Extreme amount of Gold plating?!

Hello all, i am brand new to the forum. I have ran across some telecom Circuit boards that are 16" X 11" and the back side is 100% coated in what appears to be gold.

well long story short, i am researching before i begin this journey. Safety is always first. i have read quite a few posts here that are educational, and needless to say, youtube videos that are so so.. being brand new to the chemistry required to process this material, its hard to tell the BS from the real advice.

I have access to about 110 of these boards. they do have connectors, Pins, and certain boards have a large piece of Gold coated bands. it appears as though I'm sitting on ALOT of money here, so i want to be sure that i am doing this correctly. I do not have access to Nitric acid, so thats out of the question I'm guessing. so far, i have began stripping the boards of all components. i have taken a batch, which is just 1 board, stripped of components, weighing 200g, and am giving it a bath in straight Hydrochloric acid to remove Tin. i understand its trash in, trash out..

Anyhow, i am coming here to make sure that i am going about things correctly. i am open to any and all input.
Thanks in Advance!!

I know a picture is worth a thousand words.. so here is a sample. anyone think this would be worth refining?

With gold, it always looks like more, gold fever there is always gold at the end of the rainbow, my problem when I get there that rainbow seems to have moved on me.

Some thing we need to learn is patience, the gold is there, it may not be as much as it looks like, and we need to come back to reality, we will have to put in a lot of work to learn to get that gold, before attempting.

Why are you worried about nitric acid? that is not a problem, there is no need for acids now if you had them you would have already dissolved your gold and circuit boards into a giant toxic mess, possibly poisoning yourself with the fumes, Not knowing how to get your gold back, and not knowing how to safely dispose of the toxic waste polluting the water supply of all your neighbors.

You do not need nitric or any acids at this point, there is no need to buy a bunch of labware, or chemicals.
We can begin with second-hand kitchen utensils and make many of the chemicals like nitric acid, or ferrous sulfate...
But let us not put the cart in front of the horse, we first need to learn to harness the team before we hook them up to the wagon and take the wagon through those dangerous mountain passes.

First, we need to do a little home work.
let's get an understanding of safety precautions, and dealing with waste, check out the safety section.
learn where the gold is, how to collect, prepare, and separate the materials for processing. as simple as this seems this can mean success or failure of our project, some metals create huge problems( like tin), even the metals that do not create problems with recovery can pose a problem (copper, for example, can displace your gold), so we need to learn to separate and get at least a very basic understanding of the chemical actions of how metals react in solutions...

My suggestion is to collect some computer memory cards, even if you have to buy then as education tools, along with keeping studying and collecting more scrap in order to get at least a little gold, you may not get as rich off what you have now as you think.

After studying the safety aspects, studying how to separate and prepare the scrap, and collecting more scrap we need to begin study of a simple process, like the (CuCl2) copper chloride etching, wrongly called the acid peroxide process on the forum, with this we can recover the gold, and can go on to study how to dissolve the gold without the king of (dangerous acids) aqua regia or nitric acid, using simple chemicals many people already have in their house or garage...

Well there we go again putting the horse in front of that cart, we have to really watch that gold fever and not get impatient to get that gold we see shining.

Do not worry about getting that thar gold, it will be there when you are ready, but if you do not know how to harness your horse and tie him to the back of yer cart you are going to have a rough trip through them thar Alps.

Begin with safety and study of dealing with waste, this trip through the Alps will take a little time to learn in the beginning (education is where the real gold is not that shiny glitter of that little bit of gold you see on that circuit board in your hand. We will learn to harness this team in no time, then we can take a nice ride through those dangerous mountains with the skill needed to get us where we wish to go.

Or you could always sell them on Ebay. Or to someone already set-up to recover the gold safely.

Thank you for the reply! I have done some homework, maybe not enough. I am not trying to put the cart before the horse here, and I certainly am going about it safely. What I am doing so far is all outside, with a full chemical suit, heavy duty chemical gloves, goggles, and a respirator. I have the lab ware, and I'm trying to get a yield test completed at this point. I have 110 of these exact radios.

Right now I'm just learning as I go, and by as I go, I mean a yield test. Firstly. These boards are not easy to get to and require a lot of work to get to. I'm just wondering if it will be worth all the effort with this many boards.

I don't know where to start with the calculation of yeild. I understand they are very thin, but from what I gather from other places and people experience. The yield should be high, considering the volume of boards and the surface area alone.

Can anyone help with the calculation?

And what kind of dollar amount would these go for on eBay?

The visible gold plating on those boards are ENIG, a very thin gold plating, so it looks like much more than it really is. They are however still very good quality boards to process if you get them cheap enough.

Try the forum search, try gold plating with GSP as an author, GSP is a math wizard, He has many posts on calculating the amount of gold, thickness, value... You may find answers to the question there.

The math normally just goes over my head, so I am no help.

