasty stuff at arms-length from each other. suppose that I should explain here that these aids are usually used in vacuum filters. That is a filter that has an evacuated flask attached to the stem of the funnel so that the liquid is being sucked down through the filter paper. This not completely necessary. You can do it by gravity but will probably find that you must use a little more filter aid than you would with vacuum and it will be slower. BTW -- Does anyone know of any other word in the English language that contains two U's in sequence?? O.K., how to do it. I have seen Ph.D.s in the lab use filter aid by slurrying it with some water, pour it into the filter, suck out excess water, and then pour the sample to be filtered on top of it. He has just successfully defeated the whole purpose of using the filter aid. That ain't the way to do it. The way we Basement Chemists are going to do it is to put the filter aid directly into the liquid sample, slurry it around and then pour it into the funnel. How much do we use for any given volume? I don't know! You have to experiment. It depends on what sort of nasty stuff is in your sample. Just guess. If you have 300 ml try about a teaspoonful of aid. You will know if it works or not. If the goo still accumulates on top of the filter aid you will have to use a bit more. Just recover all of the filter aid and re-slurry it. Add another teaspoonful of filter aid and try it again. I told you that there was a little art involved. One word of caution, once you pour the slurry into the filter, DON'T STIR IT. Don't even scratch around on the surface of the packed filter aid. It almost never helps and it can cause things to slow even more.

Multiple Filters
I must comment on a human phenomenon that in the case of filtering is self-defeating. Here in Central America we have many Diesel vehicles. The fuel here is probably not quite as clean as that you are accustomed to in the USA. It is the custom here to put extra in-line fuel filters on all cars etc. Gentlemen, this is dumb. If you put two identical filters in line you do NOT get twice as good filtering. If a particle passes the first filter, it can pass the second. I once bought a used Land Cruiser here upon which I eventually found five in-line filters. Actually what they do here is when you tell the guy to change your filter he doesn't remove the old one. He simply puts another one before it. The same suspect filter is still in the

line and still capable of slowing fuel flow. Never will understand that line of thinking. Same thing with paper filters. The only reason to double-up is to provide physical strength. You will never need it with professional paper.

Vacuum Filters
If you anticipate doing very much filtering I highly recommend that you consider the advantages of using a vacuum filter. The most common, and, most useful of these is the Buchner Funnel. It is usually made of porcelain but you can get them in plastic too. It is simply a funnel with a flat plate or bed on which you can lay a piece of filter paper and suck the liquid through the paper with a vacuum. You will find this devise will make life much more pleasant if you are doing much filtering. Actually, there are two pieces to this apparatus. You must have the Buchner funnel and you must also have a Filter Flask. The latter is the catch vessel and the vessel that is attached to your vacuum source. The other thing that you will need is a rubber stopper with a hole in it to seal the joint between the funnel and the flask. Alternatively, you can buy a set of adapters, just little rings of rubber that will serve very nicely. None of this stuff is very expensive. The following drawing will, I hope, illustrate the device that we are talking about. Now if you decide you want to invest in one of these things, you must decide what size do you want. Well, for average use, I would buy a filter funnel of about 15cm diameter and a flask of 1liter capacity. That is up to you and your needs. O.K., If you buy a vacuum filter you will still have to have a way to produce a vacuum. There is a device that I highly recommend that is called a Water Entrainment Pump. It is a simple-minded device that you can attach to any water faucet to produce a suprisingly high vacuum. They are of metal or plastic and they are really useful. They are also inexpensive. This is the vacuum source that the Buchner system was designed to work with. Now, for those of you who would like a vacuum source for less or maybe free, there is another option. Go down to some place that has used or worn out refrigerators. Some that they about to junk. Find one that still runs but is nevertheless ready to be scrapped. Get the compressor from it. Hook it up and you will find that frequently it will still produce a credible vacuum. You can use it!

Sintered Glass Filters

I think that I must mention that there are filters that are made exactly like the Buchner Funnel but instead of having discrete holes for the liquid to flow through, have a filter bed of porous glass. If you should end up with one of these you will find that after a time the filter will no longer allow even water to pass through it. It will laugh at all your attempts to clean it.

