Refining gold from Computer boards and CPU's
Mike Blanchard
computer boards in my basement and garage that my wife wants me to "do
somethign with". I figured that I'd refine the gold from them in leu
of throwing them into a dumpster.
Now I'm hooked on this concept, I know it can be done and the basics
of doing this. BUT, what parts have the gold in them? Do all IC's
have gold content? how about CPU's? I must have 1000 or so 486 CPU's
and about the same old Pentuim chips that I was going to give to my
cousin for an art project. Nothiong short of diamond tipped tools
will drill into these CPU's so what do I do, grind them up the best I
can and pull out the little wires and pins? Is there much gold within
the CPU's themselves?
I know the board contacts or "fingers" are plated with Gold, but
what about the PCB traces? How do I deal with the PCB itself, it's
epoxy/fiberglass, do I just dump the whole thing into a container of
Aqua Regia and go from there?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have Ammon's book on order
so I think I'm on the right track at least :-)
thanks all! any web sites with this info on them?
Exibar
alan
"Mike Blanchard" <exi...@thelair.com> wrote in message
news:cc0872df.03022...@posting.google.com...
I believe others have tried and found it uneconomic. If you are approaching
it as a hobby, I suspect the only worth while thing to do is cut off the
fingers and dissolve out the non-gold with sulphuric acid. Junk the rest.
Sell the gold and the income may cover the cost of disposal of the
copper-contaminated waste, or it may not.
alan
Muhammar
get from your junk parts?
They do this kind of thing in mainland China: A lot of cheap laborers
(who do not need gloves for diping stuff into nitric acid), enviro
authorities being members of the Party...
Don Bruder
exi...@thelair.com (Mike Blanchard) wrote:
> Has anyone any experience with doing this? I have countless boxes of
> computer boards in my basement and garage that my wife wants me to "do
> somethign with". I figured that I'd refine the gold from them in leu
> of throwing them into a dumpster.
> Now I'm hooked on this concept, I know it can be done and the basics
> of doing this. BUT, what parts have the gold in them? Do all IC's
> have gold content? how about CPU's? I must have 1000 or so 486 CPU's
> and about the same old Pentuim chips that I was going to give to my
> cousin for an art project. Nothiong short of diamond tipped tools
> will drill into these CPU's so what do I do, grind them up the best I
> can and pull out the little wires and pins? Is there much gold within
> the CPU's themselves?
Gold there is, yes. But I can do everything but guarantee that there's
not enough to pay for the supplies and hardware (you'll be lucky to make
half your money back, if that much) you'll use in recovering it.
Commercial operations that do this are able to survive because of the
sheer scale at which they operate. Most of them are based in China or
Brazil, or similar locations where manual labor is cheaper than dirt.
They process tons upon tons of electronic scrap each day, and they run
the process in huge batches. The large scale of the operation saves
them. Unlike you, they can buy their chemistry by the multi-thousand
gallon tanker-truckload. As a hobbyist, you don't stand a chance of
hitting the break-even point financially, and may find yourself put out
of business before you even get really going, due to the hazardous
chemistry (and the attendant trouble with both getting it in the first
place, then disposing of it at least relatively safely after you've made
it even MORE hazardous) involved.
Shovel the stuff into a truck and ship it to a professional, guy. Take
it from someone who thought it would be a great idea not too many years
ago, and found out the hard way that as an idea, it's wonderful, but as
an "in reality" item, it really sucks canal water: You don't want to
mess with it.
... glances over at the shelf, where sits the 2-ish gram "nugget"
recovered from almost 6 months of work, several hundred dollars worth of
chemistry and hardware, and god-only-knows how many painstakingly
separated chips, edge connectors, connector pins, and related junk.
> I know the board contacts or "fingers" are plated with Gold, but
> what about the PCB traces? How do I deal with the PCB itself, it's
> epoxy/fiberglass, do I just dump the whole thing into a container of
> Aqua Regia and go from there?
