# Processing LEDs from flatscreen TV lightbars



## Grelko (Mar 27, 2018)

I've been saving these up for a little while. I forgot to weigh them, but theres a couple hundred in the mortar.

You are going to need a huge amount of these for anything signifigant to add up, since each LED look like they only contain 1-4 bonding wires.

The way I'm doing it, is just for recovery of the bonding wires and tiny chips, to refine at a later time. (No chemicals needed)



Lightboard from a flatscreen TV. Depending on the size of the TV, you'll get more or less boards and they come in different lengths.


Slide a small straight screwdriver underneath of the plastic cover and pop it off to expose the LED.



Take a small pair of jewelry cutters "edge nippers", or a screwdriver etc, and remove the plastic disc. The white plastic is very easy to break apart. The small yellow circle in the middle seems to be a type of glue. The bonding wires are in this part.


There is a small bit of metal left on the board after the disc is removed, I haven't tested this piece yet to see if the solder contains silver or not.


Just for size reference.


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## Grelko (Mar 27, 2018)

As far as I've seen, from over a hundred "random types" of flatscreens, there are only 3 different types of these.

If you get flatscreens that are a bit older "2005 or so", you'll most likely find small flourescent tubes inside, instead of the lightbars.

If you completely remove the longer rectangle ones (with metal on the back), they stick to a hard drive magnet.

The rectangle ones come on a thin strip of aluminum, that's around 1/2 inch wide. There's a bunch of them on each board.

The ones with the small white square and yellow circle inside, depending on the size of the TV, you might get 6-15 per board. Sometimes it's a fiber board, sometimes it's aluminum.


The 3 different types that I've seen so far.


Magnified to show the small chip on the back and bonding wires on the front.


Another close up view. The type with two chips, seems to have 4 wires and the other with one chip only has 2 wires. The rectangle one was very hard to make out, but it looks to be 2 wires also.


I'm grinding them up with a mortar/pestle and panning the wires out. I've decided to take out the longer rectangle ones, because they don't grind up as easily as the other types.


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## Claudie (Mar 28, 2018)

Interested in seeing the results. :G


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## Grelko (Mar 28, 2018)

Now, I'm sure I've lost some of the bonding wires and/or chips, since I didn't incinerate the material before panning. 

There's no burning allowed in town, so this is about the best I can do right now.

A lot of the plastic or glue has been crushed into powder, then I used a drop of dish soap and swirled it around in a goldpan till everything fell to the bottom. After that I panned it out just like I would after crushing up IC chips.

All I need to do now, is use a eye dropper or "sucker bottle" , pipette, turkey baster, etc. and take out the gold/chips to refine later.


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## UncleBenBen (Mar 28, 2018)

Hi Grelko! Good to see you around. That looks like a bit of gold in that pan.  

I've been saving those up also. Especially when I come across keypad boards with a lot of them on it. Since it only takes a few seconds to scrape them all off with a sharp chisel and toss them in my LED bowl. Another one of those things that adds up. Slowly, but it does. :wink: 

I have a couple mortars and pestles made from that same green stone. One that size and one a bit larger. My hands and knuckles are telling me lately that it's time to upgrade to electric mills! :mrgreen:


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## silversaddle1 (Mar 28, 2018)

Too bad you weren't closer. I'd give you a whole truckload of led tv's to scrap.


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## Grelko (Mar 28, 2018)

UncleBenBen said:


> Hi Grelko! Good to see you around. That looks like a bit of gold in that pan.
> 
> I've been saving those up also. Especially when I come across keypad boards with a lot of them on it. Since it only takes a few seconds to scrape them all off with a sharp chisel and toss them in my LED bowl. Another one of those things that adds up. Slowly, but it does. :wink:
> 
> I have a couple mortars and pestles made from that same green stone. One that size and one a bit larger. My hands and knuckles are telling me lately that it's time to upgrade to electric mills! :mrgreen:




I'm still around  Been catching up on reading here while slowly working through the boards I have left. All the components that I've been scraping off, are just sitting in a bucket until I get around to processing everything, which should be pretty soon.

I have 3 mortars, one is tiny and looks like a ceramic melting dish. The green one is closer to 5 inches. It's normally for getting IC chips to powder after using a pipe crusher. I also have a large one that's around 8 inches, but that's just for grinding up food, like the acorn cookies I made in another thread.



silversaddle1 said:


> Too bad you weren't closer. I'd give you a whole truckload of led tv's to scrap.



That sounds like it'd be fun  I might find a couple per month while scrapping around town. If they can be fixed easily without needing to buy parts for it (replace a capacitor or two), then take them to the pawn shop up the road. If I had the room to keep a bunch of stuff, Id be selling on E-bay. Found a working Wii fit board last week. I want to have yard sales when it's warmer out, since I get a some of everything while scraping.


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## rickbb (Mar 29, 2018)

Interesting, I'm sitting on a bazillion led's from a failed project at work. hmmmmmm.


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## Grelko (Apr 5, 2018)

rickbb said:


> Interesting, I'm sitting on a bazillion led's from a failed project at work. hmmmmmm.




I keep thinking about using them as mini solar panels, but I'm not sure how to lower the voltage and raise the amperage.

So many things you can do with all the different materials :lol: 

Connect a few LEDs to some capacitors to hold the electricity, wire it into a USB then charge your phone with the sun, or regular light. Same concept as those old solar calculators. I'm sure they already have that somewhere in the world, but I haven't seen one yet.

Also...

The Christmas lights that use LEDs, have a gold bonding wire in them too. Just pop off the plastic cover to expose the LED. If you didn't want the gold from them, you could use them for many projects, since the legs are very long.

Edit - spelling


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