However, we Basement Chemists are not to be intimidated by such trifles, are we? When this happens we must resort to our above average knowledge of redox reactions. The first thing to try is to simply dissolve some Nitrate in water and try your best to suck some of it into the sintered glass. Usually you can. Now take the filter (assuming that it is NOT plastic) and put it in the oven. Get it as hot as possible for an hour. This will probably remove all the carbonaceous material that usually causes the problem. You might even have to repeat it. If that don't work we go to a more extreme method to save our filter. For this you will need a little Sodium Dichromate and some concentrated Sulfuric Acid. To the acid add, with stirring, the Dichromate crystals until you get a nice dark red solution. DON'T GET THIS ON YOU!! It will clean your bones too. Just soak the offending filter for a few hours or days, wash it and see if that got it. There is another general cleaning solution that you can use to clean this sort of thing. As in the above, I can't remember the exact proportions but just make up a solution of Lye (caustic). About 30 grams/liter, add strong Potassium Permanganate solution, with stirring, until you get a dark blue solution. Like the Dichromate, DON'T GET IT ON YOU!! It will do a job on you too. As above, just dunk the filter in it and forget it for awhile. Both of these solutions are used extensively to clean glassware in laboratories. They can be used on pipettes, general glassware, ceramic, porcelain, sintered glass, gas spargers, etc. Aint All This Fascinating??

Melting and Smelting

Dr. A.K. Williams, Ph.D San Pedro, Costa Rica

Hey, I never thought I would have to put up a page on this subject but it seems there is a lot of confusion on this point. At least it will be short. Probably a one or two beer page. There is a whole bunch of difference between melting and smelting. We are gonna try to put this subject to rest. It is simple but I seem to have a big problem trying to explain the difference. I think we all understand pretty well what it means to melt something. That is what happens when you put a glob of hog lard in a frying pan and stick heat to it. It is what happens when you touch a piece of solder to a hot soldering iron. It is the changing of a solid to a liquid by the application of heat. When the heat is removed the melted material returns to it's solid state. It's chemical content has not been changed. O.K., maybe if it was a powder

when you stuck the heat to it, when it cools, it will probably be just a lump of something that is not finely divided. It is still the same stuff with the same composition. If it was 20% Zinc when in a powder form, it is still 20% Zinc after it cools to a solid lump. Are ya with me? Yeah, I think so. That ain't too hard to grasp, even for us miner types. Now, there is a thang called "smelting". That is a metallalurgical term. It really has nothing to do with "melting" other than the fact that both thangs have to be done at high temperatures where the material in question is probably a liquid. Just a coincidence. Lets try explaining the difference with a "fer instance". Fer instance, if I had 10 grams of Gold. Hell, we all know it ain't all gold. So lets say it is 20% copper and 80% Gold. If it happens to be in a powder form and we melt it down to a nice lump of metal, it is still 20% Copper and 80% Gold. Right? Don't want to lose anyone this early. O.K., so you are a purist and don't like the idea that your beautiful lump of metal has all that nasty Copper in it. Won't do no good at all to melt it again. You just end up with the same stuff. So, being a Basement Chemist, how are you gonna skin that cat? Well, one way is to smelt it. So how does that differ from melting? Physically, not much but chemically it is like being on a different planet. So what is this great difference that we are going to utilize? We are simply going to subject the molten metal to a highly "oxidizing" environment. Hey, you know about redox. You also know that it is very difficult to "oxidize" Gold but pretty easy to "oxidize" Copper. That is why Gold stays nice and shiny but Copper turns green pretty quick. Well, that is what we Are gonna use to clean up our gold a little. We only have to do two things. First we have to convert the Copper to some salt that will not form an amalgam with Gold. Second, we have to give the Copper salt some way to "escape" from the Gold. Hey, that ain'tno big problem for a Basement Chemist. O.K., now an easy, cheap, way to this is simply mix the Gold/Copper with an "oxidizing agent" such as Sodium Nitrate. That will get the job done. However, the Copper is sort of "locked up" inside the Gold so the Nitrate can't really get at it. Hey, we solve that problem by melting the whole mess. Now the nitrate can contact the Copper and oxidize it to Cupric Nitrate. Yeah, yeah, I know you all knew that but I had to say it. Well, that solves the problem, right? Remember, we still have to get the Gold and Copper Nitrate separated. Otherwise, it will just be sort of a mixed mess. Hey, we can do that too. What we gotta do is provide a second liquid that will dissolve the Copper Nitrate but not the Gold. And it has to be a liquid at the temperature of molten Gold. Water don't last long at that temperature. So what we are gonna do is use a hi-temp liquid. Molten glass works great. So you just got to toss in some white, quartz construction sand, a smashed up disposable beer bottle, or a smashed piece of yr wife's best crystal (if you got the balls). Any of that stuff will work. So now we got the nitrate, we got the silica (beer bottle). We heat that up with the Gold/Copper until it all melts. About 1,100 deg C or 1,800 deg F. Now all we have to do is pour it into some sort of mold and let it cool, (you can use that cast iron breadstick pan that yr wife has stashed away somewhere), bust off the glass containing the Copper and we got a button of pretty good Gold. But, wouldn't ya know it. Sumpin went to hell. The molten goo was so thick it just wouldn't pour out of the crucible. Maybe you should use a different brand of beer bottle. Well, before

