# IC Gold - First Successful Try



## mbn (Jul 21, 2015)

Hi you there, dear people of Gold Refining Forum,
Thanks to Patnor101 and other kind members who shared their precious information, I tried to recover and refine gold from nearly 1.3 kilogram of IC chips. It was from 40 grams of n/s bridges (only black top), 850 grams of ram chips and the rest, other black IC chips from motherboard/cards (no eproms or thick eprom-likes). 

After hours of proper incinerating and then, using mortar-and-pestle to dust the white chips and magnet to separate the pins, I washed the dust carefully (with drops of liquid soap) and let it dry. I then crushed the sands and washed it again, but my pan was not black or blue so I couldn't see any gold wires there; I transferred the dust/sand to my beaker and when washing the product one more time, I saw the beauty just beneath the beaker on the bottom.

I soaked the fine sands in 50/50 diluted Nitric acid (250ml D-Water and 250ml Nitric), which created a mess with all the brown fumes and a little leakage, but anyway, that was an educational experiment to know next time I'll add the acid a little at a time in several pours. 

After about an hour and a half, when the copper pins dissolved (most of them), I soaked the concentrate on Aqua Regia and dissolved everything (it was yellowish brown) - I've begun evaporating the excess of nitric and then, participated the brownish black mud with SMB. The recovered gold mud goes to second AR with a very careful additions of nitric, drop by drop - I also used three drops of Sulfuric to the AR. After filtration and diluting the AR four times with D-water, I participated the gold with SMB and then, washed the gold mud first with boiling distilled-water (3x), and again with near-boiling HCL (3x) and then, final three washes with boiling distilled-water. 
Here are the photographs:


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## Anonymous (Jul 21, 2015)

Mohsen THAT is a good start!

Congratulations. You've got a way to go but hey you got a result!

Jon


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## mbn (Jul 21, 2015)

Thanks a million for the kind words, Jon.


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## g_axelsson (Jul 21, 2015)

Congratulation, when you have melted your first button and holds it in your hand you will be really hooked. 8) 

A bit of advice, don't put the beaker directly onto the hot plate. Some sand between the beaker and the plate will lessen the risk of thermal shock and breaking the beaker. You should also use some kind of catch vessel if a beaker breaks. I use to put my hot plate inside a plastic box so if a beaker breaks the gold chloride could easily be recovered.
Some people use a pyroceram vessel on the hot plate, it works both as a thermal buffer and a catch vessel if something breaks.

Now we just wait for the picture of your final button, unless you just save the powder until you got more to melt.

Göran


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## mbn (Jul 21, 2015)

Göran - Thanks a bunch for the advice. From now on, I'll do as you said.
I will melt this one, but not now 'cause I have to buy a dish and a better torch.


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## Anonymous (Jul 21, 2015)

I would recommend cleaning it up before you melt it. It's definitely got some impurities in it that would be better removed now before making a button. 

Alternatively as Goran suggested, put it to one side until you've got some more powder and re-refine and clean it all up at once. 

Again though, a great start I hope you're feeling good.


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## mbn (Jul 21, 2015)

Thank you Jon. 
It sure looks way better than the picture (I don't know why, maybe the white-balance issue), but I also expect it to be better for a two-times refined gold. 
Do you mean another AR by "cleaning", or another way (or method) of washing? 
-
Thanks again for the advice and encouragement.


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## patnor1011 (Jul 22, 2015)

Good work. Try to reduce concentrate to the absolute minimum you can, repeated washing and grinding of 1 kilogram of IC will leave you with like 2 spoons of material.


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## mbn (Jul 22, 2015)

Patnor1011 - You're right. I've done the wash & grind process almost 4 times (last one was with a spoon in the beaker), but I was eager to run the whole process and see the result - learnt so much for the next time. 
Thank you.


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## solar_plasma (Jul 22, 2015)

How many gramm did you recover?


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## mbn (Jul 22, 2015)

1.76 Gram.
0.70g was the empty paper, and all is 2.46.
-
I know there is some loss (in compare to a perfect process), but I hope not much.


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## mbn (Jul 26, 2015)

Hi you there again, dear people of forum

I was so eager, like a baby i would say, to see the golden yellow - so, I tried to melt the powder. As I know it for sure now, my torch was not good enough to drop the gold and make a button. It is my first one, so, I love it even if it's ugly in shape!
It has a weight of 1.74 grams.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Jul 26, 2015)

mbn said:


> Hi you there again, dear people of forum
> 
> I was so eager, like a baby i would say, to see the golden yellow - so, I tried to melt the powder. As I know it for sure now, my torch was not good enough to drop the gold and make a button. It is my first one, so, I love it even if it's ugly in shape!
> It has a weight of 1.74 grams.



Looks like you just need to heat it for a little longer time. Use some sheet rock under your melting dish so some of the heat doesn't get transfered from the dish.


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## g_axelsson (Jul 26, 2015)

Now you're hooked!

Did you season the melting dish with borax?

Göran


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## mbn (Jul 27, 2015)

Barren Realms 007
You're right. Thanks for the advice. I'll try to do better next time. 