As for the PCB itself, the traces are totally worthless as a gold
source. They're just copper, or occasionally aluminum. Other than NASA
and military gear, which, if my experience is any indicator, you've got
about a snowball's chance in hell of ever seeing, gold is only laid down
on the areas that will be used by an edge connector.
Resistors, diodes, capacitors, and coils - so-called "discretes" - are
all worthless. Once in a great while, perhaps if you stumble onto some
old military hardware, you'll find a couple here and there that have
gold-plated leads, but those are EXTREMELY rare. Rare enough for me to
not flinch at calling them practically nonexistent.
Transistors MIGHT have a trace of gold in them, depending on how old
they are and who made them. Older = more likely. Don't waste your time
on them unless you manage to get to the point where you can have
somebody trucking in multi-ton batches of them, though. The amount
doesn't justify the effort for a hobby-level operation, no matter how
generous you are in your figuring.
Older non-CPU chips may or may not have any gold at all in them. No
telling for sure until you try a batch, and the result will only be
valid for the batch you actually try it on. The next batch is just as
likely to have nothing at all in it. Older CPU chips are somewhat more
likely to contain gold, but just because they're CPU chips is *NO*
guarantee that they do.
Newer (post 1985-ish) chips, CPU or otherwise, probably don't have any
gold in them at all, since by that point, most (maybe even all?)
chipmakers had switched over to aluminum or copper wires for connecting
the legs to the silicon. The newer "forest of pins" types often have
gold plated pins, so if you can "shave" those off, then treat them like
connector pins, you'll be getting a better payback for your efforts.
Grinding the entire chip and processing it is more hassle than the
payback is worth. Take the legs, and pitch the body, basically.
Connector pins in plugs/sockets/edge connectors are the real "mother
lode", since there are often dozens of pins per connector, each with its
own tiny plating of gold to contribite to the cause. But the plastic
they're usually encased in makes them a pain in the rump to work with.
Not impossible, just much more hassle than smashing a chip into powder
and going to work on it. If you're actually going to make the attempt,
I'd *VERY* strongly advise you stick with plugs/sockets and edge
connectors as your raw material. Those will at least give you a prayer
of getting something for your efforts. Anything else is likely to leave
you wondering why you were stupid enough to actually try it in the first
place. It shouldn't need saying, but... If the pin you're looking at is
silvery-colored, pitch it. There's nothing there. You're wasting your
time (and perhaps your chemicals) if you bother to try to process it.
Likewise, the "business end" of the pins are the only place there's
likely to be any gold at all. The "back end", where the wires are
soldered on, is almost certainly just tinned copper, with the gold plate
only being put on the end that's actually going to be making contact.
Yeah, I know... I'm a ray of sunshine for you. Sorry, but them's the
facts...
--
Don Bruder - dak...@sonic.net <--- Preferred Email - unmunged, SpamAssassinated
Hate SPAM? See <http://www.spamassassin.org> for some seriously great info.
I will choose a path that's clear: I will choose Free Will! - N. Peart
Fly trap info pages: <http://www.sonic.net/~dakidd/Horses/FlyTrap/index.html>
Chuck
for gold content. You can probably sell Pentium chips for at least $3 to $5
apiece.
On that note, do you have any functional board/chip combos? I've been toying
with building a cheap home automation PC.
"Mike Blanchard" <exi...@thelair.com> wrote in message
news:cc0872df.03022...@posting.google.com...
Steven Swift
>The price of gold is $350/ounce. How many grams of gold do you hope to
>get from your junk parts?
Back in the 70s, I got about 12 troy ounces from a plastic garbage can
full of circuit boards and ICs. But now all the chemicals are illegal.
If you have a hankering to try it, please get a copy of "Recovery and
Refining of Precious Metals," by C. W. Ammen, ISBN 0-442-20934-7, 1984.
Steve.
