# Competition with a difference.



## Anonymous (May 22, 2016)

The difference with this one chaps is that you really need to think before guessing 8) 8) 

Ok, the product is 2.5Kg of military chips. Not very often seen in this quantity and it's a "guess the yield" game.

Now here's where it gets different and the clue is in the level of the prizes.

You can ask any questions you like on the thread in fact I welcome as many as possible. BUT the best prize isn't for being the closest- the best prize goes to someone who researches, calculates, and comes up with an informed guess that's close to the result. 

You can guess TWICE in each category below but once you've had your two guesses you're done. 

First prize (yield) one ounce of silver - posted anywhere in the world.
First prize - (solution) one oz of silver for the person who guesses the total amount of AR (in volume) required to fully dissolve the values from the products.

Bonus prize (yield) for getting within 1g of the total yield - 1 gramme of gold.
Super bonus prize for getting within 0.5g of the yield all of the above and 50g of the chips themselves (unrefined of course!)

So as you can see, some thought and consideration could pay you a serious bonus. I really do recommend you do a lot of asking around and searching both the forum, and the internet. This is not as easy as you may believe. 

Competition closes next Friday 27th May at 9pm GMT+1 (i.e. UK time)


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## Barren Realms 007 (May 22, 2016)

Is your calculation requirement for AR going to include digestion till the silicone die separates from the ceramic chip or not?


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## Anonymous (May 22, 2016)

Yes Frank it is.


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## Topher_osAUrus (May 22, 2016)

Amount of AR (total) -3.3 L

Gold yield 17.3 grammes

Very awesome of you Jon!


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## richard2013 (May 22, 2016)

Jon can you please give total weight of the batch :mrgreen:


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## Barren Realms 007 (May 22, 2016)

richard2013 said:


> Jon can you please give total weight of the batch :mrgreen:



2.5Kg


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## etack (May 22, 2016)

38.31G
4.68L

Eric


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## richard2013 (May 23, 2016)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> richard2013 said:
> 
> 
> > Jon can you please give total weight of the batch :mrgreen:
> ...



Thanks I realize i miss reading the first post carefully



Here's my numbers

31.05grams
2.6 L


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## Grelko (May 24, 2016)

spaceships said:


> You can guess TWICE in each category below but once you've had your two guesses you're done.



That's nice of you :mrgreen: 

33.58g 
4.27 L

and

47.12g
6.58 L


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## jason_recliner (May 24, 2016)

Hi Jon,
May we know the physical dimensions of one chip, not counting the protruding legs?
Is it asking too much to know the mass of one chip?


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## UncleBenBen (May 24, 2016)

This is a fun competition you've challenged us with Jon!

Are you going to digest in an open container or will you be refluxing in any way? Just a watch glass?


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## nickvc (May 24, 2016)

I'm not allowed to play but remember this isn't normal e scrap or even telecom scrap, forget a few grams a kilo or pound.


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## FrugalRefiner (May 24, 2016)

First guess: 25 grams of gold, 100 ml of AR ("required to fully dissolve the values from the products").
Second guess: 30 grams of gold. 4 liters of AR (to dissolve everything).

Dave


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## Barren Realms 007 (May 24, 2016)

nickvc said:


> I'm not allowed to play but remember this isn't normal e scrap or even telecom scrap, forget a few grams a kilo or pound.



That is an understatement... 8)


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## solar_plasma (May 25, 2016)

27g Au
3,1L AR

45g Au
3,8L AR


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## solar_plasma (May 25, 2016)

My guess is based on the yield on gold tops/bottoms ceramic CPUs, estimating there is half as much or less ceramic. Further cross-checked plausibility by other high-grade scrap like golden ring/legs TO-5/18 etc. My first guess is a secure low guess (like for maximum pricing), the second is an optimistic but realistic expectation (hope).


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## Anonymous (May 25, 2016)

jason_recliner said:


> Hi Jon,
> May we know the physical dimensions of one chip, not counting the protruding legs?
> Is it asking too much to know the mass of one chip?



