# PESKY PINS



## seawolf (Dec 23, 2010)

As I was sitting cutting the small pins from a board and I had an idea. This may have been posted before but heres my idea. I have a lead melting pot for making sinkers with a sprue so I cut the boards on the bandsaw and then set the pot to just barely drip the lead on the back of the strips of board to make full contact with all of the pins. Then took them to the sulphuric cell clipped the positive lead to the fresh lead, gentley lowered the pins only into the cell and watched the meter on the charger it went to six amps then back to zero. After a quick rince in distilled water I found all AU removed from pins. To recover the lead a small propane torch quickly flows the lead back into the melting pot, if any pins fall into the pot they float and are skimmed of with the dross. This does away with chasing the pins that I kept having fly around and not into the catch box. NOTE; lead must just drip or the pins will desolder and drop from the board.


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## patnor1011 (Dec 23, 2010)

Cool.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Dec 23, 2010)

Do you plan on getting the gold that is under your original lead where the pins are soldered to the board?


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## patnor1011 (Dec 23, 2010)

That may be less than one tenth of pin length, and less than half of fully plated pins on boards are really fully plated. Most of pins on computer mobos or various peripheral cards are not plated on places where pin is inserted in plastic header and soldered to board. Costs of dissolving solder may far exceed value in recovering traces of plating on this tiny part of pin.


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## seawolf (Dec 23, 2010)

As patnor1011 said the pins are only plated about 1/4 of there length.


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## Anonymous (Dec 23, 2010)

That is called selective plating,and pins that are plated that way usually have a thicker plating than the fully plated pins.However the overall yield will be less per pound.But in your case it doesn't matter if your lead trick works.Sounds like an awesome idea.I have been needing a reason to re-setup my cell and it looks like you gave me one.I had a similar idea.I wanted to make a lead bath and place my plated material inside a carbon screen and dip it.The idea is that the lead will absorb the gold plating and leave the remainder of the pins intact.One would simply cupel the lead to extract the gold.The cuple could be ground up to recover and reuse the lead.Of course this would not be feasible on a small scall,but I have hundreds of pounds of mil-spec barrel connectors that are a pain to seperate,and noone wants to buy them for a reasonable amount of money.
Thanks for the idea seawolf.


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## qst42know (Dec 23, 2010)

I can only imagine how difficult it would be to recover the lead from a used cupel. 

Did you have a specific process in mind?


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