Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker
Mining and Metals and on today's video we're gonna try our hand at another catalytic
converter here. Now the first catalytic converter I
tried out a couple weeks ago a lot of you guys left messages and comments
saying that it didn't have any platinum in it or palladium because it was an
aftermarket cat or a pre-cat and so I've decided to go and try another one.
So let me get this one prepped and cut in half so we can get at that honeycomb
where all the precious metals are and then we'll take it over and smelt it and
see how we come out. So here's an up close look at our cat, and I'm not sure
what car this is from but I'm gonna pull off these heat shields here and see if
we can find a number and maybe that'll help us identify what cat this is from
and then we can maybe get an idea of how much precious metals are in this thing.
Alright we've pulled off our heat shield here and there's no numbers on this thing
anywhere that I could find and so I'm hoping you guys can help me identify
this cat but more importantly if it has any precious metals or not. So leave
me a comment below and let me know if you think this is a good one or a bad
one and maybe what kind of car it came off
of. But now what I'll do is I'll just take our plows and I'll just cut it
right down the middle and get that that honeycomb out of the middle that has the
precious metals in it and we'll scrap the rest of this thing. Yeah, that's the good stuff. Okay thank
you very much. Alright here's our stuff we're after this is where all the
precious metals are. And they're bonded kind of all to the outside of this
honeycomb or grid pattern we have here. And so what we're gonna do now is we're
going to take this and crush it down to a pretty fine powder and we're gonna try
and smelt it down and see if we can recover the metals. Kind of the holy
grail of this would be to not use any collector metal and just crush it down,
mix it with some flux in a crucible, pour it and get a little platinum or
palladium bead. So that's the test we'll try first, see how that goes. But then I
also want to test recovery and so I'm going to do another test after that with
a lead collector metal and probably a third test with a copper collector metal
and then we can compare all three results. I'll be using a hundred grams of
crushed up catalytic converter and I'll be using for our flux recipe I'm going
to be using 150 grams of lye, a hundred grams of borax, and 50 grams of silica
sand. And by making our flux basic hopefully it will eat up this ceramic
kind of honeycomb stuff that the platinum's
bonded to and that will free up the platinum to be collected in the bottom
of our smelt. So we'll try those and see how it goes here. Alright I'm gonna
take the stuff I'm just going to crush it up with a hammer and hopefully we can
get it knocked off into this bin here. So that's kind of how it comes apart, and
oh, just for reference I have I have about 1.6 5 kilograms of this stuff so I
have I have quite a bit of this stuff to play with and so we're gonna, we're gonna
work through at a hundred gram increments until we get a good recipe we
like. A little bigger hammer here. Alright before we go much farther on this stuff,
it's pretty damp so I'm gonna put it in our frying pan and get it on our furnace
and just dry it out and get some of this moisture out of here I think it'll help
it crush up better and crush up finer. So in a previous video we were having a
little bit of trouble getting all the ceramic to dissolve in the flux and the
last three smelts we've done here it's all completely dissolved, the crucible
still looks really pretty good and so I think we're we got a good recipe for
flux and now we just got to figure out if our collector metal is doing its job
and if so which one does the best job. Alright we've got our little lead button
here and we're gonna put it in the furnace and cupel the lead away and be
left with our platinum and palladium. And I'm gonna take the furnace right to the
limit, it's working its way up to 2,200 degrees. I'm gonna cupel this a way
high temperature because I think on our previous video, we cupelled it a pretty
low temperature and it ended up being about two-thirds lead and a third
palladium. And so the theory is is if you get it hot enough, the higher you get it
the less lead you're gonna get because that alloy with the precious metals is
going to have a higher melting point the closer you get to the platinum palladium. So we want to get as high as high as we can to cupel so that we can get as much
lead out as possible. Alright so we'll take our precious metal alloy here put
it in our cupelling oven. And that's gonna melt and all the lead oxides gonna
absorb into that magnesia cupel. Alright here's our third one, this has the copper
collector in it. Well there's our collector now at the
bottom. Let me knock it out of there and see what we got. Well I don't know if you can see that. See if
we can get it cleaned up a little bit here. Well there we go there's our copper.
