HP backplane yield & process?

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Mfe18

Member
Joined
Dec 7, 2018
Messages
10
Hello
I'm new to this and have come across these. Hi boards I have depoppulated them and. Have been peeling gold off as you can see in pics... What should I do? Has anyone processed these? 15442402200324483868823279231836.jpg15442397068536080404297634836474.jpg15442396136676447370889539196918.jpg
 
Don't take advice from anyone who just joined the forum and who needs help with simple things.

If you have no experience, backplanes are not the material you want to start your long journey with.
 
I agree with Dr.xyz, Being blind you would be better off taking advice from those which can see.

You are wasting your time, there is very little gold, peeling is just a waste of time.

My suggestion of what to do (study more) and stop wasting your time manually peeling solder mask and copper traces off of circuit boards.
 
butcher said:
I agree with Dr.xyz, Being blind you would be better off taking advice from those which can see.

You are wasting your time, there is very little gold, peeling is just a waste of time.

My suggestion of what to do (study more) and stop wasting your time manually peeling solder mask and copper traces off of circuit boards.

I've read so much.... :!: and it's seems like "everything" Is right by one person's opinion and the next person says it's completely wrong..... I don't want to mess things up. I understand the safety parts of it all but damn... I've read to much perhaps...
 
Mfe18,

I believe you think this should be simple to get gold from electronics or rocks, well it is not as simple as you now believe.

Recovery and refining is a large field of science and the arts, we are not a rocket scientist but just like the rocket scientist, we will not learn this overnight.
We as refiners have many obstacles to overcome that the rocket scientist does not have problems with, such as Gold Fever.

Most rocket scientists do not believe that they could have sent a rocket to the moon from watching a dozen youtube videos or reading a few hundred papers about the subject.

A rocket scientist cannot tell you in a few posts on some forum of how to get to Mars, and if they tried not all of this scientist will agree on the best option throughout the process, or even on the process, the type of rocket or how it is built or what is to be included...

Like the rocket scientist, we have to begin somewhere to learn this science and art, the trouble is with gold fever most refiners begin by trying to fly before they understand anything about the mechanics or the science of the whole field they wish to begin to learn, they will just strap the homemade rockets they learned about on Utube to the seat of their pants and try going for a ride to Saturn and then wonder what happened when it does not work and why their backside is so sore they cannot sit down anymore.
Then they come to the forum asking what went wrong, how do I fix it and get to Saturn tell me in a few Post on the science forum, where not all of the rocket scientist of the forum agree on the best method or course to help him understand.


Recovery and refining are similar to rocket science in that no one person will know everything about it, no one person can learn it all in their lifetime, the field is very broad and covers many aspects and details, the science can be simple to extremely complicated with many variables to be encountered...
 
I have finally started my first batch and it is looking very promising :G . :G Trial and error is the best way to learn. :idea: Thank you all for advice.... wrong and right.. God bless
 
Mfe18 said:
I have finally started my first batch and it is looking very promising :G . :G Trial and error is the best way to learn. :idea: Thank you all for advice.... wrong and right.. God bless

People have died like that....

Just don't hurt and kill yourself or anyone else...
 
I have read and heard the old adage that "a fool and his money are soon parted".
How so much more true regarding gold refining is this statement:

"A fool who thinks he can refine gold* and his health are soon parted." :(

* (and refuses to heed the advice of well seasoned refiners of gold)
 
Mfe18 said:
butcher said:
I agree with Dr.xyz, Being blind you would be better off taking advice from those which can see.

You are wasting your time, there is very little gold, peeling is just a waste of time.

My suggestion of what to do (study more) and stop wasting your time manually peeling solder mask and copper traces off of circuit boards.

I've read so much.... :!: and it's seems like "everything" Is right by one person's opinion and the next person says it's completely wrong..... I don't want to mess things up. I understand the safety parts of it all but damn... I've read to much perhaps...

Ok well, peeling is not always a waste of time. It certainly is not a waste of time when you know what to peel and what not. And, of course, if your source material is free (or very very litlle payed for) and if you have a lot of it. For intstance motherboards I take of all the bigger chips like BGA and flatpacks. Gold pins I don't bother, too much work for very little gold. The plating on your boards looks like ENIG or flash plating, the gold layer is like a few atoms thick, don't get fooled by seeing gold is big gold, it mostly is not. So where is most of the gold? It is inside the chips and on gold fingers, like on RAM. Visible gold on older boards like 70's an d 80's can be pretty thick and interesting. So study what to go after and what not.
One thing about safety, I see too many people dealing with escrap in a wrong way. I mean they take huge health risks by scrapping components or handling dust from incinerated chips. Take precautions and remember that dust is your worst enemy in scrapping computer parts. I always scrap in a self made dust free hood so I don't pollute my surrounding and my clothes/hair and so on.
 
I've bitten my lip so far on this thread however having refined those boards it's not a "little gold." HP sold those boards for over £30k each in their time. The equipment they came out of ran most of the banking/payroll software in the world in its hey day.

They didn't skimp for a a few bucks worth of gold per board.
 
Shark said:
charlie2 said:
AR, denox then so2 precipitate, then :G

cheers :D

:shock: I wish it were that easy!

could you tell us the difficulty in that ,please?

the chemical process itself is not a real big deal so we want to know the difficulty about that :wink:

cheers
 
charlie2,
Refining gold and the recovery of gold are two different processes.

Aqua regia is a good choice for refining gold but is a very poor choice for recovering gold.
 
charlie2, once I made the mistake of putting some circuit boards in a gold containing AR solution. Some of the gold did cement out onto the circuit board and probably also inside on any buried conductor.

Another reason you don't want to put circuit boards straight into AR is that the gold you try to precipitate from the huge amount of toxic soup will come down as a very fine black silt. Sometimes even as black ink and it can take a long time to settle.

The tin on the board can form metastannic acid and make it near impossible to filter.

If it was that easy then there wouldn't be a quarter of a million posts on this forum.

Göran
 
For a while I ran fingers in AP (hydrochloric acid and peroxide) I did this for quite a long time (several years). I got to where I was getting larger batches of fingers and was hoping for a quicker way to get them done, so I used AR. On one pound lots I lost about .01 to .4 gram average over the AP method. I tried it many times and I always came out just slightly less than the AP method. I know that isn't much of a loss, but when all I had was small batches I didn't want to loose any of it. Just for my satisfaction I wanted better accountability of my investments. There are ways that might be better, but I do not class them in the hobby level and have not tried them myself. Because of the way I use the gold from fingers now, I am back to the AP method and run it cold and slow. If I want it faster, I use the crock pot method. For me a loss that can be explained leaves room for improvement.
 
Shark if you dissolved all the base metals from the fingers in AR you won’t have lost any gold, it will be in filter papers or in your stockpot, also if dissolving directly in AR you need to make sure to rinse the fingers really well to remove any pregnant solution, it’s also likely that as the solution was dirty the gold will take a lot longer to settle maybe even days, as I said check your stockpot and filters you may have a pleasant surprise :shock: :D
 
I'm with Nick on this Shark - I don't get losses if the AR is pushed through to completion.

That given I modified the process somewhat- hope it helps. I pop the fingers in AP to remove the bulk of the copper and then chuck them in AR. They go a LOT faster.

Jon
 
For now the majority of the gold from fingers get used as is from the AP method. Once I have that settled, I may need to try it again. I am almost always open for some small testing, :D
 
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