can i do this

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Joined
Apr 25, 2018
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i am recylcing different motherboards from half an year and i am regularly facing loss as not properly understand the tricks of dealing with market! well i decided to stop more losses and make a more accurate velues of precious metals that can be recovered from pcbs. here is my story of last deal!
i buy 70 pieces of p4 motherboards,2.5 dollars ( 250 RS in pakistan)per piece... 10 p3 motherboards 3.7 dollars each, 12 p2 motherboards 4.9 dollars each. no ram, no processor! so first i think to remove BGA chips only, hthat weight only 250 gram, so i can get 2 gram of gold from these. as i ask the seller to rebuy my boards without BGA, he offer me 1 dollar per kg. by this
92 motherboards= 217 dollars.
gold from BGa=2gram= 80 dollar.
remaining boards= 46 dollar. i am loosing approximately 86 dollars without acids+labour+chamicals.
can someone give me an idea where i did wrong!
can i process remaining whole board via electrolysis. will this recover gold from plated items?
 
Motherboards in general is a very poor source of gold. The volume of non-precious metals and the weight of the board itself compared to the weight in gold it contains makes it unprofitable to try and work with them. You will have a better outcome working with RAM sticks and peripheral cards. IC chips are another good source of gold bearing scrap. It may not be the process that was the problem but rather the material you are trying to get gold from.
 
You're paying more money than the boards are worth, FAR more than they are worth.

So your process isn't the problem - the product price is.
 
and i hate to break it to you, but 250g of BGA's are only going to get you 1g of gold...

problem is you are looking at it in the wrong way. you are just thinking in terms of gold... refineries recover all metals from the boards. This will be impossible for a home refiner to do at a profit (especially if you are just going for gold), so you have to figure out what you can recover and figure out how much your time/effort/chemicals/investments are worth and figure that into a price that is profitable for you to refine. I think that you will find that you will need to find a source that is much cheaper than your current supplier.
 
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