# Help needed in yield estimate telephone cards



## archeonist (Jun 4, 2016)

Hi guys,

I can get my hand on a extremly large amount of telephone cards, more than 29 thousand pieces.
I know the gold content of one single card is very low, but 29000 times a small amount could mean serious numbers.

Is it idiotism to buy these for 200 euro's (I do not count the labor for processing these, I know I have to cut all 29000 of them to get a fair amount in my beaker)
Let me hear what you guys would do please!

Best regards,

Erwin


----------



## patnor1011 (Jun 4, 2016)

As we say it is all here already 
This may help answer some of your questions.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=20572&hilit=sim+card


----------



## archeonist (Jun 4, 2016)

patnor1011 said:


> As we say it is all here already
> This may help answer some of your questions.
> 
> http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=20572&hilit=sim+card



Thanks Patnor!


----------



## patnor1011 (Jun 4, 2016)

I would not go in this unless they are free. 
Insane amount of work compared to possible return.
I would expect no more than 10g from amount you mentioned. Now try to estimate how long it will take to cut out plated area and chips out of 30k of cards. 8)


----------



## archeonist (Jun 5, 2016)

Thanks for your advice patnor! Still I will buy them, just for the hobby :lol:


----------



## justinhcase (Jun 5, 2016)

Maybe use a drill press.
Clamp a large stack tight together and use a large diameter drill to drill out the entire stack at once.
The added advantage of braking them up and twisting so they will incinerate better.
Still more than lightly a negative in your return after all the work and chemicals.
with Two hundred euro you could buy 19g of scrap 375 alloy, or a nice sovereign if you shop around and find a keen seller.
That would give you profit with almost no work and a manageable bit of refining if you wanted , a much better use of your time.


----------



## Barren Realms 007 (Jun 5, 2016)

justinhcase said:


> Maybe use a drill press.
> Clamp a large stack tight together and use a large diameter drill to drill out the entire stack at once.
> The added advantage of braking them up and twisting so they will incinerate better.
> Still more than lightly a negative in your return after all the work and chemicals.
> ...



If you were going to try and drill the area out it would possibly work better if you get a bit that cuts a mortise joint used in wood working.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/14mm-Square-Hole-Saw-Mortising-Chisel-Twist-Auger-Drill-Bit-Woodworking-Tools-/151774444651?hash=item2356763c6b:g:yTAAAOSwLVZVzgwj


----------



## justinhcase (Jun 5, 2016)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> justinhcase said:
> 
> 
> > Maybe use a drill press.
> ...


That may work.But I have found that trying to drill plastic with woodworking bit's can be a pain.plastic likes a much shallower cutting angle than most wood drills.
If you could fit a conventional bit in the woodworking dril sheath that would be quite a neet cut.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 7, 2016)

Guys, no drilling needed. I bought the lot today for a much better price. These cards are about 13 years old. I noticed that the glue, wich holds the chip in place, has aged. When bending a card the chip pops right off! A lot of them I can almost do in one second. 
Still a hell of a job, but a lot less plastic. At the end that will give me a higher yield I hope. 
I'll try to keep you guys informed during this project.


----------



## justinhcase (Jun 7, 2016)

archeonist said:


> Guys, no drilling needed. I bought the lot today for a much better price. These cards are about 13 years old. I noticed that the glue, wich holds the chip in place, has aged. When bending a card the chip pops right off! A lot of them I can almost do in one second.
> Still a hell of a job, but a lot less plastic. At the end that will give me a higher yield I hope.
> I'll try to keep you guys informed during this project.


good stuff.
Make sure to search properly for embedded chip's and bond wires,they may be as much as the plated front.
Hope the whole pack came out in one.
You will no doubt be going for acid digestion rather than adding it collector metals and smelting,as everyone tries at first.
Do not try to filter your solution,be very patient and let everything settle a day or two if need be.your gold will lightly be extremely finely divided.
Do not fall into the trap of "aspirational Refining"you do not know the yield until you have run your material with your available kit and resources.
Good luck even though I ran a test batch of several hundred T-Mobile cards.You never know until you test!
But it is best to test in small samples before you buy the whole cow.
J


----------



## archeonist (Jun 10, 2016)

Hi J,

They come out like in the picture, they pop out easy. Still only done 2000, so 27000 to go :shock: 
What should I do? First run in AP like fingers, collect the foils and incinerate the rest? What will the route be after incineration? Panning the gold wires?


----------



## patnor1011 (Jun 11, 2016)

That is exactly how I did them.