--
Steven D. Swift, nova...@eskimo.com, http://www.novatech-instr.com
NOVATECH INSTRUMENTS, INC. P.O. Box 55997
206.301.8986, fax 206.363.4367 Seattle, Washington 98155 USA
J2jurado
<<Back in the 70s, I got about 12 troy ounces from a plastic garbage can full
of circuit boards and ICs. But now all the chemicals are illegal.>>
I remember a pilot plant in Edmonton, Maryland which was built by the US Bureau
of Mines, Avondale Research Center (R.I.P.), part of Dept. of Interior. It was
built by the Resource Recovery Group, and they published several Reports of
Investigation in the early 80's on recovering gold from used hardware. Fred
Ambrose and 'Bud' Dunning were the investigators.
The hammermilled the scrap, and then after preliminary magnetic separation, ran
material over a huge eddy current table, which concentrated gold and other
metals. It was pretty nifty watching different metals deflect to different
collection stations, and then the segments were run across the board once or
two times more to concentrate more.
I was an undergrad engineering student, and pretty amazed at it all...but I do
not believe the system ever commercialized.
Tim Dellinger
> Now I'm hooked on this concept
>...
> Nothiong short of diamond tipped tools
>will drill into these CPU's so what do I do, grind them up the best I
>can and pull out the little wires and pins?
You might want to rig up a rock-tumbler style ball mill in order
to break things up for you. It might take a few weeks, but if
you're lucky, everything will turn into a rough powder with minimal
investment of time on your part. Just an idea.
--
Tim Dellinger www.ews.uiuc.edu/~tdelling
tdel...@uiuc.edu
Uncle Al
What are labor and inputs worth vs. isolated products of value? I'd
grind the whole mess up in an attritor, run it past a magnet to pull
ferrous alloys, and then over a linear induction winding to pop out a
metal rich fraction. Gold is quite reactive in the presence of
oxidizing agents (air) and complexing ligands (chloride or any soft
Lewis base). Dissolve the whole mess up in nitric acid, then
electrowin or selectively reduce (oxalate, sulfite, etc.) the gold
out. If you acid leach the crude powder you will have a lot of sludge
saturated with acid (and gold dissolved therein). Hydrazine reduction
is *not* recommended, and keep ammonia way from there ("explosive
gold"). Never have ethanol near nitric acid and heavy metals.
Copper isn't worth much, but you can grab it by reduction with scrap
iron.
Another tack is to have a big pot filled with molten sodium carbonate
and an air or oxygen sparge. Chop the boards and burn off the
organics. This is better than break-even for huge piles of hospital
x-ray film and silver. The high silica content of cicuit boards makes
this more of a "more studies needed" eco-scam for computer boards. It
might not be too bad for chewing chips not attached to boards.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!
Repeating Decimal
nova...@eskimo.com wrote on 2/23/03 11:08 AM:
> muha...@hotmail.com (Muhammar) writes:
>
>> The price of gold is $350/ounce. How many grams of gold do you hope to
>> get from your junk parts?
>
> Back in the 70s, I got about 12 troy ounces from a plastic garbage can
> full of circuit boards and ICs. But now all the chemicals are illegal.
>
> If you have a hankering to try it, please get a copy of "Recovery and
> Refining of Precious Metals," by C. W. Ammen, ISBN 0-442-20934-7, 1984.
>
> Steve.
12 troy ounces? That must have been a hell of a large garbage can. Or else,
your scrap came from people who did not know how to plate gold.
Bill
Michael A. Terrell
Equipment made to the mid '60s had plenty of gold. They plated in
mils, not micro inches. Parts were expected to have a long, reliable
life, not wear out after a couple hundred mating cycles. TO-5
transistors had real gold plating on them. I used to (US) $18 to $25
for a quart jar full of defective parts from a coin company licensed to
deal in gold. The owner shipped the stuff to a refinery where they
burnt scrap PC boards and chemically removed gold, silver, platinum and
palladium from old boards and parts.
--
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
Keith R. Williams
mike.t...@earthlink.net says...
Still, that's a pound of gold! That's impressive for a garbage
can-o-junk! I'm surprised James B. wasn't on your tail.
