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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
 
Welcome to the forum! Karat scrap is great if you can get it for the right price, but that can be difficult. That's why many members focus on ewaste as it's often available for free if you put in the work to find it.

I always recommend the Tips for Navigating and Posting on the Forum thread to new members to help them get off to a good start. Be sure to follow all the links, including lazersteve's Guided Tour and the Safety section. Good information is definitely scattered throughout the forum. We've been trying to select some of the best threads in the The Library section.

Those should get you started. :)

Dave
 
Thanks!

First off, I am amazed by the wealth of info here. Going to take some time just to process it all down.

Second, thank you to who ever helped put together the Gold Refining Forum Handbooks http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=19142
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=19143

Exactly the kind of detailed yet cliff note style easy-info-digestion method I was looking for.

Don't worry, I'm not tossing a gallon of acid into a casserole dish in hopes to make 1.21 jigawatts of gold any time soon. Lots and lots of studying and collecting to do first. 8)
 
For myself, I try to make sure my batches will yield at least half a gram, and preferably >1g. The main reason is I want to be darn sure the dropped gold is visible, and worth spending the time filtering/washing/etc. So, using your 44.5lb number, you'd only need about three quarters of a pound of pins to get a half-gram of gold. Notice I'm not critiquing or confirming your number, just using it ;)

I also recommend refining twice--even the people who get it quite pure the first time often do it twice. For that, unless you specifically want to track twice-refined yield from a specific source, you can just save the powders from first drops (without melting them!) and re-refine them in one larger batch.

Edit to add, because I'm an idiot: Welcome!
 
Upcyclist: Notice I'm not critiquing or confirming your number, just using it ;)

Feel free to critique. Despite the generational group I get lumped in with I tend to not think of myself as a special snowflake. 8)

I measured one of the medium sized pins I had collected so far. To be honest it "looked" average, for what thats worth.

Ignoring the plating that starts to wrap the edges, and only measuring the gold plated portion: Calipers said it was 5mm x 0.85 mm (side note I am US based, but my calipers were stuck in metric yesterday)

I used 0.000381mm as my estimate for thickness of the plating (converted low grade plating number I found from micro inches to mm)

Ended up with 0.00161925 mm^3 for volume of gold/pin as my average

Assuming (as in I'm not sure where I got this number but it was most likely google or forum search)
0.019 grams gold per mm^3

that basically left me with a 1.01 million pins to get 1 ounce troy (theoretical 100% recovery)

Then I estimated the numbers based on the number of pins it took to get my kitchen scale to show a gram on what I would need to get 1 million pins.

Anyone with practical knowledge feel free to let me know what real life numbers look like.
 
Paperdryer said:
Second, thank you to who ever helped put together the Gold Refining Forum Handbooks

Exactly the kind of detailed yet cliff note style easy-info-digestion method I was looking for.
That would be a fine Southern gentleman we know as Palladium. I know he put a lot of work into them, and many members have benefited from his effort!

Keep in mind that they are a collection of posts from the early days of the forum, and just as with Hoke's book, a couple of bits of information are a little dated. I believe the description for making AP uses a rather large proportion of H2O2. We've since learned that only a tiny amount is needed to get the reaction started.

As with Cliff notes, there is much more to the story, but it's a good way to get a big blast of information to get started. Then, read, read, read the forum and you'll be able to identify the areas where we've developed better information.

Best of luck on your journey. 8)

Dave
 
Paperdryer said:
Feel free to critique. Despite the generational group I get lumped in with I tend to not think of myself as a special snowflake.

No worries there Paperdryer. Our great leader Noxx started this forum at the ripe old age of 17! As long as you are willing to do your part on the study end you will fit in just fine. So have fun with it, safely if course, and welcome. I can already tell you will like it here!

Ben
 
Hello paperdryer and welcome, I see that Dave and the others already gave you a good set of pointers.

You have found one of the weaknesses of a forum, it isn't a good way to collect information in a easy searchable way, the really good posts get drowned in all noise from discussing basic things. I started a wiki to collect information and links into the forum, it's an ongoing project and you can find the link in my signature.

I was wondering about your gold calculation, is it a pin plated on only one side? Like a PCI connector? Some pins for example IDE connectors are plated on four sides so it gives four times the gold.
In any case, getting a lot of gold from electronic scrap takes a lot of scrap.

Have fun and read a lot! :)

Göran
 
Welcome to the forum.
As you have already worked out getting decent amounts of values from e scrap is not easy and that is the problem most members face, if you think getting all the information on recovery and refining is hard then finding good amounts of decent scrap is harder still, it can be done and a fair few members have accomplished it you just have to persevere and keep looking and asking, it is out there.
 
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