# Crystal Oscillators with Gold Bond Wires?



## cosmetal (Jun 4, 2018)

This is a shocker to me. :shock: 

I had NO idea that these type of crystal oscillators contained gold pads and gold bonding wires! Am I still such a noobie that I was the only one not in the "know"? :?:

Has anyone collected these and done some R&R (recovery & refining) on them? How are they processed and what sort of gold yield do they produce?

Anyone?

James


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## denim (Jun 4, 2018)

Did not know that. But then again, there is much more to learn than I now know, fortunately  Really glad the forum is back up. I don't see that kind of stuff often, mostly computers and the like, much of which is sold. But good to know.

Dennis


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## kernels (Jun 4, 2018)

Yep, was clearly worth a look because you can see some gold braze holding the stainless cap on usually. Never had enough of them to run a yield test. They would probably process fairly nicely, just ball mill them for a while to break all the caps off, sieve them out and process the powder.


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## patnor1011 (Jun 6, 2018)

There are like 1-3 on nearly every laptop motherboards. You need literally thousands of them to have any significant amount. I did about 1500 laptops and I collected only about 1 regular coffee cup of these.


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## kurtak (Jun 6, 2018)

patnor1011 said:


> There are like 1-3 on nearly every laptop motherboards. You need literally thousands of them to have any significant amount. I did about 1500 laptops and I collected only about 1 regular coffee cup of these.



Pat is correct per the underlined - there yield is good (actually "very" good) but they are so small it takes a LOT of them to be worth running on there own so trying to save them up to run as a batch of there own takes a very "long" time 


Therefore I do save them & then when I have enough ceramic CPUs for a batch I throw these little guys in with the batch of CPUs

Kurt


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## cosmetal (Jun 6, 2018)

patnor1011 said:


> There are like 1-3 on nearly every laptop motherboards. You need literally thousands of them to have any significant amount. I did about 1500 laptops and I collected only about 1 regular coffee cup of these.


Thanks, all.

Tzoax knew about them also:

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=22951&start=300#p284656

But, no one seems to have any yield data due to low inventory to process.

I need to reinspect my boards and harvest all of them I find. It would be interesting to get some yield data on the books.

I must be a masochist :roll: 

James


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## snoman701 (Jun 6, 2018)

I've got a 1/2 lb of them. Bought them on Ebay for $95.

It was sort of an impulse buy.

If I ever get around to running them, I'll post data.


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