The gold plating on the circuit traces are thin, very thin, companies try to save every penny they can to make profits, they will not use precious metals where they are not needed, they will use as little as they can get by with.
There is no reason to have a thick coating of gold on the copper traces of the circuit board, unlike memory fingers or gold plated copper connectors where the physical wear of plugging in und unplugging the connection would cause friction and wear, where the protective coating of gold could be fairly easily rubbed off by mechanical action and the copper or base metal of the pin would be exposed to oxidation and a bad connection...

The boards do yield well particularly the first board. Butcher these are boards from Ericsson or Nortel microwave Base stations 3G/4G.

I refine a lot of tonnes of these.

The plating is not necessarily as thin as you would think because the boards sell for many thousands of dollars each, and are designed for extremely low rates of failure. A few bucks of extra gold really isn't a concern in this application.

I bet that there is several times more gold in those three BGA IC than what you see as a plating on that particular board. Throw in other IC to process and sell depopulated boards on ebay. While hundred of them do look like big amount at the end of the day it is too little to excite some refinery and too much to process in buckets.

anachronism said:

The boards do yield well particularly the first board. Butcher these are boards from Ericsson or Nortel microwave Base stations 3G/4G.

I refine a lot of tonnes of these.

The plating is not necessarily as thin as you would think because the boards sell for many thousands of dollars each, and are designed for extremely low rates of failure. A few bucks of extra gold really isn't a concern in this application.

Click to expand...

Sweet...i just bought a load of these that I had to take apart. Hoping for more. Thanks for the info!

Also got the amplifiers...what a pain to take apart. Everything is rivetted to the aluminum heat sink.

That'll be the silver plated aluminium heatsink then?

I'd put those on E-Bay so fast your head would spin. Want to make twice what the gold's worth without refining anything, there's your answer!

anachronism said:

That'll be the silver plated aluminium heatsink then?

Click to expand...

No actually....I'm used to seeing it in the splitter boxes, but none in these.

Not that I do anything with the silver aluminum anyway. I didn't figure it to be worth my time. Am I wrong?


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snoman70 said:

anachronism said:

That'll be the silver plated aluminium heatsink then?

Click to expand...

No actually....I'm used to seeing it in the splitter boxes, but none in these.

Not that I do anything with the silver aluminum anyway. I didn't figure it to be worth my time. Am I wrong?


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Click to expand...

Great first post! :lol:

Done a lot of reading the last six years and finally decided to participate? :mrgreen:

Göran

g_axelsson said:

snoman70 said:

anachronism said:

That'll be the silver plated aluminium heatsink then?

Click to expand...

No actually....I'm used to seeing it in the splitter boxes, but none in these.

Not that I do anything with the silver aluminum anyway. I didn't figure it to be worth my time. Am I wrong?


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Click to expand...

Great first post! :lol:

Done a lot of reading the last six years and finally decided to participate? :mrgreen:

Göran

Click to expand...

lol...somethin like that.

I don't know how, but I guess I had two accounts. It's ok, I've got just as many if not more personalities.

snoman701 said:

lol...somethin like that.

I don't know how, but I guess I had two accounts. It's ok, I've got just as many if not more personalities.

Click to expand...

So Snoman, registered in 2013 isn't your account then? :wink:

... what happened to Snoman7?

Göran

g_axelsson said:

snoman701 said:

lol...somethin like that.

I don't know how, but I guess I had two accounts. It's ok, I've got just as many if not more personalities.

Click to expand...

So Snoman, registered in 2013 isn't your account then? :wink:

... what happened to Snoman7?

Göran

Click to expand...

Honestly, Snoman registered in 2013 very well could be me as well...not all my personalities talk to each other....so sometimes I have to use hearsay to figure things out!...I didn't even know I had the 70 account.

I would have skipped 7. It's eBay's fault. I tried registering many many years as Snowman, and they suggested I use snoman70, and it has just sort of stuck. Less usernames to remember.

I didn't even know the 70 account was mine. I was trying to log in to this account, and had the username messed up and the password wasn't working. So I just started working through old passwords and bam, it logged me in. Didn't even notice it was a second account until I didn't get alerts on tapatalk when someone posted something in reply.

Anachronism, do you happen to have a figure of yield per board or per 200g's I am doing this in my backyard, and refining via buckets. I have an unlimited supply of these. About 100 or so per week, as well as tons of additional telecom equipment. All 100% legal of course as they are all being thrown in the trash.

I'm brand new to the process and trying to determine what I'll get out of 100 of these


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He'll probably just want to buy them off you if they are worth shipping!


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snoman701 said:

anachronism said:

The boards do yield well particularly the first board. Butcher these are boards from Ericsson or Nortel microwave Base stations 3G/4G.

I refine a lot of tonnes of these.

The plating is not necessarily as thin as you would think because the boards sell for many thousands of dollars each, and are designed for extremely low rates of failure. A few bucks of extra gold really isn't a concern in this application.

Click to expand...

Sweet...i just bought a load of these that I had to take apart. Hoping for more. Thanks for the info!

Also got the amplifiers...what a pain to take apart. Everything is rivetted to the aluminum heat sink.

Click to expand...

These RRUs B12,S sell for 22,000 each... so yeah not a cost factor you wouldn't think


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