Tin

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patnor1011

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While I am harvesting tin from s/n bridge - BGA type IC with usual methods aka heatgun or stanley knife I was thinking if there is not better one. I mean with heat gun or blade there will always stay some tin inside little cavities where solder balls are on IC. What if I will put them in HCl to dissolve all tin in solution. Then I can proceed as one will do trying to form tin crystals where cathode will be iron abut here is my problem - I do not know what should I use as anode.
I mean everytime when I saw this process for growing tin crystals anode was piece of tin but I plan to have tin already dissolved in HCl and harvest this one as crystals. What should I use as anode?
Or another question. If there is enough of tin dissolved in electrolyte and I will use another piece of tin as anode will dissolved tin deposit on anode first? If that is a case then I may dissolve as much as I can, let it deposit on cathode and then use electrolyte to dissolve more of solder from BGA chips and repeat this as many times as needed.
Am I right or it is not possible? What could be used as anode as alternative of tin to have just tin from electrolyte to deposit on cathode?
 
what would you use as an anode? I wouldn't think that it would be any different from a copper cell. Use a piece of copper plate on one side for the copper in solution to plate to. So I would say that you could use the tin. Some might go into solution and then plate out. Not sure.
 
I mean that I want to saturate solution with tin and I want tin to plate out I am not interested in copper at the moment.
 
patnor1011 said:
I mean that I want to saturate solution with tin and I want tin to plate out I am not interested in copper at the moment.
I was using the copper as an analogy. Use a piece of tin instead of the copper.
 
Stainless steel makes a good cathode for stannous chloride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af9GAUYDrlQ
 
Interesting video, Geo!
I've had for the past 3 years several pounds of tin/silver bars, and lately I've been thinking of recovering both, the tin and the silver. I'm going to give electrolisis a shot. I need to get up to date on the "do and don't" of electrolisis.

Pat, if the solution is saturated with tin, I would use a piece of graphite as an anode to recover the tin until the solution is "balanced". Then, use tin anodes.
I did something like that, several times, when recovering copper from saturated copper nitrates, and from Cu/Cl. On the Cu/Cl, you end up with lots of chorine...

I'll be following the information as others chime in... 8)

Phil
 
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