--
KEith
Dale A Trynor
Dale Trynor wrote:
I would not be surprised. For example I got about 1.5 troy ounces from about a
gallon or two of the connectors cut off of old antique telephone electronics.
The annoying part is that all of the plugs were left at the dump they came
from. Of course the connectors were of a much smaller volume that the boards
they came from as all together they would have filled an old refrigerator.
Typically also did well off of such things as old mainframes as well, as long
as the stuff was old.
Herd one story about truckloads of this stuff that had been thrown away and the
workers barging about saving a few pounds of copper and I was doing very well
with splitting the gold with the customer, providing my own labor and paying
for all the process materials myself.
Newer electronics don't seam to pay so very well unfortunately and I catalogued
some of the results on my web site. The newest of the new has gotten really
poor. It would pay at least for medium age equipment as long as you get your
chemicals really cheep and like to do this anywise so that you don't count so
much for your time.
Dale A Trynor
> Has anyone any experience with doing this? I have countless boxes of
> computer boards in my basement and garage that my wife wants me to "do
> somethign with". I figured that I'd refine the gold from them in leu
> of throwing them into a dumpster.
> Now I'm hooked on this concept, I know it can be done and the basics
> of doing this. BUT, what parts have the gold in them? Do all IC's
> have gold content? how about CPU's?
Dale Trynor wrote:
One usually doesn't get much from chips and the exceptions I have found
involves those ceramic chips where you see a small square piece of gold
colored metal soldered on. I don't know why they would use plating gold
here but I got about .75 cents worth of gold from a few samples. I thing
they may be nickel metal, noting the reactivity and dissolved color of the
base metal but never bothered to investigate. I wanted to post asking
about beryllium oxide heat sinks as it might be used in some chips due to
its thermal conductivity being somewhere I seam to remember being near
aluminum metal. Its not cheep and should be sellable if you knew where.
Also note that tantalum caps are particularly valuable as well as common
and I have seen adds where they are willing to buy at about 8.00 per
pound. They are rather heavy as well.
> I must have 1000 or so 486 CPU's
> and about the same old Pentuim chips that I was going to give to my
> cousin for an art project.
Wish I had a selection of old pentium chips about now as I have been
trying to put some cheaper computers together for some rather poor friends
that only need internet access as we are still on the slower twisted pares
anywise where faster computers might not really help much. Knowing of just
one example suggests lots of others with the some needs so ebay would be a
good idea. Try finding out if the old Nuts and Volts magazine is still
around as they routinely have adds for selling used electronics etc. I
have also seen surplus companies willing to buy such scrap as they may be
reselling the parts. I can look up a Canadian company that I have book
marked someplace but where you are it may not be of much use. Try
www.recycle.net for some of them. I let my subscription run out and being
in Canada makes it became more expensive and difficult to subscribe and my
budget is very price sensitive. Guess they wanted to sell more Canadian
magazines by making it more difficult to get Americas ones, so now I just
don't buy any anymore. Pity as it seams that Canada wants to keep its
people stooppeedd or french speaking unless you have the money to buy your
way out. In regards to the cost of educational magazines, maybe they want
smarter richer people but dumber poorer ones.
> Nothiong short of diamond tipped tools
> will drill into these CPU's so what do I do, grind them up the best I
> can and pull out the little wires and pins? Is there much gold within
> the CPU's themselves?
> I know the board contacts or "fingers" are plated with Gold, but
> what about the PCB traces?
Connectors is about the only thing you will do well on. My own experience
is that it doesn't pay to hack saw them off and I have found the best way
at least for me is to remove them was by using an old planner blade and
lightly using a hammer to cut the ends off the boards. I suppose a
lawnmower blade could be made to work but they are probably to awkward.
> How do I deal with the PCB itself, it's
> epoxy/fiberglass, do I just dump the whole thing into a container of
> Aqua Regia and go from there?
