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kjavanb123

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 1, 2009
Messages
1,743
Location
USA
All,

As I am waiting to recieve result from incinerating 2998 lbs (1360 kg) shredded circuit boards, I decided to disassemble 573 lbs (260 kg) telecommunication boards. This time I am going to track every single boards I disassemble into low grade ICs ( 2-sided legs), medium grade ICs (squared, 4-sided legs), and cermaic CPUs (gold plated), pins, copper, aluminum, and iron and put everything in an excel file, along with photos of each type and quantity of each precious metal containing items.

Telecomm board 1;
image.jpg

Telecomm board 2;
image.jpg

Telecomm board 3;
image.jpg

Here are what harvested so far;

CPUs;
image.jpg

Pins;
image.jpg

I will keep you posted.

Regards
Kj
 
very dirty boards, read this.



Examples of transmissible bird diseases associated with pigeons, geese, starling and house sparrows:

-- Histoplasmosis is a respiratory disease that may be fatal. It results from a fungus growing in dried bird droppings.

-- Candidiasis is a yeast or fungus infection spread by pigeons. The disease affects the skin, the mouth, the respiratory system, the intestines and the urogenital tract, especially the vagina. It is a growing problem for women, causing itching, pain and discharge.

-- Cryptococcosis is caused by yeast found in the intestinal tract of pigeons and starlings. The illness often begins as a pulmonary disease and may later affect the central nervous system. Since attics, cupolas, ledges, schools, offices, warehouses, mills, barns, park buildings, signs, etc. are typical roosting and nesting sites, the fungus is apt to found in these areas.

-- St. Louis Encephalitis, an inflammation of the nervous system, usually causes drowsiness, headache and fever. It may even result in paralysis, coma or death. St. Louis encephalitis occurs in all age groups, but is especially fatal to persons over age 60. The disease is spread by mosquitoes which have fed on infected house sparrow, pigeons and house finches carrying the Group B virus responsible for St. Louis encephalitis.

-- Salmonellosis often occurs as "food poisoning" and can be traced to pigeons, starlings and sparrows. The disease bacteria are found in bird droppings; dust from droppings can be sucked through ventilators and air conditioners, contaminating food and cooking surfaces in restaurants, homes and food processing plants.

-- E.coli. Cattle carry E. coli 0157:H7. When birds peck on cow manure, the E. coli go right through the birds and the bird droppings can land on or in a food or water supply.

Besides being direct carriers of disease, nuisance birds are frequently associated with over 50 kinds of ectoparasites, which can work their way throughout structures to infest and bite humans. About two-thirds of these pests may be detrimental to the general health and well-being of humans and domestic animals. The rest are considered nuisance or incidental pests. A few examples of ectoparasites include:

-- Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) may consume up to five times their own weight in blood drawn from hosts which include humans and some domestic animals. In any extreme condition, victims may become weak and anemic. Pigeons, starlings and house sparrows are known to carry bed bugs.

-- Chicken mites (Dermanyssus gallinae) are known carriers of encephalitis and may also cause fowl mite dermatitis and acariasis. While they subsist on blood drawn from a variety of birds, they may also attack humans. They have been found on pigeons, starlings and house sparrows.

-- Yellow mealworms (Tenebrio molitor), perhaps the most common beetle parasites of people in the United States, live in pigeon nests. It is found in grain or grain products, often winding up in breakfast cereals, and may cause intestinal canthariasis and hymenolespiasis.

-- West Nile Virus while West Nile is technically not transmitted to humans from birds, humans can get infected by the bite of a mosquito who has bitten an infected bird. The obvious lesson is that the fewer birds there are in any given area, the better. This translates into a smaller chance of an infected bird in that area, a smaller chance of a mosquito biting an infected bird and then biting a human.
 
Disassembly of telecomm boards finished in 5 working days, 7 hrs a day with 2 labors, total weight was 260 kg (573lbs), recycled 600 grams (1.37lbs) gold cap CPUs, 16 lbs of gold plated pins including the plastic casings, some 2 lbs of tantalium caps and 22 lbs of low yield ICs, and 7.2 lbs of medium yield ICs. Will be processing them separately using different procedure and will post results, if this is economical then due to cheap labor costs here might be a method of recovery.


Here are some photos from couple days ago,
image.jpg

Pins and fully plated connectors
image.jpg

ICs
image.jpg

CPUs
image.jpg



Thanks and regards
Kj
 
Your tantalum capacitors contains a lot of aluminum electrolytes, polyester film capacitors, varistors and resistor networks.

Göran
 
Reality check Kevin

7 days labour for 2 people to get those boards depopulated? That's a waste of money. You've just blown the extra money you would have gained from separating the components to that level.

Take out the ceramic procs as you just did, and trade the boards to a refinery. You'll already get a better return than standard PC or server boards so you're making a load of work for no real gain. Unless of course you need to keep people employed and busy?

It's really not worth it. I do this for a living please believe me.
 
Spaceship,

The wage locally is roughly $12 per day, so total of $120 labour costs to depopluate these boards. I am still awaiting to receive my incinerated boards to follow GSP methods of producing refiner bars and pulp, as this was a testing to check out this route.
My objective is to be refiner, collect different boards and refine myself locally or send them out to copper smelter.