Yes Göran,
I preheated the dish and seasoned it with borax, but the heat was not right. The powder melted to become a metal, but not molten enough to produce a whole drop and be a button. 
Thanks for your attention and the encouragement.


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## glorycloud (Jul 27, 2015)

The picture of the bottom of your gold with the heads up nickel looks like Mexico! 8) 

Nice work on the gold!!


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## MarcoP (Jul 27, 2015)

glorycloud said:


> The picture of the bottom of your gold with the heads up nickel looks like Mexico! 8)


... the bottom one, the top one instead looks like Italy without islands. So, Mexico and Italy are similar


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## mbn (Jul 27, 2015)

MarcoP said:


> glorycloud said:
> 
> 
> > The picture of the bottom of your gold with the heads up nickel looks like Mexico! 8)
> ...



8) 
glorycloud & MarcoP,
Please look at the link below. The red area I mean. It's almost where I live now!
http://medind.nic.in/ici/t11/i2/IndianJournalofCancer_2011_48_2_165_82875_u1.jpg


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## Anonymous (Jul 27, 2015)

Hi Mohsen

Effectively although you melted the gold in part you didn't melt it completely in the crucible (assuming you had a touch of borax in there of course) 

It's also your first melt so it's really easy to feel nervous about it - I know for a fact that I did! You need to melt it and roll it around the crucible to collect all the molten gold so it "snaps" into a perfect circle. At that point you know it's fully melted. 

Once you have seen that "snap" once you will never forget it. 

Don't be scared of it. If you're not using a hydrogen/oxygen torch then your chances of evaporating the gold are pretty slim.


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## kuma (Jul 27, 2015)

spaceships said:


> You need to melt it and roll it around the crucible to collect all the molten gold so it "snaps" into a perfect circle. At that point you know it's fully melted.
> 
> Once you have seen that "snap" once you will never forget it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq5ydeWWr4A

Sorry


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## Anonymous (Jul 27, 2015)

Haha well it's KINDA like that I guess without the scarey robot type nemesis guy appearing.....


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## mbn (Jul 27, 2015)

Jon (spaceships),
It actually was the result of my second attempt at the time. the first (my very first try) was not good and the powder produced 4 little golden balls! I then tried my second attempt with little bb's, trying to spend more time in heating process with better focus of the torch's flame in the gold. It was nearly successful, as you see the result is in one piece!
-
I'll try to do better next time with both the recover & refine, and melting the powder. 
Thanks for your attention and advises.

kuma,
:lol: 
Thank you for the link!


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## kuma (Jul 27, 2015)

My bad, back to my quiet corner, :lol:


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## jason_recliner (Jul 27, 2015)

glorycloud said:


> The picture of the bottom of your gold with the heads up nickel looks like Mexico! 8)
> 
> Nice work on the gold!!


My first thought was a person sitting down and taking off his jumper.


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## mbn (Jul 28, 2015)

jason_recliner said:


> glorycloud said:
> 
> 
> > The picture of the bottom of your gold with the heads up nickel looks like Mexico! 8)
> ...



Good one!


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## mbn (Jun 8, 2017)

Hi there all,
I'm back with an update!

It took almost two years of mine to reach this point!
This weird thing was the result of my very first try in recovering/refining & melting gold: 




I was doing my homework (study) and involved in two separate processes lately: refining from 650 grams of fingers (mostly RAM) and the second one, Poor-Man AR of ceramic CPUs (35 Black MMX + 10 regular Ceramic CPU). The later one was a double process of recovering first, and refining the semi-black resulting powder. 
At the end, I refined all the powders (and the old semi-melted piece) once more for utmost purity - The result is a 6.49 grams of beauty! 







The goldsmith who melted my piece said it looks almost triple 9 to him (99/9 pure), but I'm not sure about that.

And one other thing: I find triple washing the powder with hot D-Water / HCL / D-Water right after precipitate as a charm. I saw it myself that there is a huge difference between three-times washing & only washing once or two times. 

THANK YOU ALL for sharing the knowledge.


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## FrugalRefiner (Jun 8, 2017)

Very nice! It's always nice to see our members progress.

Dave


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## kernels (Jun 8, 2017)

Fantastic mate, what a great result. Every atom of the hold you hold there was created when a massive star exploded millions of years ago, what a great feeling to hold a piece of that.


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## mbn (Jun 8, 2017)

Thanks a bunch, Dave.
-
Inspiring, kernels... I feel the same way and I adore it for that. 
Thank you.


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## butcher (Jun 8, 2017)

I like it, I can see the glowing gold color of Success.
I can see you have been busy studying, in my opinion, the education you have gained is just as much of that success, and just as valuable, if not much more valuable that that pretty hunk of gold from some massive star blowing its cork.


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## Shark (Jun 8, 2017)

Very Nice! 

IC's may be the hardest material to learn and it looks like you learned it well.


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## mbn (Jun 9, 2017)

Glad to hear it from you, butcher. I appreciate every bit of the lil knowledge I have gained from here. 
Thank you!
-
Thanks, Shark.
Yeah; I still have a little above a kilogram of ICs (mostly thin ones from RAM) but I feel kind of lazy to do them! It takes a lot of time and energy, but fun as well (If doing all for hobby).


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