I tend to prefer to first dissolve everything away from the gold with
nitric acid first, however any remaining tin contained in any solder will
form a white sludge that is even bad on filters. Dissolving the whole
thing in aqua regia also dissolves this tin and keeps it in solution but
you also end up with a huge amount of liquid with only a little gold in it
to deal with. I use ferrous sulfate solution that I make myself by
dissolving old scrap iron in old car battery or sulfuric acid solution and
then filtering the whole thing. Works great but you will need to use lots
of it and keep in mind that while the gold is instantly reduced its still
so fine that it sometimes takes all day to settle out. If the aqua regia
mix was not sufficiently diluted before hand it will also tend to
redisolve the gold. I usually get by with diluting the aqua regia mix to
something like about 1//4 and then double the solution with ferrous
sulfate solution but I am only guessing right now. Usually its not that
hard to tell if all of the gold had precipitated and if it redisolves. I
do usually use less of the ferrous sulfate initially and instead usually
save the solution for one more test with a little extra ferrous sulfate in
case any re dissolved. Might be a lazy way of recoveing the gold but it
works for me and its cheep anywise.
You can make your own nitric acid and in a pinch use ammonium nitrate
fertilizer solution with sulfuric acid added, but because you only get a
little nitric acid in solution this way it tends to be very slow. Still I
have used this method when my supplies of nitric acid were becoming
scarce.
I ordered some ammonium nitrate fertilizer this last summer for this
reason and have this residual feeling she may have suspected me as a
terrorist suspect. Asked me some questions with pencil and paper at hand
on why I wanted it and it hasn't arrived yet.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have Ammon's book on order
> so I think I'm on the right track at least :-)
>
> thanks all! any web sites with this info on them?
>
> Exibar
Its of particular interest here that Palladium was not long ago up to
about 1000.00 an ounce and that one of its main uses is in electronics and
something to do with capacitors. This has got to be a lot of the metal
because its use in automotive catalyst were also very large as well and
for it to be equal and or more in electronics means that old electronics
must be rather rich in it. Hoping someone here will be up to date and more
informed on this than me, so I am hoping to see some replies on this.
I have done quite a bit of this and you might find something usfull on my
site however its in a total mess and will requre me to do some telephone
calls to get it streaigtend out so I can get it working properly again.
Terry Wilder
Some have tried unsuccessfully recycling I believe the old ball contacts on
some electronic devices when it was near $700
Bruce Lane
exi...@thelair.com says...
> Has anyone any experience with doing this? I have countless boxes of
> computer boards in my basement and garage that my wife wants me to "do
> somethign with". I figured that I'd refine the gold from them in leu
> of throwing them into a dumpster.
Before you waste all those potentially useful parts, I would
suggest trying the electronic-dedicated swap meet route to get rid of
them. It will likely be much more economical, and environmentally
friendly, than trying to extract what little gold is in there, and you
could end up making someone's day by providing just the part they've been
searching for.
Poke around in your area to find out about computer swap meets, and
how to sell at such. Computer clubs often have info on these. Also, check
the ARRL's web site (http://www.arrl.org) for listings of ham
radio/electronic-related swap meets or hamfests in your area. There are
still a goodly number of tinkerers Out There, myself included, that do
sometimes need older parts.
Keep this in mind as well: As PC's get less tinker-friendly,
especially in light of RIAA/MPAA's mindless and paranoid grab for control
over the hardware (as in runaway DRM), the demand for older computer
hardware that was built before such things were even imagined is going to
increase. It may take a while, but you could be sitting on quite the
treasure trove.
Good luck.
--
Bruce Lane, Owner and Head Hardware Heavy,
Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com
KC7GR -- kyrrin (a/t) bluefeathertech dot-com (Reassemble to use)
"I'll get a life when someone demonstrates to me it would be superior to
what I have now..." (Taki Kogoma)
Steven Swift
>>
>> 12 troy ounces? That must have been a hell of a large garbage can. Or else,
>> your scrap came from people who did not know how to plate gold.
>>
>> Bill
Standard 50 gallon, but most of the dross was gone. I cut connectors,
crushed plastic ICs and got rid of bulk stuff. Most of the gold came from
old boards that had 100-500uinches of gold used as resist. I sheared the
boards into about 3x3 squares. A lot of work. I didn't make any money
if you count the hours and it took a few years to fill the garbage
can. So there was a lot of "high-grading" before processing.