Goran,
The workers just disassembled whatever they thought could be Ta caps based on color, I have to sort it out yet.

Best regards,
Kj
 
All,

Today I got the chance to strip gold from small percentage of pins scrapped from the telecomm boards using sodium cyanide.

Here are the photos,

Pins that were stripped of gold total weight 650 grams (1.43lbs)
image.jpg

During cyanide leaching, it took almost a minute
image.jpg

After gold was removed, all pins were inside a 35% hydrogen peroxide to clean from any cyanide
image.jpg

Checked the pH is 12 dropped gold with zinc until powder becomes gray and foams are white, after 3 hot water rinses I add water, then under fume hood, drop nitric in 25 ml and wait until no more reaction here is what the brown powder looked like after zinc removal
image.jpg

Then I added like 10 ml or so nitric to the hot above solution, and it turned to this very concentrate auric solution,
image.jpg


Two more pictures in my next post since there is only 5 to pictures per post.

Regards
Kj
 
Continued from my previous post,

Auric solution diluted for SMB addition
image.jpg

Four spoon SMB addition to this solution
image.jpg

After half an hour solution turned clear with lovely brown powder settled at the bottom, rinsed it with hot water 3 times, then added ammonia, boilded, rinsed, then added hydrochloric acid and boiled, rinsed and let dry to b like the following
image.jpg

And the refined auric chloride powder ready to be added to stock to be combined with other parts gold and melted.
image.jpg

I like to thank GSP, and juan manuel for posting great stuff about using cyanide to strip gold from platd items.

Thanks
Kevin
 
Kevin:

GOOD JOB!!!!!...Congratulations!!!!!!.Have you melted that nice powder?.How many grams did you get?.

All members here in the Forum know that I was really scared about using cyanide process...until the day that Mr.Chris Owen,Great Master of our Brotherhood and worldwide known as GSP,took me under his wise guidance.So I put away fear and worked hard and I learned many many things.I keep working and studying on cyanide process.I am greatly indebted to GSP.

I want to say thanks to Harold_V,(The Genius of the Forum)who also taught me many things about cyanide process and thanks to 4 Metals who gave me many tricks about cyanide too.

Kindest regards.

Manuel
 
Juan,

I couldnt agree more, those members are truly the gems in this forum learned so many things about using cyanide which is an amazing thing in the refining.

I have not weighed the powder will have some updates tommorow along with AR leaching 3 lbs of CPUs recovered from some of these telecomm boards.

Thanks
Kj
 
Thanks guys, the weight of dried and purfied gold powder is 2.4 grams that is from 1.4 lbs pins which picture is here.

The refined gold chlordie powder
image.jpg

Regards
Kevin
 
Mate well done.

By the way, it's elemental gold powder not gold chloride powder.
 
Today I re-refined the gold powder precipatee from the 3 lbs of ceramic CPUs removed from lot of telecomm boards and its weight in the picture is 9.4 grams, there is another guessing 3 grams also which it is drying now.
So 3lbs of CPUs shown in this post yielded almost 12.4 grams of purified gold powder.

image.jpg

Regards
Kj
 
Good job, Kevin. You're becoming an excellent refiner. I'll try to give you a PM later in the week.

I would have to disagree with Goran on the capacitors. If the colors are right in the photo, those electrolytic capacitors on top look like tantalum ones to me. The Ta ones are grey colored and the Al ones are much more silvery. When you heft one of them, the Ta ones feel quite heavy and the Al ones feel very light. Hard to confuse them. They were quite popular in the early to mid 80's. Some had a Ta slug and some had a Ta mesh. At about the same time, there were a lot of silver/tantalum electrolytics that looked almost the same except they were much whiter and they had a green or red plastic plug on one end. The green ones ran about 25% Ag and the red ones 40%. They had a clear plastic coating on them. The can was Ag and the Ta was inside.

In the late 80's, early 90's, I owned a refinery. I was doing some jet engine scrap, film, and karat gold, but I was mainly doing electronics and the stuff that I got in was from the early to mid 80's. I saw about everything possible from that era. Probably the best lick I hit was when I scrapped out a 50's TV studio. The worst was all the electronics from a Navy submarine. Everything was yellow but the gold was quite thin. Very disappointing.

In general, electronics scrap from the 80's was very good, but 70's escrap was the best ever.
 
Chris,

Thanks for your comment, I am indeed indebted to you and many others whose posts and excellent refining information has been my mentors in this processes.
I have posted a photo of my incinerated boards and designing a ball mill for it to mill to mesh 10. Your comments are greatly appeiciated.
Ta caps, your description is exact sir.

Best regards
Kevin
 
necromancer said:
kjavanb123 said:
3lbs of CPUs shown in this post yielded almost 12.4 grams of purified gold powder.


Regards
Kj

has anyone else had results like this >> :?:

I've had some very good results with these chips but I've not had 12g from 3lbs. I've only had those results from DEC chips
 
Actually make that weight to 13.5 grams of pure gold powder as I dried and weighed the last part of brown powder from the same CPUs batch. So far that batch has been the highest yield.

Regards
Kevin
 
kjavanb123 said:
Actually make that weight to 13.5 grams of pure gold powder as I dried and weighed the last part of brown powder from the same CPUs batch. So far that batch has been the highest yield.

Regards
Kevin


amazing !!
 
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