# Gold plated pins from laptops



## patnor1011 (Sep 4, 2018)

I just had an amazing week of fun doing some refining with Jon (anachronism on the forum). We did some classic like ceramic CPU's, fingers... 
What I am going to share will probably make some people quite sad. I personally was quite disappointed, to be honest. As you may know, I spent some time dismantling and recovering refining material from laptops. We processed my laptop pins - 14 kilograms of them. They come from over 2000 laptops, generally, there are about 6-8 grams of pins in one motherboard. (I did not count battery connector pads as I sold them separately)
This could be considered much better feedstock than pc motherboard pins as laptop pins are generally much smaller and thinner. 

All 14 kilograms stripped and the sad part, yield from 14kilogram of laptop pins is 23 grams of gold. 1.6g per kilo. 
Post-2000 laptops and consumer electronics generally do have very thin flash gold plating. Nothing even remotely comparable to old electronics or telecom/military stuff. For me personally, that means it is simply not worth the time to harvest material like pins from them and selling whole motherboards is a probably better idea. I am inclined to think that there is much more gold in IC and BGA chips than in plated pins or visible plating on any laptop motherboard.

On another note, I observed a beautiful reaction when your gold AR solution is so saturated with gold that you will see it in metallic form after applying a drop of stannous chloride. Enjoy some pictures.


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## nickvc (Sep 4, 2018)

I'm sorry you and your good lady’s hard work yielded so little but I’m not overly supried, as with much plated scrap you need volumes to make a decent return and if you have to hand harvest much of the items the effort isn’t worth the return, if you could strip the visible gold on a whole board or component it would make more sense but that leaves very little value to the stripped components and boards so what can you do with them ?
I’m also going to agree that there is probably more gold encapsulated within components than the visible gold depending on what you are processing.


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## Claudie (Sep 4, 2018)

2000 laptops, that's a lot of plastic!


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## patnor1011 (Sep 11, 2018)

Claudie said:


> 2000 laptops, that's a lot of plastic!



Indeed. 
And over 100k screws. :mrgreen:


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## silversaddle1 (Sep 11, 2018)

And the really bad thing is even if they were not whole laptops, figuring around 4 pounds per laptop, at today's market, those 2000 laptops would have paid around 5600 dollars. Since I have no idea what shape the laptops were in, I'm just guessing incomplete. Had they been whole, at 4 pounds each, at $1.05 a pound, over 8 grand.

Of course, I'm Patnor made some money off the other parts.


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## snoman701 (Sep 12, 2018)

ferrocyanide leach?


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## Sleepydann (Mar 15, 2019)

Partner, were those pins mixed, metalic and non metalic? What process did you use?


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