Steve
Michael A. Terrell
************** WARNING *******************
If ceramics containing beryllium oxide are crushed, the dust can cause
severe lung damage, or death.
25 years ago I worked at Cincinnati Electronics, and a test tech on
the GRC-106 line found a damaged 4CX250 tube in a radio and was playing
with it. Another tech saw him, realized the part was damaged and ran
over to wrap it in a plastic bag. The guy was in the hospital over a
week, on oxygen, and suffered lung damage. The doctor informed him that
if his friend hadn't taken the broken ceramic transmitting tube away and
had him wash his hands and face right away, he would have died.
************** WARNING/ *******************
I worked for a company in Altemonte Springs Florida that recycled
mainframes, terminals, and did certified destruction on tons of circuit
boards every month. They had a contract with a refinery, and we shipped
Gaylord boxes full of plated circuit boards fingers, gold plated boards,
and some boards cover in gold plated parts. You had to remove the
aluminum and iron from the board, but they burnt them, and chemically
separated the metals from the soot. He told me that he got a tractor
trailer load of cables to scrap and had 55 gallon drums full of large
connectors with hundreds of heavy gold plated pins. He told me he used
a 55 gallon drum with some holes drilled in it, and filled it about half
way with plastic connectors, dropped in a piece of dry ice, then bolted
the lid on. then they dropped it on its side and rolled it back and
forth across the floor. The plastic was brittle from the cold, and
cracked and fell away. Then they would stand it up and scoop out the
mix, then pick out the pins from the plastic.
Mike Blanchard
I do have the second edition of Ammon's book coming in this week, it
comes highly recommended and wasn't very easy to find!
thanks!
Exibar
nova...@eskimo.com (Steven Swift) wrote in message news:<b3b67q$3jk$1...@eskinews.eskimo.com>...
Mike Blanchard
with a couple dozen 4 inch steel balls in there will do the trick...
Anyone have a cement mixer and/ or a couple dozen 4 inch steel balls
for sale? :-)
Mike B
tdel...@glsn14.ews.uiuc.edu (Tim Dellinger) wrote in message news:<I8b6a.2041$o7.2...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>...
Mike Blanchard
this is exactly the info that I was looking for. You've told me
what to try and what to toss in the can, basically. Exactly what I
was looking for.
Thanks again Don!
Don Bruder <dak...@sonic.net> wrote in message news:<3676a.68024$Ik.29...@typhoon.sonic.net>...
David Lloyd-Jones
>That's exactly what I was thinking, perhaps a cement mixer type thing
>with a couple dozen 4 inch steel balls in there will do the trick...
>
A Wheelabrator ball mill is what you're looking for. A weeee bit larger
than your average cement mixer, and rather more than a couple dozen
balls, though.
The reason walnuts and maple walnut ice-cream are cheap enough to eat is
that even in this age of advanced materials, these beasts are major
consumers of walnut shells for polishing castings. But depending on the
size of shot you charge them with, they can polish, grind, or smash
pretty much whatever you want polished, ground, or smashed.
Talk about miracles in materials science: I used these machines when I
was manufacturing auto-parts (brake rotors) to clean 10~13 pound
castings with bb-sized steel shot. The thing that astonished me, and
astonishes me to this day, is that the machines could work for years on
end without grinding themselves to a fine powder!
-dlj.
John Fields
wrote:
---
Kind of like the container which holds the universal solvent?^)
--
John Fields
Sir Charles W. Shults III
solvent, in a nice styrofoam insulating box.
Cheers!
Chip Shults
My robotics, space and CGI web page - http://home.cfl.rr.com/aichip
gary drummond
> > I worked for a company in Altemonte Springs Florida that recycled
> mainframes, terminals, and did certified destruction on tons of circuit
> boards every month. They had a contract with a refinery, and we shipped
> Gaylord boxes full of plated circuit boards fingers, gold plated boards,
> and some boards cover in gold plated parts.