So let me knock some that slag off and we'll see what we got. Alright I'm
gonna add about 45 grams a led to our copper, that'll be about a one to four
ratio. But I think at these high temperatures will be able to cupel
the lead and copper away with that higher ratio that four to one. Alright
one guy left me a comment and said that I wanted to be careful because platinum
and palladium will actually dissolve in real caustic, hot caustic stuff like lye
if you get it way hot like 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So he suggested I try a
smelt with just borax and silica sand and so while this lead and coppers cupelling away, I'm gonna add 50 grams of this catalytic converter, I'm going to
use 150 grams of borax, and 75 grams of silica. Smelt it down, I'll add 20 grams a
collector again and see what happens. Alright we'll throw in 16.1 grams of lead. Alright here's our slag from our borax
and silica sand only fluxm and it's really really glass you're really really
acidic you can see the the little hole there where it kind of sucks down in the
middle. That's very characteristic of an acidic slag. And it also seems to shatter
like this when it cools down. So let's tip it over and see what we got for our
lead collector. So there's the point,
there's our lead in there, get it broken out of there and see what we got, yeah there we go. And
here's our lead button afterwards with the borax and we got 16.24 so we got 0.14 grams more than we started with.
Alright guys so I'm sitting here brainstorming while my lead's cupelling
away in the furnace and I've got a couple different options here I wanted
to go over with you guys just kind of like I said just a brainstorm session. It
seems like the lead is really hard to get completely out of the platinum
palladium and again I kind of mentioned this earlier, I think what happens is as
you increase the percentage of platinum and palladium in your button in the cupel
furnace, the melting point keeps going up and up and up and up because pure
platinum and palladium have a really high melting point and lead the lead
in there keeps the melting point low but then as you remove the lead that melting
point Rises Rises Rises and then it solidifies and you still have about half
your lead in there. So that's not really what we want, we want those pure precious
metals. Copper would be a good solution where instead of using lead as a
collector you could use copper and then electoral win the copper away. So that
would be an option, then take your slimes from your
electrowinning sell, smelt them again and you should have pure platinum palladium
but then again you're essentially have the same problem, you have this fine
platinum plating dust just like we have our auto catalytic converters that you
got to form into a metal button somehow. So the idea of copper works well but the
the final product, you still need to collect it all down into a into a metal. So I have this thought, if we used either silver as a collector metal you have a
valuable metal that you could probably sell to refiner and get paid for and not
get dinged on so you could get your silver price back as well as your
platinum palladium but the other option is if you use a led as a collector then
you can take it, put it in the furnace cupel as much lead away as you
can and then essentially in court with silver so you add you know maybe 10
grams of silver that will keep the melting point of the bead low but then you
can cupel the rest of that lead out and you'll be left with silver and
platinum palladium bead that you can then sell to a refiner. And the only
reason you wouldn't use silver as a collector metal is it some may get lost
a little bit in the slag. I did a video years ago using silver as a collector and I
didn't lose very much but there was definitely some silver that assayed out
in the slag. So right now those are kind of my thoughts, wanted to share them with
you and you know sometimes it helps talk out loud with someone. So I think right
now we'll figure out how much platinum palladium we're getting back from our
lead and our copper collector, and then I might try adding some silver and
seeing if I can pull the rest of that lead out of the bead and get it zapped with the
XRF gun and see if we can get a pure silver PGM bead with no lead in it. Alright guys well here's our button from the lead collector and it actually looks
pretty good! It looks metallic, it doesn't look mossy like our previous buttons
from our previous video. So hopefully we got most of the lead out of here
and we have just our platinum and or palladium in there.
So let me pull it out of there get it weighed and we'll see how much metal we
recovered compared to the first smelt. So it looks like we recovered almost a
third of a gram. So hopefully there's not a lot of let in there and that's mostly
precious metals, but that's a third of a gram from a hundred grams of catalytic
converter. Alright guys so here is a comparison between our lead collector
with sodium hydroxide or lye and the lead collector with just borax and
silica sand and see if we lost any. But remember we used a hundred grams of
catalytic converter here and only 50 grams here, so if these come out to be
the same percent recovery this one should be about twice what this bead is.
