Separating the gold off the chip ash

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FREED0M

Member
Joined
Apr 13, 2015
Messages
13
Hello. I've read kuma's post about getting gold from computer chips' gold bonding wire. I've also searched on the internet about it.

So basically, I've incinerated around 250 or so grams of epoxy chips with charcoal, and some of them turned really white. I picked one of the broken "whitened" chips and could see rows of tiny gold balls.
Then I put all of the chips into a jar, put on the lid and shaked to pulverize the chips. And put a neodymium magnet on the lid, just like many people do.
After that I put the pulverized chips into a filter, and got most of the fine ash, with some ( or rather, a lot) of copper wires.
Tomorrow I'm going to buy some sulfuric acid ( for wet car batteries) and pour it in, hopefully dissolves the copper wires.

My question is, after only some ash and gold is left, how can I separate the gold from the ash? Should I just try to melt it and hoping the gold to form bigger granules, so it can be separated more easily from the ash? Or there is an easier way?

Thanks in advance~ :)
 
FREED0M said:
Hello. I've read kuma's post about getting gold from computer chips' gold bonding wire. I've also searched on the internet about it.

So basically, I've incinerated around 250 or so grams of epoxy chips with charcoal, and some of them turned really white. I picked one of the broken "whitened" chips and could see rows of tiny gold balls.
Then I put all of the chips into a jar, put on the lid and shaked to pulverize the chips. And put a neodymium magnet on the lid, just like many people do.
After that I put the pulverized chips into a filter, and got most of the fine ash, with some ( or rather, a lot) of copper wires.
Tomorrow I'm going to buy some sulfuric acid ( for wet car batteries) and pour it in, hopefully dissolves the copper wires.

My question is, after only some ash and gold is left, how can I separate the gold from the ash? Should I just try to melt it and hoping the gold to form bigger granules, so it can be separated more easily from the ash? Or there is an easier way?

Thanks in advance~ :)
Click to expand...

Save your money, battery acid is not going to do it. It is worthless in this particular instance. Read more about it here:
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11827

Also you really need to get more knowledge about acids, metals and chemistry involved. The best idea will be to download Hoke book and read it till your head hurt. Then read it again, till it start making sense.
 
I find washing with water with a touch of dish soap works best for removing ash. There are lots of threads here about that so I won't go into detail.
Water washes must precede anything done with acids. This is so you'll have much less wastes to deal with.
 
Actually I was gonna treat the gold mechanically.. but after second thought, I'd better gather more chips and learn about acid methods before using chemicals :D
 
resabed01 said:
I find washing with water with a touch of dish soap works best for removing ash. There are lots of threads here about that so I won't go into detail.
Water washes must precede anything done with acids. This is so you'll have much less wastes to deal with.
Click to expand...

Okay I'll try that, thanks for the suggestion
 
Sorry for necro-ing this thread, I've done something bad.

Just realized that I still this old, unfinished batch.

After my previous post in this thread, I totally forgot about the ash. IIRC, I had some difficulty in panning out the ash back then.

Someday later, for whatever reason I was thinking at that moment, I poured some mercury hoping that it will amalgamate with the metals...

Yeh I knew I put myself in more hassle and danger...

What should I do now? I just checked and still have the used mercury, and the ash with leftover metals & tiny bits of mercury. Not sure how much metal is in the separated mercury.
 
Put it in a container, mark it as mercury containing waste....deposit it at the next city wide hazardous material disposal days.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
What should I do now? I just checked and still have the used mercury, and the ash with leftover metals & tiny bits of mercury. Not sure how much metal is in the separated mercury.

Snowmans answer"Put it in a container, mark it as mercury containing waste....deposit it at the next city wide hazardous material disposal days."

For once a simple question get a simple answer, and a very good answer.
 
250g of mixed IC chips now mixed with mercury is not worth the hassle.
Dispose of it as toxic waste. There is very little gold in there if any anyway.
 
I agree with snomans response, easy, simple with a cradle to grave twist.... However, for the person who is able to understand processes and truly wants to learn how to do this correctly, there are other ways. I would think that the ones who could handle that process probably do not need much instruction though.
 

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