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rob22

New member
Joined
May 1, 2017
Messages
2
Hi all,
my name is rob,
i have been viewing this site,(doing searches through google)for a couple of years now,and felt it time to join .

i work in the scrap metal industry in the uk,and i have access to quite large quantities of various scrap.

primarily,i confine myself to collecting sterling silver cutlery,and electronic scrap,
however,on a daily basis,i come across large quantities of plated silverware.
i tend to ignore anything marked nickle silver as i believe it has no silver content despite its name.

Through internet searches and closely inspecting items i have a basic working knowledge of plated items.
i have carried out several experiments using nitric acid on sterling silver cutlery,and on older electric fuse boxes,where the contacts are silver , i have dropped the silver out of solution using copper busbar,
washed the resulting powder until clear,and with borax,have accumulated around 1.5 killos of silver.
I have around another kilo of items waiting to process.

I feel it is now time to move on to plated silverware,this i can readily buy from my employer,to around one ton per year.(yes one ton)
After deplating the items will be resold to my employer.

I have also accumulated around 40 kilos of trimmed fingers from memory sims,
around 10 killos of black memory chips mixed with soldered board chips(not cpus)
i also have around 150 main cpus ranging from the better quality older ones to the lesser quality newer ones.
On average i strip 10 pc units per week at work,i also save printer cartridges,mobile phone pcbs,screen touchpads,etc etc .
i have around 150 gold plated bath and sink taps stored,

All the required ppe(personel protection equipment)i need i allready have,
Currently i am having built at a friends yard,a workshop with filter and extraction and an area large enough to concentrate on the various methods needed to process the materiel i accumulate.

on dissolving and precipitating silver contacts and sterling cutlery and jewellery i will use nitric acid.
on deplating gold i will use the h2so4 stripping cell.
on the memory chips i will incinerate then pan out the gold wires,before cleaning.
My chemistry at school was A level,but i have lots to learn,
in particular,
which method would forum members recommend regarding silver deplating
and secondly which method would members recommend for cpu gold recovery.


as a side note ,there was a video card produced early nineties around 4 inch by 6 inch that was completly
covered in gold , both sides,i have several of these in my cpu pile,together with around 40 laptop inbuilt mousepads.

So thats a little about me,
again hello to all,
and any help advice or constructive criticism is more than welcome.
best regards
rob
 
Welcome!

I haven't done any silver deplating myself, but it seems that most folks here don't think it's economical to do so. I don't doubt that they're interesting experiments, but one ton is not a trial run ;)

I would use the heck out of the search bar to find out more about processing the CPUs--much of it depends on the type of CPU (on fiber, ceramic, etc.).

Enjoy!
 
Thankyou for your welcome,and your advice,
i appreciate the questions i have asked have been asked many times before on here,
so,i will use the search function.
best regards
Rob.
 
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