CD drive boards yields

Hi
I processed 1.1 kg (2.4 lbs) CD drive boards were processed and recovered 0.3g gold and 0.05g silver.

Thanks
KJ

kjavanb123 said:

Hi
I processed 1.1 kg (2.4 lbs) CD drive boards were processed and recovered 0.3g gold and 0.05g silver.

Thanks
KJ

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing, I always love seeing yield data from you

but that being said, gold yield seems very high (its, what, like 3 KGs for a gram?), and silver very low - might be you have mixed them up?

any more information about the material - were those boards from PC/laptop CD-ROMs, old/new, perhaps any pictures?

how'd you do it? smelt all together or process pins/ICs separately ?

niks neims said:

kjavanb123 said:

Hi
I processed 1.1 kg (2.4 lbs) CD drive boards were processed and recovered 0.3g gold and 0.05g silver.

Thanks
KJ

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing, I always love seeing yield data from you

but that being said, gold yield seems very high (its, what, like 3 KGs for a gram?), and silver very low - might be you have mixed them up?

any more information about the material - were those boards from PC/laptop CD-ROMs, old/new, perhaps any pictures?

how'd you do it? smelt all together or process pins/ICs separately ?

Click to expand...

Hi

No this is correct got 0.3g gold and 0.05g of silver. I lost the pictures since I changed my phone, but there were 26 pieces of PC CD drive, due to their sizes.

I depopulated using hcl and then sort everything into ICs, gold plated, and SMDs

Then silver smelting was used to process each category. If I recall correctly got 0..28g from ICs, and 0.02g from pins etc.

Thanks
KJ

Like always, age matters. Older drives have way more and way bigger chips with more bond wires than newer ones, so yields vary accordingly.

Best e-scrap buyers in europe pay close to 10 eur/kg for drive boards.

Dr.xyz said:

Like always, age matters. Older drives have way more and way bigger chips with more bond wires than newer ones, so yields vary accordingly.

Best e-scrap buyers in europe pay close to 10 eur/kg for drive boards.

Click to expand...

but older boards are also 4x as heavy as newer ones. if not more dense, i can't remember, but know it's not worth taking the new ones apart...just sell them on to the shredder.

I recently dismantled about 150 laptop CD rom and those boards do look very nice. Heavily populated a lot of IC and ton of small capacitors. That actually made me think about that price for them should be different from let us say motherboards.
I plan to keep them separate from motherboards to see when I will have more if I can find buyer with interesting price. If not then I will just strip them and process or sell material from them. One thing I know is that I am not selling them for motherboard price.
What I already found is that buyers pay good money for HDD boards and when compared with CD Rom board visually there is not that much of a difference only that CD Rom boards are tiny tad thicker than HDD board.
I am talking about laptop material not desktop. Here too I would like to see different pricing as laptop boards be it HDD or CD Rom are thinner and lighter than desktop all the while more heavily populated. I know it is hard to break down material to every different piece for buyers but if you as a seller go to the length of really good separating of your material you should get paid a bit better even though volume is important too.
Someone who purchase tons of materials daily may not be inclined to debate price of 10 or even 100 kilo lot. But then if material look good it is all about money isn't it?

Clean (with the components still on of course) laptop boards go for 9 euro now. Old pc ones for 6. Thats without metal attachments. With they are at 4 and 3 a kilo. New pc boards are at much less.
https://www.hollandrecycling.com/elektronica-recycling/printed-circuit-boards
This site is in english and they also have different categories for RAM and CPU'S. Up to 155 euro a kilo for some cpu's.
https://www.hollandrecycling.com/elektronica-recycling/ic-processor
A great indication of gold and pm's per type of scrap imo.

Martijn.

A little info from my own numbers... To get 100 kilogram of laptop motherboards one need to dismantle approximately 440 laptops.

Just checked the place I normally sell to and HDD boards are running $14.50 lb. CD/DVD boards only $4.72 and laptop MOBO $5.00 lb.

https://cashforcomputerscrap.com/current-pricing