Hi Jason I will get that information for you this evening and post it.


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## Anonymous (May 25, 2016)

UncleBenBen said:


> This is a fun competition you've challenged us with Jon!
> 
> Are you going to digest in an open container or will you be refluxing in any way? Just a watch glass?



A watchglass Ben, I used peroxide in the AR as well.


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## everydayisalesson (May 25, 2016)

So I have never done this kind of scrap, or anything close for that matter but I did do a little homework. 

Yield 31.1 grams
AR 2.7 liters


yield 50 grams
AR 3 liters

Good luck to everyone!!!!


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## Anonymous (May 26, 2016)

Any more for any more? 

High stakes on this competition guys. Also the gold has been recovered, dropped, refined and XRFed at 99.99 already.


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## Refining Rick (May 26, 2016)

30.6 grams.
1860 ml A/R

39.4 Grams
2600 ml A/R


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## jonn (May 26, 2016)

73 grams


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## etack (May 26, 2016)

my second guess ( miss read the post) 8) 

56.71g

5.2L

Eric


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## jason_recliner (May 26, 2016)

spaceships said:


> Any more for any more?


Yep. I'm still to make my estimations.

I realise you've already processed everything, but are there any numbers on the chips?


jason_recliner said:


> Hi Jon,
> May we know the physical dimensions of one chip, not counting the protruding legs?
> Is it asking too much to know the mass of one chip?


Edit: Alternatively, the number of chips processed? I'm trying to work all that out myself with the parallax issues. But you did say ask anything.

If you don't stick your hand up, you don't get an icecream. 8)


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## richard2013 (May 27, 2016)

2nd guess is


31 grams
26.5 liters


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## jason_recliner (May 27, 2016)

Time's almost up. I was never good at the jellybean game. I can only take a stab that there are about 400 chips in the beaker.

I don't own a 3 litre beaker myself but I found several specs online varying between 146mm and 161mm diameter. Based on about 10-11 chips across the beaker, that's about 14mm per chip. You recently posted some pics with Ferranti chips that looked consistent with it being about 12-15mm across. 

A bit of digging on Ferranti and I found patent US3214292A, whereby they describe a method of plating kovar at 21 microinches and germanium at 15. But I also found spec MIL-C-45204b for plating that is 20 to 1500 microinches for grades 1-6. I'll pick grade 3 as a medium, at 200 microinch, or 5 micron.

So the plating alone is perhaps around 14x14x0.005mm = 0.98mm3 = 18.9 mg per chip. Which is probably small enough to ignore compared to the wires inside. Though it would certainly add up! With 400 chips it would be +7.5 grams on whatever's inside!

According to the guides I've found, the best possible escrap one can normally expect to find probably runs at about 6 grams per kilogram. Being old school military, this will be more - but how much more? 9? 15? These look like they were made when gold was a cheap as... um... chips. These guides per kg are useless here.

If it yielded 9g/kg, that'd be a simple 22.5 + 7.5 = 30, which seems to be the middle of the road guesses here. But with the 'holy grail' P-Pros pulling 0.3g EACH, I reckon these can do better. A heck of a lot better.

So I'm going to take my two guesses, one is quite low compared to my peers* and the other is much higher, based on a crazy 18g/kg + 7.5g for the plating.
(* yeah I know I'm not a real refiner, just indulge me for the game, ok?)

First guess:
23.0 grams gold. You will use 2.1 litres in initial recovery, followed by 110 ml in your second refine. Total 2.21 litres.

Second guess:
52.5 grams gold. You will use 2.2 litres in initial recovery, followed by 310 ml in your second refine. Total 2.51 litres.

I am the least experienced so far to make the guess, but it's been a lot of fun and good brain-stretching while thinking about it.
Thanks Jon for creating the competition. And good luck to everyone else who entered.


