Separating metal from alloys

[Kelario 95]

Hooray, internet. Once again telling me everything except what I want to know.

 

I have a get-rich-quick plan for the next few years: buy cheap, non-working cars on Craigslist, melt them into ingots, and sell the raw metal, earning a huge profit. Judging by exactly how much metal cars have and the fact that platinum (!!!) is included, this could actually be very profitable if the cars are old and dead. As with anything, however, it has a catch. I'm pretty sure car metals are all alloys.

 

I've worked with molten metal before, and I know that mixing lead with antimony produces a new PbSb metal that is either hard or difficult to separate. I would like to separate my alloys into their base metals so that I can have pure metal to sell. The internet says only how to do this with electrolysis, and it restricts it to gold, silver, and copper rather than having a general method that would apply most metals.

 

What's a good way to do this?

[SharpWit 2,844]

One thing I know for sure, is that this is now way to get rich quick. Where I live there are tons of signs saying they'll buy your old cars for this exact sort of thing. The only way I think you can get rich quick in this world anymore is through stocks or inventing a highly addictive app for mobile phones.

[Leavinh 313]

I know absolutely nothing about this, but after a bit of interneting, it seems that something called fractional distillation might be a possible solution. So you would just need to figure out what the parts are made of, and then heat until one of the parts vaporizes (repeating until you have extracted what you need). Like I said though, I have no knowledge or experience with anything like this so I don't even know if this is a thing you can do with metal.

 

I'm definitely wishing you luck with this, though. It sounds very difficult and interesting.