Paperdryer
Member
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2016
- Messages
- 5
Hello World,
Let me introduce myself. I'm paperdryer. I make my living working in the pulp and paper industry selling capital equipment, components and performing engineering services. I would consider myself well educated and decently skilled when it comes to hobbies that might demand a little more than others. In the past I built a Gingery Lathe from aluminum scrap I melted down and sand casted. I built a quad-copter and a few fixed wing rc aircraft from parts before the drone craze really went commercial (sorry no pictures due to hard drive failure prior to cloud backups). For some reason I decided I wanted to try gold refining as my next adventure.
I joined the forum a day or two ago, and have been reading up all that I can. Not quite through Hoke yet, but I should have a first read of that done either during lunch or tonight.
One of my issues I am having and it seams others have had is that the information here seems to be greatly dispersed and a lot of things are pretty dated. I have spent a good portion of my professional life writing up technical documentation for the operation of industrial systems so I think I am going to make sure that with this hobby I spend more time documenting and pulling together the information so that things are easier for the next guy that comes along (or at least so I have a better shop notebook if I put this on hold and come back in a year or so).
Second issue that I am coming into. Scrap supplies are not quite as easy to come by as I would have thought. My first thought was to go through and tear down an old computer I had lying around. Nothing of any value to sell on ebay, aside from the power supply, and no collector items. I spent about 3 hours stripping down the components before I ran the math on it. From my rough calculations, assuming an average gold pin of 5mm x 0.85mm at about 0.000381mm plating thickiness I would need about 44.5 lbs of the stuff to get an ounce of gold. Or about 1/2 a man year of computer stripping (2080 hours/man year) to have the raw material to refine down to an ounce.
After my preliminary reading I am sure that trying to process 44.5 lbs of scrap for my first attempt is a major mistake, and plan to have the chemicals/apparatus together sometime shortly after I think I have a recoverable gram. From what I have read, I think I should be working to acquire karat scrap as the time to get an appreciable amount of recoverable gold would be significantly shorter.
Wow, first post and a wall of text. Sorry about that. Just wanted to say hello.
Call to action, After you finished reading Hoke, what forum thread helped you the most when you were getting started?
paperdryer
Let me introduce myself. I'm paperdryer. I make my living working in the pulp and paper industry selling capital equipment, components and performing engineering services. I would consider myself well educated and decently skilled when it comes to hobbies that might demand a little more than others. In the past I built a Gingery Lathe from aluminum scrap I melted down and sand casted. I built a quad-copter and a few fixed wing rc aircraft from parts before the drone craze really went commercial (sorry no pictures due to hard drive failure prior to cloud backups). For some reason I decided I wanted to try gold refining as my next adventure.
I joined the forum a day or two ago, and have been reading up all that I can. Not quite through Hoke yet, but I should have a first read of that done either during lunch or tonight.
One of my issues I am having and it seams others have had is that the information here seems to be greatly dispersed and a lot of things are pretty dated. I have spent a good portion of my professional life writing up technical documentation for the operation of industrial systems so I think I am going to make sure that with this hobby I spend more time documenting and pulling together the information so that things are easier for the next guy that comes along (or at least so I have a better shop notebook if I put this on hold and come back in a year or so).
Second issue that I am coming into. Scrap supplies are not quite as easy to come by as I would have thought. My first thought was to go through and tear down an old computer I had lying around. Nothing of any value to sell on ebay, aside from the power supply, and no collector items. I spent about 3 hours stripping down the components before I ran the math on it. From my rough calculations, assuming an average gold pin of 5mm x 0.85mm at about 0.000381mm plating thickiness I would need about 44.5 lbs of the stuff to get an ounce of gold. Or about 1/2 a man year of computer stripping (2080 hours/man year) to have the raw material to refine down to an ounce.
After my preliminary reading I am sure that trying to process 44.5 lbs of scrap for my first attempt is a major mistake, and plan to have the chemicals/apparatus together sometime shortly after I think I have a recoverable gram. From what I have read, I think I should be working to acquire karat scrap as the time to get an appreciable amount of recoverable gold would be significantly shorter.
Wow, first post and a wall of text. Sorry about that. Just wanted to say hello.
Call to action, After you finished reading Hoke, what forum thread helped you the most when you were getting started?
paperdryer