# How much Silver?



## DMF80 (Mar 31, 2015)

Hi,

my name is Daniel

I want to start by giving you all a "thumbs up" for this forum, it has a lot of information that I will occupy most of this year and next reading to really become closer to an expert on scrapping and refining.

I live in Finland and sometimes I get some things from my work or from friends, they all know about my hobby. So I am planning to make a gold and silver medallion for my son that is set to be born on the 17th of June. I got these connectors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WNKkl1WGN8

I managed to get full details of it's contents and dimensions I will leave the next link with the link:

http://www.automationdirect.com/static/specs/zipportmwconn24b.pdf

I have now two of those glass jars almost full (5.7kg = 201 ounces all together) of contacts.

selling them is not an option, I'm here more for the fun of making the medallion, I want to know more or less how much more material do I have to refine to get the right amount. 20 grams is my goal.

I will do the refining this year and will leave the results, just wanting someone to give a wild guess or if it is possible to calculate how many grams I have in this lot of pins.

Thank you,

Daniel


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## g_axelsson (Mar 31, 2015)

Hi Daniel and welcome to the forum from a guy on the other side of the Bottnia bay. 8) 

To get the silver from those contacts would probably cost you more than the silver is worth. Plated silver is really hard to extract and I don't recall seeing anyone on the forum that have successfully and cheaply extracted silver from plated objects. The one thing I think might work is the reverse plating cell, but I've only seen people using it for gold. The problem there is to recover and refine the silver sulphate that you probably would end up with.

To know how much silver you have is possible, the contacts are plated and even though the document says "Hard silver plate (2 um Au) or gold" I think the 2 um thickness is correct. Just calculate the surface area, multiply with thickness and density of silver and you know how much silver you have per contact pin. Then just multiply with the number of pins you have.

But there are always losses on the way so even if you have 20 grams right now, you will never get that amount out of it.

You better plan to give the medallion to him on his second birthday. Then you have time to read all the introduction material on this site. (look at the stickies on top of every section)

I also recommend (strongly) to read Hoke's book and at least do the acquaintance experiment for silver in it. You also need a secure place to work and store acids, you can't do this inside an apartment, and you need a source of nitric acid for working with silver.

Personally I just toss this type of scrap with other brass and sell it as such. With today's prices where I live I could buy 15 grams of silver if I would sell it straight ahead.

Göran


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 31, 2015)

At 2 micron thickness, I come up with about .002 grams per sq cm of silver plated area. It would take about 15,000 cm2 to get an oz of silver.


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## solar_plasma (Mar 31, 2015)

A tray like I used may be much easier to strip but:

http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=16591&p=212986&hilit=tray#p212986

In the end I had 100g washed cement silver and there are still some powders and still some plating left. I would use this method again, whenever I wanted to strip silver. Profitable is relative. Profitable would be to work overtime at my job instead.


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## DMF80 (Apr 7, 2015)

Hi everyone,

Thank you all for having the time and dedication, also for answering my question.

*g_axelsson:*

I do have much more material for refining, I was just trying to make a rough estimation of how many grams I could get from all those contacts. Doing this in a secure place was and always will be my priority, using all protective tools that I already have with me. 

*goldsilverpro:*

I will be taking the contacts to work. There they have a pyramid calculative scale where it will automatically give me the number of contacts that I have. I really don't want to start to count them right now if I can get a machine to do that for me without me making a mistake and having to restart the count. Then I will have better numbers to put here. But right now I got this:

+/- 2 cm2 = 1 contact
15000 cm2 = 1 oz and that is 15000/32(g)(32g =1 oz) = 
468.75 / 2 (2 cm2 per contact) = 234.375
Every *235* (give or take) *contacts*, gives me *1g of silver*?

This is fun :lol: 

solar_plasma:

Its was very much fun reading that thread, I enjoyed it and learned much more from it. Its an motivational idea, improving it and more trail and error (testing) is needed to get a more defined grasp on what is happening there. My contacts are so small, what should I use for anode and cathode?
I am not doing this for a profit, I want to start small with the things I collect from material that the company that I work for PAYS another firm to collect and recycle. They throw a lot of gold and silver and other materials away everyday! 


I still have a lot to learn ( I know everything about safety). So my next question is for all members that can send me the right direction:

Motherboards that have gold printed in the circuits. How do I extract the gold? Links?

Is there a list of IC chips that have and have not gold? Links?

Thank you all


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## butcher (Apr 8, 2015)

Daniel, 
Welcome to the forum.

It concerns me when you say you know everything about safety.
In this field of work we will never know everything about safety, we must continually keep studying so we learn how much we do not know.

The more we learn, the more we find out that which we do not know.


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## solar_plasma (Apr 8, 2015)

DMF80 said:


> So my next question is for all members that can send me the right direction:
> 
> Motherboards that have gold printed in the circuits. How do I extract the gold? Links?
> 
> ...



This should help for the direction:
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=5677&start=20#p230319

Most ICs contain gold bonding. Cheap BIOS ICs normally aluminium bonded.


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