# BGA's & other plastic chips and recovery techniques



## snoman701 (Apr 1, 2017)

Pyrolize, Incinerate, Mill, Magnetic, Mill, Wash, Concentrate....

It's what I normally see, or some such variety.

Why doesn't anybody seem to go from mill directly to an AR leach after removing the magnetic components? This is something I've never been able to figure out. 

Will the ash neutralize too much acid? 

Has anyone tried an epsom salt floatation of the ash? 

This is by no means me challenging an accepted technique, just trying to understand the why's.


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## Smack (Apr 1, 2017)

One reason is the amount of acid it takes to cover an amount of gold by it's self is much less than the amount to cover gold mixed in with ash.


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## anachronism (Apr 1, 2017)

Personally I don't pyrolise, I don't incinerate, I don't mill, I don't magnetic, but heck I get gold. From crushing to AR is fine IF you know what you're doing and you understand your material but you need to be able to drop gold from cleaner product first and have a grasp of the basics. You're a way off that yet. Concentrate on getting basic gold out of material and THEN come and ask all this stuff.


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## Topher_osAUrus (Apr 1, 2017)

Wet ash, Jon?


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## anachronism (Apr 1, 2017)

Topher_osAUrus said:


> Wet ash, Jon?



No Chris. I don't use that process either.


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## g_axelsson (Apr 1, 2017)

Let's see... Jon has developed an effective recovery cell for cyanide solutions... fine milled IC:s and cyanide in a tank with agitation, possible with air to keep the material moving until the level of gold has dropped enough. Then electrolytic destruction of the cyanide solution while it is circulated back to the tank until the level of cyanide is low enough to be considered safe. The leftover could eventually be sold to a copper smelter as a copper rich material.

Am I close?

Göran


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## kernels (Apr 1, 2017)

I remember once trying going from mill straight to AR leach in my earlier days, I had exactly the same thought process. 

As suggested above, you end up with 20 x the amount of powder to deal with, I only had 1000mL beakers at the time and it was pretty much impossible to even stir the clumped mess. These days I get 1kg of chips down to about 2 table spoons before I even start with chemicals.

I seem to recall that there was some issue with washing the pregnant AR out of the clumpy mess too.

Another reason to not go from mill directly to a AR leach is that there more often than not still Tin in the powder, if you HCl the powder to remove the Tin, it becomes a pain to re-incinerate a large amount of fine powder.

I can't remember if those were the only reasons, but I did end up deciding to go back to the more traditional approach.


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## Topher_osAUrus (Apr 2, 2017)

g_axelsson said:


> Am I close?
> 
> Göran



Got to be it! 

I bet he has a very nice lab set up to play in!


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## anachronism (Apr 2, 2017)

To be honest lads, taking aside the CN leaching (which yes I'm working on) I've never liked the idea of the pyrolising and incineration with e-scrap. Pyrolising from a safety perspective, and incineration from a "why bother" perspective. Maybe the method for removing body fats/skin from rolled gold has somehow ported over to e-waste? All I've done is work my acid processes around this and funnily enough it's never been a problem. No losses, no increase in work. Others I have spoken to at length also don't see the need for these steps apart from one particular type of product, this being IC chips which I don't process anyway. 

That given I've had a number of interesting discussions about how to do those without the need for "firing up the barbecue" too. However these alternatives tend to involve machinery which is probably beyond the budget of your hobby refiner so I do see the application of pyrolising for this product, I just choose not to do it. 

Hope that adds some meat to the bones. 

Jon

Edit: Wet ashing? Chris that's truly evil stuff and I would rather chew my arm off than put myself in harm's way running that process.


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## kjavanb123 (Apr 2, 2017)

Here is another informative video by the gentleman who put the dismantling machine, hope it becomes very helpful for new members.

https://youtu.be/8Z9j7_t4qlU

Here is another video by the same guy who used blower to separate incinerated or milled ICs,
https://youtu.be/Mtx9OcaR8wM

Regards
Kj


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## g_axelsson (Apr 2, 2017)

anachronism said:


> To be honest lads, taking aside the CN leaching (which yes I'm working on) I've never liked the idea of the pyrolising and incineration with e-scrap. Pyrolising from a safety perspective, and incineration from a "why bother" perspective. Maybe the method for removing body fats/skin from rolled gold has somehow ported over to e-waste? All I've done is work my acid processes around this and funnily enough it's never been a problem. No losses, no increase in work. Others I have spoken to at length also don't see the need for these steps apart from one particular type of product, this being IC chips which I don't process anyway.


Now I'm more confused than normal. So you don't see incineration as needed except for IC chips. I thought that was the topic of this thread.
A couple of posts up you told us you get the gold going straight to AR but now you say you don't process IC:s.

Maybe it's just me and English being my second language, but I feel really confused right now.

To get back on topic, I don't know of any commercial refinery that incinerate and pan the ash to recover gold from plastic IC:s. I think everyone goes straight from incineration to smelting, creating a copper bar with the values in it. Many smelters skips the incineration all together and use the plastic as a fuel and the smelting is almost self sustaining.

For a hobby refiner to pan and then refine the concentrate serves two purposes. One is to minimize the amount of chemicals needed (and in the end, waste), the other is to minimize losses. It is impossible to leach out all the gold chloride from the ash so there will always be some left. With a lot of wet ash more of the gold chloride will be retained in the ash.

