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glondor

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 13, 2010
Messages
1,539
Hi all. I have some processors I am going to try to refine. I think I have everything I need. I would just like a quick primer on where to start. I have been reading here for months and I think I have a good idea of the various processes but could use a shove in the right direction. I have several pounds of each of these types. What process should I use. I know these are not high yield parts but I will use them for practice to get a process in place.

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I have several pounds of fingers to work with as well. I believe these will keep me busy for a while.

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Any help would be appreciated. I am rereading hoke. again.
 
Run them in some hot hcl when the leggs seperate remove the fiber plates and finish the pins in hot HCL. Try to seperate the capacitors before you dissolve your gold. Then save them for future processing.
 
The legs of the P-III and P-IV green fiber cpus are soldered on and can easily be separated from the cpu housing by heating the cpu from the bottom with a hand torch and a giving the hot cpu a gentle tap on the side of a ceramic or metal dish. Don't overheat the cpu, just melt the solder or the cpu will catch fire and produce some very toxic smoke. Do this outside or under a fume hood. The hot pins will all fall of along with the capacitors and you can hand sort them from the tan colored capacitors when everything cools. If you use tight control on the heating of the pins you can harvest them and leave the capacitors behind still attached to the cpu housing since the capacitors tend take a little more heat to remove than the exposed pins do.

You'll get a bit of solder mixed in with the pins, break up any solder clumps you can and remove as much of the cold solder as you can by hand. The remaining solder and the pins will all get boiled in the hot 10-30% HCl (muriatic) acid, leaving the gold behind as a fine black/brown powder and possibly some foils after the bulk of the pins dissolve.

The base metal of the legs is kovar which is notoriously hard to dissolve. A portion of the solder remaining on the pins will be dissolved, the rest stays behind as a dark colored powder mixed in with the gold.

Once the HCl has removed as much base metal as it will dissolve (no more tiny bubbles when a little fresh HCl is added), pour it off and treat the residual solids with a second batch of hot HCl acid as a clean up stage. Allow to cool to 20C, then pour/siphon off the dirty acid being very careful not to pour off any of the solid sediments along with the acid.

Now treat the solid sediment using the Modified Poor Man's AR method starting at step #3:

Modified Poorman's AR

The green cpu housings have only traces of gold left in them and will require crushing and/or incineration to get the last of the gold out of them, so put them aside until you are properly equipped to handle them. The bulk of the gold in these new cpus is on the legs.

You can use also the Modified AR method to process the ceramic cpus.

The memory fingers can be harvested and processed using the Acid Peroxide method as demonstrated on my website videos.

Here's some yield info:

Memory Finger Yields

I would start with a small sample of the various types of scrap you have (don't mix scrap types) and get acquainted with each process before jumping into a large batch. Start very small until you know what you are doing, then scale up.

You have a lot of work ahead of you with those cpus and your returns will be minimal due to the age of the bulk of the cpus (they are relatively new).

Steve
 
I know we were asked about the cpu chips, but the fiber chips are some of the harder to start on even forgetting the low yield. You mentioned that you had a good supply of fingers as well. In my opinion fingers are the very best electronic scrap to learn on.

Read up on the AP method (HCl and H2O2) for removing your gold foils from your card edges/fingers. Once removed you will have 22K gold or better foils. At that point we can walk you through how to digest your foils and precipitate your gold. There are several methods depending on your access to chemicals.

You have done well by spending several months reading before proceeding. I think Barrens would agree that your fingers are the best place to start if this is your first try.

Ps; as I type slow I see Steve has replied with good advice. Please do yourself a favor and read his AP data and start with your fingers in order to get familiar with the process.
 
Oz said:
I know we were asked about the cpu chips, but the fiber chips are some of the harder to start on even forgetting the low yield. You mentioned that you had a good supply of fingers as well. In my opinion fingers are the very best electronic scrap to learn on.

Read up on the AP method (HCl and H2O2) for removing your gold foils from your card edges/fingers. Once removed you will have 22K gold or better foils. At that point we can walk you through how to digest your foils and precipitate your gold. There are several methods depending on your access to chemicals.

You have done well by spending several months reading before proceeding. I think Barrens would agree that your fingers are the best place to start if this is your first try.

Ps; as I type slow I see Steve has replied with good advice. Please do yourself a favor and read his AP data and start with your fingers in order to get familiar with the process.

Yes I would agree with this 100%. The pins can be a pain if you don't know what you are doing or what to look for in your reactions. And nitric is a waste of time on te pins.
 
Thanks guys. I will try to get a positive outcome from this batch. I will take advise and start on the fingers while I torch the pins from the cpu/s. Would a sulfuric cell have any use with any part of these? I have purchased some vids and stuff from lazersteve for some plated and when it arrives i will get that In operation as well. Going to read about a/p method now.
 
glondor said:
Thanks guys. I will try to get a positive outcome from this batch. I will take advise and start on the fingers while I torch the pins from the cpu/s. Would a sulfuric cell have any use with any part of these? I have purchased some vids and stuff from lazersteve for some plated and when it arrives i will get that In operation as well. Going to read about a/p method now.

Not likely, the pins would be so dense when put together that you will not get a correct flow of current to deplate the pins.
In the 1st picture you can see how close the pins pack together on the right side of the picture. In the 2nd picture you can see the size diffference in the pins, the ones on the left will be pins like you pull from mother boards or slot cards and the pins on the right are probably twice the size of the pins you will pull from the CPU's

pins 1.jpg

pins 2.jpg
 
WOW lots of pins. The ones on the right from the chips, were these removed with hot hcl? they look very clean. In refrence to hot hcl, how hot? 50 -60 degrees C?
 
glondor said:
WOW lots of pins. The ones on the right from the chips, were these removed with hot hcl? they look very clean. In refrence to hot hcl, how hot? 50 -60 degrees C?

