patnor1011
Well-known member
Well, all plastic/ceramic was reduced to powder. Like Rusty said baby powder like. That was pretty much washed away. All what I did - panning was basically separating small gold wires from bigger non magnetic pins.
When I crushed material and washed that with water all fine plastic/ceramic powder was washed away. Bigger pieces were dried out, crushed and washed again. I repeated this process about 5-6 times to get rid of all plastic, ceramics and glass. Magnetic pins were taken out with magnet, non magnetic separated from gold in pan. I have over kilogram of pins and inside metallic parts. A lot of them are gold plated say about 30% and some appears to be silver plated. Some chips were the same where I had written on box that they (contacts) are Au/Pd plated. I would say that there will be some bits of gold in form of tiny wires still trapped or soldered on ends of pins.
All this material will be processed later.
It is questionable which process is more or less time or resources consuming. Washing all that powdered material in acids or getting rid of junk first. I am well aware that some of gold maybe lost while washing but lets say I was very careful when doing so and actually wash-dry-crush material several times. I was taking care to wash it so no gold will be lost.
Right now I have all gold wires I was able to take out in nitric - there was some amount of broken tiny copper pins mixed with gold and small bit of ceramics/glass.
Day or two and I will have some numbers for you. I did processed 7 kg of mixed chips. I will decide later for the best process of how to try to extract Au/Ag/Pd from metallic parts from inside of chips.
First two pictures on this page represent sample of what I processed, note that all or lets say 99% of chips were cut from boards therefore without outside pins/legs, not just desoldered and weight was 7 kilograms.
When I crushed material and washed that with water all fine plastic/ceramic powder was washed away. Bigger pieces were dried out, crushed and washed again. I repeated this process about 5-6 times to get rid of all plastic, ceramics and glass. Magnetic pins were taken out with magnet, non magnetic separated from gold in pan. I have over kilogram of pins and inside metallic parts. A lot of them are gold plated say about 30% and some appears to be silver plated. Some chips were the same where I had written on box that they (contacts) are Au/Pd plated. I would say that there will be some bits of gold in form of tiny wires still trapped or soldered on ends of pins.
All this material will be processed later.
It is questionable which process is more or less time or resources consuming. Washing all that powdered material in acids or getting rid of junk first. I am well aware that some of gold maybe lost while washing but lets say I was very careful when doing so and actually wash-dry-crush material several times. I was taking care to wash it so no gold will be lost.
Right now I have all gold wires I was able to take out in nitric - there was some amount of broken tiny copper pins mixed with gold and small bit of ceramics/glass.
Day or two and I will have some numbers for you. I did processed 7 kg of mixed chips. I will decide later for the best process of how to try to extract Au/Ag/Pd from metallic parts from inside of chips.
First two pictures on this page represent sample of what I processed, note that all or lets say 99% of chips were cut from boards therefore without outside pins/legs, not just desoldered and weight was 7 kilograms.