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## g_axelsson (May 27, 2016)

I was going to do some math on this, but I'm a bit stressed and have to leave town in two hours time, so I'm going to go with some gut feelings here.

I also wanted to wait as long as possible to see what clues I could get from other members guesses. :mrgreen: 

As Irons say, the second mouse get the cheese....

Now Jason has done most of my work so I can build on his guesses. With one small addition, PPro's may be the 'holy grail' with 0.3g of gold each, there are only 11 per kilo so the gram per kilo isn't that high. Boardsort is paying $70 per pound for PPro while they pay $110 per pound for 486 cpu:s.

I'm going to go with a first guess of 11 g/kg = 27.5 g and 2.1 liter AR
Second guess 34.5 g and 2,6 liter AR.

Göran


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## UncleBenBen (May 27, 2016)

I'm taking a wild stab at percentage yield based on not so similar material. Way off from every body else and I haven't used AR yet but here goes...

First guess, high end:
112g 1.8 liters AR

Second guess, low end:
78.5g 1.6 liters AR


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## GOLDbuyerCA (May 27, 2016)

Nice material, i would pay fifty bucks, for the starting material, " any day " even with gold going down " groan " 
i think your yield at 90 percent recovery will be 21.5 Grams, which will take 3 L of Acid, " your process method " 
the material is really good, Did i say, i think you will get 1,000 for the outcome? well that is what i think.


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## Anonymous (May 27, 2016)

Alright folks 

21.88g per Kg , and 3.2 litres of AR. 8) 8)


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## solar_plasma (May 27, 2016)

I hate it, when the low guesses are the most correct ones - and most often they are! 

This has been great fun, Jon!

edit, oh wait, you wrote "per kg" ...wow! nice stuff!


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## nickvc (May 28, 2016)

Really good material 8) 
The best ever e scrap I refined came in at 90 grams a kilo, it was heavily gold plated kovar and I treated the off cuts we had kilos and kilos of the stuff, not sure of the application but I'd guess military or avionics, happy days.


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## solar_plasma (May 28, 2016)

54,7g per 2,5kg, so as far as I see, etack was closest, guessing the yield, - only 2,01g off.

Guessing the volume of AR (3,2L) seem to be Topher_osAUrus with 3,3L and me with 3,1L, who were closest, - both only 0,1L off.

Hey Jon, how's about to put your 1g gold into the jackpot for your next competition? :mrgreen:


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## Barren Realms 007 (May 28, 2016)

spaceships said:


> Alright folks
> 
> 21.88g per Kg , and 3.2 litres of AR. 8) 8)




You need to fix the size of the lettering on the "per Kg". It can barely be read.


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## Anonymous (May 28, 2016)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> spaceships said:
> 
> 
> > Alright folks
> ...



You think I didn't know that Frank? 8) 8) 

Jon


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## jason_recliner (May 28, 2016)

solar_plasma said:


> 54,7g per 2,5kg, so as far as I see, etack was closest, guessing the yield, - only 2,01g off.


Etack, you beat me by just 190 mg. I was 2.20g off.


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## kurtak (May 28, 2016)

spaceships said:


> Barren Realms 007 said:
> 
> 
> > spaceships said:
> ...



You just gotta love that old military/aviation/telecom stuff - A mate 8) :mrgreen: :!: 

Kurt


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## everydayisalesson (May 28, 2016)

That was a lot of fun. I don't think I did too bad having only processed fingers and a handful of pins up to this point.

Mike


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## modtheworld44 (May 28, 2016)

kurtak said:


> spaceships said:
> 
> 
> > Barren Realms 007 said:
> ...



Kurtak

To bad this wasn't a contest for the 186 cpu's,I could have won it hands down. :mrgreen:


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## joekbit (May 30, 2016)

Its to bad I never placed a guess. I just did 1lb 8 oz of very similar chips. ISO120 chips. My yield was 10.91 grams and i used about 2 liters. I figured you would get about 22 grams.


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