Göran


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## snoman701 (Apr 2, 2017)

Smack said:


> One reason is the amount of acid it takes to cover an amount of gold by it's self is much less than the amount to cover gold mixed in with ash.



Thanks...makes a lot of sense.

I've got a pound and a half of them, but am not a gold prospector. I'm not much of an athlete, or musician for the consistent rhythm as would be needed in panning. 



anachronism said:


> Personally I don't pyrolise, I don't incinerate, I don't mill, I don't magnetic, but heck I get gold. From crushing to AR is fine IF you know what you're doing and you understand your material but you need to be able to drop gold from cleaner product first and have a grasp of the basics. You're a way off that yet. Concentrate on getting basic gold out of material and THEN come and ask all this stuff.



Jon,

My laboratory concentration and work is directed at only cleaning up past mistakes. The only thing I have processed that wasn't a previous mistake was an assay, to determine whether purchasing 100 lbs of gold plated copper was a worthwhile investment...it's not in this case. I won't be working on any material with an organic component for quite some time, but am just insanely curious. I won't be working on any new material until I've got a perfect sink, consistently. 

I am a planner. Part of that planning includes designing and building a shed just for refining. I also recognize that a lot of the stuff that I've got in my pile right now, will likely never show up again (gold capped chips, etc). So I just need to make sure that my plans are sustainable as my knowledge and experience grows, and can be matched by available product. 


For what it's worth, my "guess" is that when you have processed these, you have shredded them to a fine size, then just performed a "simple" acid leach.


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## Topher_osAUrus (Apr 2, 2017)

anachronism said:


> Edit: Wet ashing? Chris that's truly evil stuff and I would rather chew my arm off than put myself in harm's way running that process.



Yes indeed, it does seem very dangerous (especially when watching the bga recovery done in the youtube videos posted a few months ago... About to boil over the vessel and they say "time for more acid" -uh, are you sure? Seems like "time for less heat")

I would imagine wet ashing is probably one of THE most dangerous processes in a refiners tool box. ...unless they use HF for discerning diamonds from junk... And dont use gloves.. Or other personal safety measures


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## snoman701 (Apr 2, 2017)

Topher_osAUrus said:


> anachronism said:
> 
> 
> > Edit: Wet ashing? Chris that's truly evil stuff and I would rather chew my arm off than put myself in harm's way running that process.
> ...



There's a lot of things...very stupid things, I'd like to do at some point in my life. Explosive metal forming comes to mind. Jumping off a bridge. Jumping a car dukes of hazard style.

Wet ashing, not one of those things.

It's the kind of thing safety videos are made of.


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## Shark (Apr 2, 2017)

> Explosive metal forming comes to mind. Jumping off a bridge. Jumping a car dukes of hazard style.



Hey snoman, are you sure your not from the south??? :lol: I have done two out of those three and wish I was still in shape do them again.


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## goldsilverpro (Apr 2, 2017)

The most profitable way to process them is to not process them.


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## snoman701 (Apr 11, 2017)

anachronism said:


> Personally I don't pyrolise, I don't incinerate, I don't mill, I don't magnetic, but heck I get gold. From crushing to AR is fine IF you know what you're doing and you understand your material but you need to be able to drop gold from cleaner product first and have a grasp of the basics. You're a way off that yet. Concentrate on getting basic gold out of material and THEN come and ask all this stuff.



All I can say is that people should plan to make mistakes when they start!

I just went through my filter bucket. I'm sort of excited to incinerate them.

But I found a whole lot of IC's...ceramic, and none had released their dies. 

I'm finally to the point that I'm pretty confident in the recovery stage...having went back over all of my mistakes. The refining stage will take time, mostly because I need better environmental control...mostly dishes. More orange liquid awaits! 

I'm up to 6 grams of gold. The only thing I've processed outside of "mistakes" were some really simple assays, and I stripped the gold from some aluminum.


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## chambersjr (Nov 1, 2017)

goldsilverpro said:


> The most profitable way to process them is to not process them.



Are you saying BGA's are not worth the time/trouble?


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## snoman701 (Nov 1, 2017)

chambersjr said:


> goldsilverpro said:
> 
> 
> > The most profitable way to process them is to not process them.
> ...



The answer to this question is always dependent upon the quantity you have or your desire to play, and how you value your time.

If I've got 1,000 lbs of them, they are going to get tolled by a professional.

If I've got 10 lbs of them, which I likely have now, I'm likely going to continue collecting them, staring at the box, thinking "some day" (I probably have 10 lbs of them now). Likely, by the time I get around to it, they'll make their way to the point that I'll be getting it done by a professional.


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## mls26cwru (Nov 1, 2017)

snoman701 said:


> The answer to this question is always dependent upon the quantity you have or your desire to play, and how you value your time.
> 
> If I've got 1,000 lbs of them, they are going to get tolled by a professional.
> 
> If I've got 10 lbs of them, which I likely have now, I'm likely going to continue collecting them, staring at the box, thinking "some day" (I probably have 10 lbs of them now). Likely, by the time I get around to it, they'll make their way to the point that I'll be getting it done by a professional.



well, whenever you are ready to sell them, let me know... I am always looking for more feed-stock! 
I have been refining these pretty consistently over the last two years... takes time an effort, but it helps me pay the bills!


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