we go to that extreme, lets see if the wife has some ol 20 Mule Team Borax lurking around the kitchen/utility room somewhere. Now if you just toss a teaspoon of that stuff right in the mix with her smashed crystal, you will find that when it melts, it will be much thinner and you can pour it much easier. Now you just bash off the glass and you will find that your Gold is much cleaner than when you started. Now it is probably 95% Gold and 5% Copper. I can't guarantee the numbers, but something like that. So, fellow scientists, that is the difference between Melting and Smelting. It ain't near as complicated as getting a Wiffle table adjusted right. How many beers did this page take?

This Metaluurgicool stuff is Really Great! I think it has sumpin to do with Gynocoligy or maybe Proctology. I just larned them words, ain'tcha proud of me?

Weights and Measures

Dr. A.K. Williams, Ph.D San Pedro, Costa Rica

Introduction
What can I tell you about weights and measures that you don't already know? As many of you have undoubtedly noticed in other pages on this site I do not use the "English System". When I was about 12 years old I already knew that the system that I was being taught sucked, made no sense at all, and was something that I wanted no part of. In fact, that is the problem, it is not a system at all. It is a non-system in which you never know what yardstick to measure any particular thing by because the yardstick is only to be used for certain items. Can anyone out there give me any intelligent reason why a ton of coal does not weigh the same as a ton of Epsom Salts? Well, they don't weigh the same because The English non-system uses a completely different set of scales to weigh them. One set of scales is "rigged" so that it doesn't register the same as the other. If that weren't bad enough, neither of these scales is tied to any unchangeable standard. Why is a mile 5280 ft? Is there any standard thing in the universe that fits this odd-ball number? Why not just round it off to 5000 ft? That would make a little more sense (very little). Just off the top of your head, how many feet in 1/5 of a mile? Don't cheat! Assume that there was 5,000 ft in our mile. Now ask the same question. The answer is obvious. Why? Because in the latter case you are thinking in decimals and units of ten. Think about it. Of course we have the "statute" mile as above but where does the

Nautical mile fit in. The nautical mile was devised because it is near impossible to navigate in statute miles. So why is a nautical mile any better? Because it is based on something that gives it reason for being. A nautical mile is the distance of one second of longitude at the equator. Are you really content measuring things as 14 17/92 of an inch. You have two minutes to divide that number by 2. Bet you didn't make it. You would have, had we used increments of 10. I seem to recall a story about the English building a railroad across Australia. Of course they started on each side of the continent and built toward the pre-determined meeting spot. It seems that the surveyors were pretty good because they did, indeed, meet. However, it seems that the tracks could not be joined because the two building crews had used different track gauge. One half was wider than the other. I believe the engineers explained the costly error by the simple ruse of using the stupidity of the English non-system. They said they used different "yardsticks" to measure the distance between the rails. I have been told that until this day, trains must stop at this point so that the cars can be detached from their wheel carriages and installed on carriages of the proper gauge so that they can continue the trip. Is this true? If anyone knows tell me, I'm interested. History is littered with stories such as this. All because of the unreasonable non-system that England, due mostly to their rabid colonialism, managed to inflict on a large part of the world. This non-system is not a laughing matter. It is plague, a sickness, and a monument to man's stupidity. To the English for devising it and to the rest of world for accepting it. Can you even entertain the thought of accepting measurements such as long tons, short tons, avoirdupois tons, carats, karats, avoirdupois drams, apothecary drams, pennyweights, fluid ounces, solid ounces, avoirdupois ounces, apothecary ounces, leagues, miles, liquid barrels, dry barrels, petroleum barrels, large calories, small calories, chains, US gallons, imperial gallons, gills, grains, troy grains, hands, British hogsheads, US hogsheads, short hundredweights, long hundredweights, dry quarts, liquid quarts - - - - - -. Don't think for a minute that I have covered them all. I just got up to Q; most of the alphabet is still to go. Hope I made a point. By now you assume that I do not like or embrace the English non-system of measurements. Not only do I dislike it; I refuse to use it!