They were never installed on anything, and they are clean as a whistle.
 
OK i have 5 lbs of pins from 1/2 of my processors.

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Hot hcl is the next step to remove the kovar. How much HCL for 5 pounds of pins? I prefer not to drain and fill acid if possible, as I am not so good at filtering yet. How long should it take in a crock pot?
Update:
There is lots of black powder in the bottom of the bucket i soaked the processors in (to remove the legs). I suppose it may be gold as i believe the solder is in the acid. I will filter it and disolve a little in hcl/bleach and if it is positive for gold i will add it to the results from the pins.

I have a good haul of finger foils, I need to filter and check all the black powder in the foiles A/P buckets. I am using GSP's wick method but i seem to have been doing it wrong as it was not working, I reread the tutorial and discovered that my wick ( Fiberglass wood stove gasket) was not deep enough in the catch pail. Itseems to be working now.

Gold cell worked great, still have a little plated to do then I will try to filter and recover. No settling seems to be taking place in the cell tho. Very thick black acid. I do not think the acid was high enough concentration. ( pro flow from Rona) I think there is too much water in it.

Looking forward to posting my first bar soon.
 
glondor

You did good so far.
At this flask volume (1 liter i guess) i assume you will need to decant and add fresh HCL in order to rid of all base metals.
You will know you are done once you see that the pins are only foils and do not settle very quickly. Don't worry about filtering, let it sit for a couple of hours before decanting, there is no need to decant 100% of the base metals solution, just pour as far as you can without disturbing the foils and then add the fresh acid. heat will speed thing up of course.

The powders that in your bucket should be drained to a filter (make sure you wash the cpu's well with water), moved to a reaction flask to be treated with HCL + Cl for the gold.
Any left overs solids are probably PbCl, AgCl and organic material.
 
Thanks Samuel-a I will work on this soon. I may wait a bit as I have another 10 lbs of ceramic processors soaking for pin removal right now. I will add them tomorrow if they are all free. Then a nice acid bath.

Does the acid eventually wear out? Can it be reclaimed for reuse? I would like to reuse and recycle the HCL as much as possable.
 
Yes, it have been discussed here before, you can preform a search ' AP rejuvenation '
 
glondor said:
Hot hcl is the next step to remove the kovar. How much HCL for 5 pounds of pins? I prefer not to drain and fill acid if possible, as I am not so good at filtering yet. How long should it take in a crock pot?
Update:
There is lots of black powder in the bottom of the bucket i soaked the processors in (to remove the legs). I suppose it may be gold as i believe the solder is in the acid. I will filter it and disolve a little in hcl/bleach and if it is positive for gold i will add it to the results from the pins.

I have a good haul of finger foils, I need to filter and check all the black powder in the foiles A/P buckets. I am using GSP's wick method but i seem to have been doing it wrong as it was not working, I reread the tutorial and discovered that my wick ( Fiberglass wood stove gasket) was not deep enough in the catch pail. Itseems to be working now.

Gold cell worked great, still have a little plated to do then I will try to filter and recover. No settling seems to be taking place in the cell tho. Very thick black acid. I do not think the acid was high enough concentration. ( pro flow from Rona) I think there is too much water in it.

I am a bit confused here. Are you using only AP or are you confusing things in this post by also discusing and using a deplating cell using sulfuric acid?
 
@ Samuel-a. Thanks . A/p rejuvenation. I knew that, as i stated before sometimes I don't see the forest for the trees. I used A/p for the fingers and kept it going with a bubbler stone and an occasional splash of peroxide, I just did not equate this as recycling HCL. My bad. As advised I just used HCl on the pins in some crock pots i purchased at the local thrift store with no peroxide. Made a bit of a mess that did as one of the crock pots boiled over during the night even though it was minus 20 degrees outside. They were in a large covered plastic tub, so no harm was done, just a bit of clean up . Now i understand A/P can be used for both processes. Many thanks for exposing different angles of the same process.

@ OZ Sorry for the confusion. Here is what i started,as mentioned in my first and third post. I put 13.649 kilos of trimmed fingers on to work in an A/P as per your advice. I just need to do some filtering and washes on the foils to prep for dissolving. I then took stock of my situation and decided I had the facility and supplies and time to do more, so i took Barren Realms and Laser Steve's Que and got one quarter of the processors (10 kilos) going to remove the legs. I now have most of the legs in a beaker, the acid is filtering via a wick . I still have about 30 kilos of processors to get started and am adding more all the time.

My supplies arrived from Laser Steve and I stared a gold cell going as well to try my hand at the gold plated material I had acquired.

All the processes are working well and I do have several going at once and I need to work on timing and a bit of speed to make things a bit faster.. I am happy with the results so far and want to step up my production, so...

Just to add to the mix I am going to inquart some karat scrap and make some shot.
Can inquarted gold be parted with HCL/bleach if it is fine (small) enough? Not trying to reinvent any wheels i just want to avoid nitric for now. Time is not an issue.
 
HCl-Cl will not work on parting the silver from the 6kt alloy resulting from inquarting gold. Heated 35% Nitric acid will work to remove the silver first.

After the silver is removed, then you can process the resulting honeycombed gold with HCl-Cl.

Steve
 
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