# IDE Pins with a Cell



## toadiesop (Apr 12, 2007)

Sorry if this was posted somewhere before.....

I was experimenting yesterday with the IDE pin strips that I've de-soldered from motherbaoards and such (old sound cards are a treasure trove)

So I put my alligator clip on there and of course could only get a maximum of three or four at a time. So I started thinking.....

A stainless steel spoon (or fork, ect)!! You'll have to find one the right size of course, but I just fit the pins snug onto the handle and attach my anode to the spoon part and dip.

All 40 pins deplate at once! Still no camera right now, but I'll post pics later.

Another thing I'm thinking about is pins from parallel, serial, vga, ect. On the older computers they had ribbon cables attached to the motherboard. So I was thinking of making a "coupler" for lack of a better word... Just a board that you can plug these into but with one connection that would send electricity to all the pins at once. That way, you could just plug in, say a parallel port to the board, and then dip the other end. It sure beats smashing them open and refining one pin at a time.

Let me know what you guys think.


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## lazersteve (Apr 12, 2007)

Hello Toadie,

Here's an existing forum link for your topic:

http://goldrefining.110mb.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=91

I've had a lot ideas on the same track. The problem is in the connecting and disconnecting. You end up spending a lot of time out of the cell while connecting and disconnecting. I'm looking for more efficent ways to strip them in groups instead of individually. The wire screen mesh is one viable solution.

Steve


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## toadiesop (Apr 12, 2007)

Nice, the one tutorial I haven't watched. I figured it was just a new way to make an anode.


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## toadiesop (Apr 13, 2007)

I've done a bunch of pin strips with the spoon now and you're right steve, a lot of time outside the cell. But I can deal with that right now because I'm just experimenting. 

And by nature I'm not one to write off anything, I'm going to be testing many things in the cell. You know for fun... I just like to see what happens. Maybe I'll lose gold, maybe I'll figure out something new. 

Right now I'm going to put the anode on a bunch of CPUs. They're connected someway through the ceramic right? Who knows?

Or the gold plating around a cell phone board? 

I might even try fingers in the cell tonight.

I guess what I'm saying is, the info here is the best anywhere, but you can only learn so much by reading. If you think it'll work, try it.


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## lazersteve (Apr 13, 2007)

Toadie,

I admire and share your sense of adventure. It never hurts to test your theories, in fact it's very healthy. Let us know what you find out.  

Think about you statement about the conductive ceramic: The cpu legs would short out if the ceramic were conductive and the chip wouldn't work as a cpu (it's an insulator- non conductive at normal energy levels). It's better to try using a screen that these items rest on and touch every leg.

The cell phone boards have been addressed in another post. They are very thinly plated and strip much easier with other methods described there:

http://goldrefining.110mb.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1793&highlight=#1793

I'm glad you are learning from the forum, I am learning a lot also.

Steve


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## toadiesop (Apr 15, 2007)

> They're connected someway through the ceramic right?




HAHAHA!! Sometimes I need to explain myself better... :lol:

I was trying to say with all the gold wires still inside the ceramic that attach the the silicon chip.... what would happen if I just placed the anode on the pins of an unbroken chip. 

It worked okay but I don't have many "unbroken" CPUs to test it on of course. They're waiting for AR. 

But with the few unbroken ones I have, it was actually really cool to see the randomness of what pins de-plated depending on what pins the anode was connected too. It would be useless to try to do this efficiently, but it interesting just randomly placing the anode and seeing anywhere from 5-15 pins react.


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## lazersteve (Apr 15, 2007)

Toadie,

If you were to take a cpu socket plastic shell and manufacture a SS plate that matched that pattern perhaps you could join all the legs to the anode. The main problem would be that the surface of pins where the metal 'jig' contacted them would prevent that area of the pin from stripping. Another idea I had was very simple, and would work on cps with straight pins. Place the cpu on a flat piece of SS that made contact with each leg. As long as all the legs touch the positively charged surface the pins would strip. And finally another idea is that you could bend the legs so they made continuous contact with one another in a unbroken string. Folding each pin in one row the same direction towards the adjacent pin, and folding the last pin in a row over to make contact with the next row. This method would be very time consuming to say the least.

Keep up the great posts.

Steve


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## goldsilverpro (Apr 15, 2007)

Another time consuming method is to wrap a single piece of copper wire around all of the legs. For a faster way, I think you could somehow use a fairly coarse pad of steel wool to connect all the legs. You might use a couple of wraps of copper or steel wire to hold the pad to the CPU and then connect the clip to the wire. Haven't tried it but it should work, if the pad isn't too thick. You'll have to rinse the pad well to get all of the black gold out. Actually, copper or stainless wool would probably be better, since the steel wool would start rusting as soon as you took it out of the solution. Thinking further about this, the stainless would probably rust also. Copper would be best. I've seen dishwashing pads that look like coarse copper wool.


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## lazersteve (Apr 16, 2007)

I'll give the copper anode a test run. I'm going to try my flat plate idea first. I have some copper clad board that should be firm enough to support the cpu nicely and contact all the pins at once.

Steve


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## Dr_Code (Dec 7, 2012)

Is there a current link for the thread discussed in the posts (http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=91)?


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