The Metric System

I am not going to give you a great long boring and worthless conversion table. I don't want you to convert it; I want you to FORGET it. The only reason to have to convert is that someone who is bogged down in English non-measurements has laid this idiotic stuff on you. You know, I just miss-spelled measurements. Why? Again, the English non-system of pronunciation. Why do they never seem to get anything right? What I am going to do is to give you a few key prefixes and suffixes so that you

can convert to the metric system, tell all the Brits to kiss - - - - - - the Blarney Stone, and be liberated from the anchor that has been around your neck all these years. There are a few terms (not many) that you can learn in a few minutes that can guide you through the mysteries of the metric system like Einstein through remedial math. How can this be? Spent my whole life and I still don't know the English non-system. That is the point. Metrics is a system, not just a collection of unrelated garbage. Learn these few terms and you will be able to understand the entire metric system.
y

y y y

y y

y y y

The metric system is based on the meter (distance), the liter (volume), and the gram (weight). Nothing else, no exceptions. No short meters, apothecary grams, none of that crap. Everything is in terms of 10's. The prefix tells you immediately how many 10's and if it is more or less than the unit. I.e., grams, liters, or meters. The prefixes deci, kilo, mega mean 10, 1,000, 1,000,000 respectively. We can have a gram, a decigram, kilogram, or a megagram. That means one gram, 10 grams, 100 grams, 1,000 grams and 1,000,000 grams. These prefixes are for amounts more than 1 gram. The prefix milli, micro, pico, etc. refer to amounts less than 1 gram. We can have 1 gram; we can have 1 milligram (0.001 gram), 1 microgram (0.000,001 grams), or 1 picogram (0.000,000,001 grams). There are other terms for amounts more or less than these, but let's just work with the ones described. These prefixes usually go in jumps of three zeros, thousands. The exception is deci that really is not used very much. It's really easier to say "10 grams" rather than "one decigram". Same thing. So when you get used to metrics you will know that a milligram is 1/1,000 of a gram, a microgram is 1/1,000,000 of a gram etc. A kilogram is 1,000 grams, etc. A metric ton is 1,000 kilograms (Kg). A hectare (area) is an area 100 X 100 meters. 10,000 M2. The point here is to try to show you that in the metric system everything is in increments of 10. Now doesn't that make more sense than 19/32 or some such idiocy. Another example, if someone says "hey, I got 100 milligrams (mg) of gold in that last pan". You can convert that immediately to 1/10 of a gram. About $1.00 worth. What if he said, " hey, I got about 1/300th of an assay ton in that last pan". Does that really mean anything to you before you have to pull out your calculator and work for 5-10 minutes? I think not.

Really, all I want to do here is to present a more reasonable and useful

alternative to the generally accepted means of measuring things. I just want to get you to think about it. If you do, I have won! Because there is no reasonable excuse for putting up with the bullshit English nonsystem. After all, science has NEVER accepted this self-crippled nonsystem because it was obvious from day one that it was unworkable and an insult to any ones intelligence. Systems work! Non-systems Suck!

This document maintained by A.K. Williams. Material Copyright 1999 A.K. Williams Optimized for use with Communicator 4 and Internet Explorer 4.0