# Shredding Motherboards, PCI, Logic cards, etc..



## zmoney8787 (Jan 22, 2013)

So if I were to put boards through a large industrial shredding machine down to bits around 1" or 1/2". Remove the ferrous metals. What should be done with the remaining board pieces, plastics, non ferrous metals, etc. Can I just place it in nitric, then AR, add h2so4, and smb drop out pm's? This is not a question of refining methods in general. Just my options after I have shredded boards. Thanks.


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## jimdoc (Jan 22, 2013)

Shredding boards will just make a mess for you to deal with.
You want to separate the better material from the waste, not mix it up.

Jim


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## zmoney8787 (Jan 22, 2013)

I'm thinking more industrial scale. Like, what does an escrap buyer do with the boards? I can't imagine they are like me sitting in front of the TV with an exacto knife and pliars. lol


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## resabed01 (Jan 22, 2013)

There was a very informative post about this subject just today.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=16982

Enjoy the reading


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## zmoney8787 (Jan 22, 2013)

baller


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## burningsuntech (Feb 7, 2013)

I depopulated the boards using a heatgun for the larger ones and sand pan for the cell phone boards, then I ran the cell phone boards thru a 1/4 inch crosscut shredder and the PC boards I cut in half and ran them like memory boards thru AP. Worked very well. - RA


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## bswartzwelder (Feb 8, 2013)

I've thought about doing it this way many times. Remove tin and lead by soaking in hot HCl. Shred the boards, soak in AR. Once this is done, is there any way to safely get the last few bits of gold out of the wet boards or will the AR (which contains minute quantities of gold) just be lost? At todays prices, any amount of lost gold is valuable. After all, we are trying to get gold off circuit board traces which is only a few microns thick. If we leave a few microns of AR on the board, haven't we just lost values?


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## Geo (Feb 8, 2013)

the best way to recover all of the metals IF you are going to shred the material anyway is to melt all the metal into Doré bars and part the copper leaving any values such as precious metals in the anode slimes.


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## nickvc (Feb 8, 2013)

In my opinion, just my opinion, you cant recover all the values in a small set up, well not economically. I take the same view of cats, you always leave some pregnant solution behind where as the big boys who use arc furnaces don't so they can pay more for the material than you can recover if you have volumes. The big e waste processors do not wet refine boards but concentrate and then melt all the metals into dore bars which eventually end up in copper refineries for the same reasons, the values are in a form that can be assayed and passed on for final refining of all the metals without loses.


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