>
> Michael A. Terrell
> Central Florida
Got a name for them? I have three Westinghouse "Production Breadboards"
11.25 x 7.5 with mills of gold plating (I can peel some with a knife,
and still leave some on the board!). Ground plane on one side, voltage
on the other covering everything but the pins for 100 chips. The pins
are like the ones in sockets, but without any plastic. Very thick metal
on the chip side, and similar to a wire wrap pin 1/2" long on the wire
side, except it's wider in one dimension for sliding crimps and wire
on the pins. The pins are also heavy gold plated. It was designed for
100MHZ use I believe...
They were from an analog satellite alignment test set in the mid 60's.
Gary
Steven Swift
>Wow 12 Toy ounces! that's more than I'd ever dream of recovering!
> I do have the second edition of Ammon's book coming in this week, it
>comes highly recommended and wasn't very easy to find!
> thanks!
> Exibar
I actually got the book after I did the refining. I used old "assaying"
books from the 1890s for the techniques I used. This book would have made
it easier.
You can certainly get enough gold to make a nice ring.
Steve
Mike H
--
--
Mike
All my outgoing messages are scanned with Norton Antivirus.
No of SETI units returned: 1088
Processing time: 2 years, 96 days, 12 hours.
(Total hours: 19836)
www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
"Mike Blanchard" <exi...@thelair.com> wrote in message
news:cc0872df.03022...@posting.google.com...
> Has anyone any experience with doing this? I have countless boxes of
> computer boards in my basement and garage that my wife wants me to "do
> somethign with". I figured that I'd refine the gold from them in leu
> of throwing them into a dumpster.
> Now I'm hooked on this concept, I know it can be done and the basics
> of doing this. BUT, what parts have the gold in them? Do all IC's
> have gold content? how about CPU's? I must have 1000 or so 486 CPU's
> and about the same old Pentuim chips that I was going to give to my
> cousin for an art project. Nothiong short of diamond tipped tools
> will drill into these CPU's so what do I do, grind them up the best I
> can and pull out the little wires and pins? Is there much gold within
> the CPU's themselves?
> I know the board contacts or "fingers" are plated with Gold, but
> what about the PCB traces? How do I deal with the PCB itself, it's
> epoxy/fiberglass, do I just dump the whole thing into a container of
> Aqua Regia and go from there?
>
alan
write a book "How to make gold from old pcs". If it sells, I'll be the only
one who gets rich.
alan
Dale A Trynor
Dale Trynor wrote:
My experience is whenever someone gets around to writing one of these books its
usually too late.
PC don't have much gold but the earlier mainframes etc. did. I even got one old
telephone relay of the type that uses an electric motor that oddly had solid
gold contacts and I don't mean plated. Later ones that look the same were only
with a thick layer so age is everything. Asked one of the guys that worked for
the telephone company they came from about them and he told me they through
thousands of them away and they averaged about 10.00 each in gold.
Might be a dollars worth of gold in an old 8088 maybe but newer computers you'd
be lucky to get .50 cents worth. The really early printed circuit boards before
this period easily had about a dollars worth of gold in about 5 or so inches of
its gold plated fingers. You know those gold plated edge connectors that laid
flat on the board itself. Just about all electronics were similar as long as
its old.
With that sort of stuff I could easily recover ounces per day with a minimal
cost in acid. I did buy it in commercial amounts that gave me a reasonably
cheap price much better than the lab suppliers and if you know about how they
will sell portland cement for dollars per pound it doesn't take a genius to
realize they are not good for process materials.
I had a similar experience when I was the first one in my area to buy those old
catalytic converters that came off of cars. every muffler shop was throwing
about 30 or so of these away per month and they were worth 10.00 and even reach
19.00 at one period when platinum was at a max. It was so bad that no one in NB
new about saving them and that's unbelievable. I was shipping transport trucks
filled with their contents. Never made so much money by doing almost nothing
but telling my trucker where to go. After everyone was buying them then I
started seeing the booklets come out about making money in them. After the
market was flooded with buyers.