So this first one that we used the the lye with comes out to be 0.31 or so
depending on the wind. So there's with lye and so this one
should be about 15 and a half or 0.15 grams... and it looks like it's 0.18. So we
actually did seem to recover a little bit more by not using the sodium
hydroxide, which is kind of interesting. Alright guys so now we're going to
compare our lead collector over here to our copper collector over here. And our
copper collector weighs 0.175, and these both had the same amount of catalytic
converters so we lost almost half of our precious metals here with the copper
collector. And my suspicion is that using the copper actually pulled a lot of the
platinum and palladium into the cupel when we were oxidizing it in the
crucible, or in the cupel I mean, because
this is actually very common with gold and silver it will it will pull a lot of
the precious metals into the cupel if you have too much copper so that's my,
what I expect happened with that one. And so now that we've done all of our
experiments it looks like the best recovery we get is using a lead
collector and an acidic flux with not much lye or no lye and just borax in
silica sand. And the cool thing was is that even with the borax and silica sand
we got a total decomposition of the catalytic converters. So we don't
actually need the lye in there to eat up that ceramic honeycomb. Alright guys
one last quick experiment here before we get into production. I'm gonna take a
hundred grams of the catalytic converter and mix them with 300 grams to just
straight borax, smelt it down, I'm gonna add some lead and see if we can just
have a real nice three-to-one ratio of borax and converter honeycomb and see
how much recovery we can get. I think the last one we did had about 0.14 grams
recovered from 50 grams of converter, so if we're somewhere in the 0.3 grams we should
be doing pretty good. 18.36 grams of lead, so hopefully we
get 18.66 or so and we're done. And here's our button afterwards and
it's just right on perfect, 18.64 grams. So the borax at
three to one ratio works pretty good. Alright guys so I'm a little screw-up
here, it had been a couple days since filming the last two takes and so my
memory wasn't very good and I said we needed 0.14 when really we needed about
a 0.18 so the recovery was actually a little bit less with just the
pure borax. But I left it in here to make this point I don't think that the
recovery would be much affected at all by the addition or reduction of silica,
because it's an acidic flux, it didn't make it any more fluid or less fluid. And
so then it got me thinking about the amount of surface area this exposed to
the collector metal. And though the test where I did have the highest recovery
which was silica and borax that didn't have any soda in it, there's only 50
grams of material and so the surface area of the collector metal versus the
height of the column in that crucible was much less and so the material
had a lot more contact with the collector metal and maybe got us a
little bit higher recovery. So now I'm kind of concerned that the problem we're
having isn't necessarily with a flux recipe but it's more with the amount of
surface area of your collector metal and the amount of time that it's left in the
furnace to react with itself and have all that platinum come down and react
with the collector metal. So there's still a lot more work to be done but
let's go ahead and continue with the video now and we'll see how it turns out in the end. Alright guys now we've got everything set, we're gonna do a bigger
smelt this is the number-10 crucible. I've got 300 grams of converter in here
and 900 grams of borax, I could probably do 400 and 1200 but this is all
I got crushed up right now so I'll get this started. Alright guys I'm going to sacrifice this
one ounce round here, this is 99.9% silver and I'm going to
use it to try and get rid of the lead in our little beads. And the leftover should
be pure silver with a little bit of platinum palladium in it. So I'm gonna
put this in a cupel, get it molten, and then I'm gonna take our lead beads and
our little platinum beads that we have, put it in there and drive off all the
lead that we can and we should be left with pretty much pure silver a little
bit of platinum palladium. Alright guys here's our cupel and I'm gonna put our
beads from previous smelts in there. And then I'm going to place our coin right
on top and put that back in the furnace and we'll let that go and cupel for
a while. And then when I get the lead knocked out of thebig smelt we just did
I'll add that to it and drive all the lead out see what we're left with. Take
a look at our lead and silver here. and there it's goin, it might be kinda
hard to see there but the lead on top is cupelling away. There's a little bit of
junk on there in the left hand side, might be a little iron contamination or
something. But we'll let that go and let all that lead oxidize and see what we're
left with. Here's our silver bead after the cupel process is finished. And I
have I've read about these but I've never actually seen them. So these little
guys here are they're called silver sprouts and when your bead has a really
high percentage of silver in it, as it cools these these little they're like
little trees these little silver sprouts shoot out of the the silver button as it
cools. So I've never I've never seen those before but that's what those are.
