From: Richard Sullivan FRPS (richsul@earthlink.net)
Date: 05/30/01-03:09:52 PM Z
At 10:00 PM 5/29/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Sandy,
>
>This is not answering your question but I know that Richard Sullivan does
>this for a percentage of the platinum solution. Since platinum is fairly
>non-reactive, I think it involves some pretty nasty acids and other stuff.
>Richard has mentioned the danger involved. Liam Lawless figured out how to
>make gold chloride so perhaps he knows how to make platinum chloroplatinite.
>
>Bob Schramm
Any good inorganic synthesis book (check out Bauer) will give you the
procedures. It is not however a thing to be done on your kitchen stove with
the windows open as was previously cited for making gold chloride in an
alt-photo journal known in these parts. Kids, don't try this at home!
Platinum is many times slower to go into solution than is gold so a lot
more heat is needed. Hot aqua regia is nothing to play with unless you know
what you are doing.
The steps:
Dissolve the Pt in hot aqua regia. The gasses released are deadly!
Remove the oxidizing nitric acid from the AR by chasing with hydrochloric acid.
Add pot chloride to make K2PtCl6 and insoluble yellow precipitate
Reduce the K2ptCl6 to K2PtCl4 with hydrazine di-hydrachloride (more nasty
stuff!)
Dry in the normal manner.
It's pretty simple till you try to do it.
There is a ton of gotcha's along the way and after 25 years of making it we
still run into a pound or so of them. None of the synthesis books explain
the gotcha's. Like cooking, it is an art. The books give a recipe but you
need some experience to make it happen right. I no longer make stuff as my
son Dana (here in Santa Fe we are casually known as Bostick & Sullivan y
Familia) runs the lab.
We run all our hot gases out of 4 liter vacuum flasks through water
aspirators run on pumps through 50 gallon tanks of concentrated sodium
carbonate. The gases are neutralized into small amounts of CO2, sodium
nitrate and sodium chloride.
My first attempts years ago involved using an industrial fan to blow it up
a 10 foot stack made out of plywood. The fan blade dissolved in about 2
hours. Literally! The motor bearings were sealed and lasted. When the first
blade fell off it started shaking the whole place violently and spilled
$500.00 dollars worth of Pt solution in a beaker to the floor due to the
shaking. None of this part of the process was explained in the synthesis
book. There are special fans made out of Teflon which are used for aqua
regia fumes as you cannot use an ordinary lab fume hood. The special fans
cost big bucks and then you still have the problem of where are you going
to blow the fumes.
Just thought a few folks here like Bob Schramm might find it interesting or
maybe just wondering why I might still be alive. I am too.
Dick Sullivan FRPS
And yes that is Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. The first and
oldest photographic society in the world. I am proud to be a Fellow and in
the company of William Henry Fox Talbot, Edwin Land, and many others, but
lest anyone think otherwise, I do not dare to compare myself to such giants.
> >From: Sandy King
> >Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
> >To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
> >Subject: Platinum Stuff
> >Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 03:35:35 +0100
> >
> >
> >I need some platinum for toning of POP and silver/iron prints. In
> >the
> >past I have used something called Platinum Solution #3, Platinum
> >Chloroplatinite (spelling?). How does one prepare this solution from
> >the metal itself, and is there any practical advantage to doing so?
> >
> >Sandy King
> >
>
>
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