Wondering about mylar ribbon cables from printers

I have quite a few Mylar cable from a few printers. These came off the back of some ink cartridges. I do not believe that the process that Lazersteve used with keyboard mylars by melting off the mylar will work with this.I did peel off a small part off the coating over the traces and it appears to be copper so just "buttons" are gold. I don't want to melt the mylars and take a chance of the gold and copper mixing, so I was wondering if a soak in AP or HCl/bleach wouldn't work for the few I have, less than a pound but any gold is good gold. I know it will be dirty solution and plan on double refining anyways. So I was looking for a quick dirty fix.

Rusty

I usually process them with fingers in AP whenever I have them.

Göran

Thanks Göran, that was what I was sort of leaning towards, especially since it's copper within the ribbon. I could only get about a 1/16th inch or so of the mylar layer to come off and the metal underneath was definitely copper...lot more red looking than gold.

Rusty

The ribbons from the printers are gold plated on the contacts only. These I'll trim with scissors and run them in a copper chloride leach like Goran said with a batch of fingers.
The ribbons pulled off from the ink carts appear to to fully plated and I run these separate by first incineration then onto removing the base metal (copper) with either nitric acid or copper chloride leach. Then I'll use AR to recover gold.
Don't expect much from a ink cart despite they look good. I ran the ribbons from about 100 carts and got around 1/3 gram of gold

Yeah I didn't think there would be a lot of gold in those mylars, but figured I could add them to stuff in the works.

Rusty

resabed01,

Were the inkjet cartridge mylars that you ran just the contact part with the dots on them, or the entire mylar
that runs all the way to the printhead(s)?

I'm curious because I have been just peeling off the part with the dots, because it's quicker.

Cheers,

Mike

I caught a inkjet mylar video on youtube by 'Moose Scrapper', running the HCl+Cl process, and he is
saying to peel the entire inkjet cartridge mylar off all the way past the printhead.

The HCl+Cl did dissolve the Gold dots pretty rapidly.

I'm wondering if some of those mylars have Copper traces, and others have Gold?

From a manufacturing economic sense, though, I don't see where there would be much of an advantage
to running Gold traces from the physical contact dots to the printhead.

Cheers,

Mike

Be aware there is a lot of disinformation on YouTube. Many people claim things that simply are not true. They always make things look easier & safer than they actually are. Just because something resembles Gold, doesn't mean it is. The best way of knowing is to do a test yourself. You would probably have to burn the mylar coating off to get to the wire inside.
I have seen a lot of wire that is golden in color, but is Copper wire in a colored coating. :|

I ran a batch of ink cartridges and the carriage Mylars a while back. I ran them as the mentioned YouTube video and they worked out real well. Just don't expect a lot of gold from them unless you have several pounds of Mylars. The white colored Mylars seem to have a heavier gold plate on the contacts. Trimmed, as mentioned, and clean, plus it works just as well with "Poorman's AR".

I can't even imagine how many ink cartridges it would take to equal several pounds of mylars :shock:

About a month ago when it stopped raining for 2 days, I tried to incinerate the mylars from 100
inkjet cartridges, using a $15 portable charcoal grill from Menards loaded to the gills with charcoal,
and the mylars in a 6" diameter steel pan with 1.5" high sidewall mixed in with oak pellets.

I didn't get much smoke at all, the mylars weren't doing much more than curling up, and the oak
pellets appeared to just become charred,

so I threw a match into the oak pellets in the pie pan, and they burst into flames, but did not
burn to ash.

After everything had cooled down, I checked the mylars, and they were pretty much intact, which
was disappointing.

After having thought about it for a while, it seems that the temperature achieved was insufficient
to the task, and the experiment would have benefited greatly from a forced air feed.

Subsequent research showed that I could have done it with HCl+Cl, or as shark recently shared, it
would have worked with Poor Man's AR.

All comments & ideas are welcomed.

Cheers,

Mike

From what I have ran into, the majority of the traces are copper. From a pound of the mylars I only found one that seemed to have gold traces and they seemed to be very short traces. Now I just cut the ends with contacts and save that part. Unless you can get quantities of them they take a while to add up. I got mine from a lady that owns a small ink cartridge refill shop and pick up the ones that are damaged and can't be reused. I have run a lot of very small tests and these were one of the things I tested to help me learn the use of HCL/CL and AR. Not much gold but very useful for learning. They are also good to run if your working with plated glass wear as I do them the same way. China and ceramics are a bit different, they would be run separate from glass and mylars as the ceramic will absorb some of the solution. A long heavy soak in water after being broken up will slow it down, but I am not sure it will 100% stop the absorption.

Breaking up glassware creates more surface area to absorb. The whole plates are coated so no soak through which aids in speeding up the washing and rinsing.

Takes enough time washing dirt off and then washing in HCL+bleach and then rinsing.

B.S.

On some HP cartridges I have found, I am damn sure there's only Gold in the traces.... But that 'some' of them.
I heated the plastic with a lighter flame and the plastic peeled off the trace and the trace was Gold on both sides and right thru the whole trace.

Now identical Mylars from the same carts are Copper with Gold plating on the contact faces only.
I just think I might have picked up some real old carts.

Same with the holder that holds the carts. Sometimes the pins that make the contacts are Magnetic and sometimes not, sometimes the springs are magnetic too, sometimes not.
There's more Gold in printers than I get the impression others think there is.

Also in the light bar scanners... 250+ little Gold wires 3mm long per bar.

I think where the mylar meets the ceramic printer face there's Gold wire connections too.