So let me get this pulled out of here, we'll get it weighed ,and we'll get it
zapped with our XRF gun and we'll see what metals we have in here. Alright so
I'm just gonna take a little piece of Emery cloth here and clean up our silver
bead a little bit and get it so it's nice fresh metal on the surface for the
XRF gun. Okay there we go it's not perfect but it's cleaned up and got some
of that junk off the surface so hopefully we can get a good XRF reading
on our on our metal here. So I'm also going to take some of our
slag and get it zapped with the XRF as well and this is our no collector metal
slag and this was the first one I did with sodium hydroxide rich slag and so
we'll see if there's any metals in that. Here's some slag with the lead collector
this was the second one I did. And here's a sample of the slag that I
did at the very end with just using borax. Alright guys so was it a success? We
recovered some palladium, there wasn't any platinum in there, there was a
surprisingly high amount of tantalum in there I was not expecting that and I
can't find anything where they were using tantalum in any catalytic
converters so help me out there. Is that, where'd the tantalum come from? The other
thing though that's encouraging is there wasn't any rare metals in our slag, no
platinum or palladium so I think we're recovering most of it in our metal. It
looks like, if you look really close at the numbers, the lead collector with the
high sodium hydroxide slag worked the best, it has the least amount of metals
in it. The no collector did the next-best and then the borax did the worst because
actually in the borax, if you looked at the bottom there is actually a palladium
reading in there. So we looks like we lost a little bit of palladium in the in
the borax only smelt. That all being said you want to be really really careful
when you're looking at glasses or non metal objects with the XRF because it
doesn't give you the true weight percent because there's so much silica in there
and other things that the XRF can't read it's not a true weight percent so it
just gives you the the percent compared to the other metals in there. And so we
really don't know how much we lost but anytime you get a metal showing up on
the XRF reading, even if it's in a glassy slag or something, you know you've lost
some but we can't do any calculations to exactly how much we lost. The metal
button we recovered weighed right around 33 grams and so when you do the back
calculation it looks like we ended up with a little over a gram of palladium,
about 1.3 grams for that whole catalytic converter. I was hoping for more. What do
you guys think, is that is that what you expected based on where the catalytic
converter came from? You guys have a lot more experience with how much precious
metal should be on those things than I do. So going forward what's the next step?
I I'm really not quite satisfied yet. I think going forward my next
is gonna be to take some catalytic converter and I'm gonna stick with our
high sodium hydroxide flux. I'm gonna use silver as a collector metal, I'm gonna
put it right in the crucible, I'm not going to use any lead and see if we can
use silver and then you just get the silver button and you're done, you don't
have to cupel anything which would be nice. I'm gonna increase the amount of
silver we use for the collector so we can have a larger surface area of
metal for the charge to react with when it's molten. I think that will help
increase the percent recovery of our precious metals or platinum in our
palladium. The third thing I'm gonna do on our next experiment whenever that is
is I'm gonna actually take the slag from our smelt and send it off for assay from
a professional assayer so they can tell us exactly how much
platinum and palladium and some of these other rare metals that we're losing.
And that that way we can actually come up with a percent recovery. Alright
guys so here's the plan for my next experiment. I'm really pretty excited
about this! I've been emailing back and forth with a guy who has lots and lots
of these ceramic beads from a catalytic converter in his industrial process that
he's been using, and these are the spent beads when they replaced them. And he's
got him assayed, and they assay over in 1% platinum. And so he's sent me up the
sample and he's gonna let me play with it and see if I can recover the Platinum
out of this stuff. So this is going to be my next video and that's what these two
catalytic converters have been kind of leading up to, the two previous videos, is
once I figure out the process I can actually take the material here, these
beads and process them down and hopefully recover the platinum. So again
this is a little sneak peek for our next video, hopefully we can start with
this one here in the next couple weeks and again I'm going to use silver as a
collector and high sodium hydroxide flux and get the slag assayed and hopefully
we can get a really pretty high recovery of platinum off of these beads for this
guy. I'm gonna be really interested to hear from
you guys on what you think and what you think I can do to improve the process. I
really want to try and get as high recovery of precious metals as possible
and you guys might have some really good ideas for me, so leave me a comment in
the comment section below or you can email me. My contact information is in
the description below. And again I hope you guys really enjoyed the video this
is a fun process, I don't know of anybody else on YouTube that's trying to smelt
these things down. There's a lot of chemical recovery videos out there but
if you guys, like I said, have any suggestions on how to improve the
process of smelting these catalytic converters, please let me know. So thanks
again for watching and we'll see you guys on the next video.