Those days are over.
David Lloyd-Jones
>My experience is whenever someone gets around to writing one of these books its
>usually too late.
>
I think it would be cynical to say this as a general rule, but in this
case I think it's true. I ws once at either MIT or George Washington
back around 1970 when I saw somebody carting away a whole lot of Big
Grey Boxes, and so I asked around. Turned out there were little
individual bits of interest, but the main idea was throw the whole
thing, a quarter-ton at a time, into the shredder, and dissolve out the
gold.
Shee-yit, the paint alone on all the cabinets must have outweighed
everything but the iron cores in the power supplies.
<Dale's usual excellent stuff snipped>
>Those days are over.
>
>
>
>
Exactly.
Creating wealth is very uch a matter of doing more with less, except
when you're doing the same thing kindlier and with more thought and
attention.
Why would anybody putting money *into* a machine put in stuff that
somebody else is going to get gratuitous profit out of, without paying
it back? (A genuine economic analysis is more complicated than this:
the resale value as scrap adds to the initial value for both the initial
buyer and the initial seller, yadda, yadda, and I won't bore you with
tax and depreciation implications.) Short story: don't waste stuff on
the input side if you don't gotta.
What has struck me most about this discussion is that people have had a
lot of fun out of separating this stuff out -- in the early days when
they made money, and in the later days when they just learned a lot of
chemistry and a little bit of economics.
Now, what to do for an encore? Wot Abaht T'inviroment?
For chemists in the next couple of generations, it seems to me, figuring
out how much of this environmental stuff is real, and how much of it is
bullshit, is largely a scientific, as opposed to a testosterone-laden
political, question.
Uncle Al bulls his was around screeching his ignorant political dogmas,
and having served at the heart of the beast, as a senior member of US
Congressional staff, among other things, I sympathise with his feelings,
if not with his uh, policy prescriptions. Sure is a lotta ugly nonsense
out there.
On the other hand it is not a matter of smart tekkies versus stoopid
"fries with that?" humanists. To be personal for a second, I've been
through the mills that Al suggested, his 4-9's Society, so I know now
that my IQ is as high as his or higher. Working on policy is not just
for stupid folks -- In fact it's not for stupid folks at all.
'Bout time to round it up, sio here are some propositions:
Public service is an honorable calling;
Politics is everybody's business; sometimes this means you gotta be
a politician.
Thinking broadly is as necessary as thinking narrowly.
Environmentalism is good, as long as you do it competently; "free
enterprise" is bad whenever you do it immorally.
Best to all -- and run those glass tips through the bunsen burner, OK?*
-dlj.
* I'm 416-516-9330. First lab to do it gets a freebie -- but I guess my
youngest daughter's trust fund could use the patent.
-d.
*
Dave
present? I have been looking for the answer to this question for a couple
years now, and keep coming back to the "purple of cassius" solution. But
what if you are wanting to just determine the presence of (maybe traces of)
gold? Is there any way to effect a color change in it while it lies in
place? I am hoping someone knows the answer, and is kind enough to post...
Many thanks.
Repeating Decimal
21F5472E637633BD.9FB6FF49...@lp.airnews.net, Dave at
dbe...@genie.idt.net wrote on 2/27/03 3:45 PM:
> On the subject of recovering gold, how do you tell **IF** there is gold
> present? I have been looking for the answer to this question for a couple
> years now, and keep coming back to the "purple of cassius" solution. But
> what if you are wanting to just determine the presence of (maybe traces of)
> gold? Is there any way to effect a color change in it while it lies in
> place? I am hoping someone knows the answer, and is kind enough to post...
Forget the color change. Use x-ray fluorescence.
Bill
SNUMBER6
>Forget the color change. Use x-ray fluorescence.
I know a lot of scrap dealers in the US ... who have zero dollars invested in
any equipment ... but have XRF units for alloy sorting ...
Be seeing you
In the Village
Number 6