----------



## justinhcase (Jun 11, 2016)

You can determine the thickness of gold plating by Using a pencil eraser and counting the strokes to cut through the gold. But I can see it is quite light in colour in places and the nickel sub strata is showing through a bit so that is more than lightly thin flash plating.
This test is not very accurate ,but you can tell the difference between flash gold and thick gold plate. flash come's off in one two or three strokes the more stork's the better you have done. some will not come off easily and that is more like layered gold which is what I look for. 
You do not want to use etching solution's if the plating is to thin to hold together in manageable particles.
What I do with my I.C.'s is incinerate and pulverise, then use up some 1940's coin stock as a collector and smelt them.
It is still to dilute an alloy to recover economically so I then use that alloy when I inquart my next batch of Karat gold. It is not very good if you want any return figures. but it adds the value to your output with only an hour or two hot work.
One of the reasons that people shy away for buying such items is that the flash plating is so thin it is swamped by the other metals.
The easiest rout though the less efficient is to incinerate and pulverise . then base metal leach before digestion in A.R.
Very messy and time consuming as the Au will be so fine as to make filtering near impossible so you will have to depend on settling your sediment.
quite costly in acid as well.
I have never used a shaker table but I have wanted to run some test's to see if that would let you concentrate the metals before smelting, Always more kit to build and test's to run.
I would be very keen to hear if some one has a better way or one that can turn a profit from such thin picking's.


----------



## patnor1011 (Jun 11, 2016)

That visible plating is only small bit of total recovered. Majority comes from bonding wires on other side of that chip.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 11, 2016)

patnor1011 said:


> That visible plating is only small bit of total recovered. Majority comes from bonding wires on other side of that chip.



Yes patnor, I noticed that. There are a few that have a transparant epoxy on the backside, more visible gold there. 

@justincase, as I understand you recommended an extraction technique? So when I have my powder from incineration , I mix this with the molten metal (from coins), inquart and process using nitric? Never done this. What dissolves (won't actually dissolve but mix) the gold better, is it copper or silver?

I'll do 2 test batches, partnor's way and yours.


----------



## justinhcase (Jun 11, 2016)

If you have familiarised your self with the basic processes you would understand that some metals act as a solvent and soak up elements of interest. Silver and Copper are the two most used but aluminium and others are used in other situations.
Impurity's such as silicon and other ceramic's will be tied up in your flux which can be ladled of the top if need be before poring.
Do not go " Mixing with Molten Metal " as to introduce cold and possible moisture containing material to molten metal would cause a Steam Explosion!!
I mix every thing together evenly as possible dry and charge my crucible half way before starting to heat. But as I say this will collect just about 99% of your value which is not a lot.
To make it more economical I then use that alloy for Karat scrap.
If you have read Mrs Hoke and preformed her excellent acquaintance exercises this will all be quite easy for you.
If you have not you will be trying to reinvent several hundred years of trial and error with material not well suit to experimentation.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 11, 2016)

justinhcase said:


> If you have familiarised your self with the basic processes you would understand that some metals act as a solvent and soak up elements of interest. Silver and Copper are the two most used but aluminium and others are used in other situations.
> Impurity's such as silicon and other ceramic's will be tied up in your flux which can be ladled of the top if need be before poring.
> Do not go " Mixing with Molten Metal " as to introduce cold and possible moisture containing material to molten metal would cause a Steam Explosion!!
> I mix every thing together evenly as possible dry and charge my crucible half way before starting to heat. But as I say this will collect just about 99% of your value which is not a lot.
> ...



Yep, I know, I have read parts of Hoke and learned a lot. Never read the part for making a flux though, I Always read the parts that were accurate for my processes. But I will read that part. For my work as a Chemistry teacher I learn a lot about this kind of chemistry in practice. I use this information to make chemistry a lot more meaningfull for my students, and that works!
Thanks for the tip about the moisture, could have been a sad end of a great hobby..


----------



## justinhcase (Jun 11, 2016)

Mrs Hoke has produced an excellent tutorial and much like when you are teaching your students it is important to stick to the lesson plan.
There is quite a deep logic to the sequence of study.
It helps a lot with understanding how the dispirit information can come together into an logical process and help you decide when and where to use each tool.
I am surprised that a Chemistry Teacher has not studied how metal alloys and amalgams work.
Where are you, In my younger day's we use to take weekend in Rotterdam. There where some great clubs hidden in it's industrial district's.
But have not had time for a holiday for over ten years. :lol:


----------



## modtheworld44 (Jun 11, 2016)

archeonist

If these were mine,I would use my 12 inch cullender and polypropylene filter cloth and HCL/bleach leach the plating.Then Incinerate and pan bonding wires,time spent doing it this way would be about 8 hours vs 1-2 days using other chemical process.Thanks in advance.



modtheworld44


----------



## justinhcase (Jun 11, 2016)

modtheworld44 said:


> archeonist
> 
> If these were mine,I would use my 12 inch cullender and polypropylene filter cloth and HCL/bleach leach the plating.Then Incinerate and pan bonding wires,time spent doing it this way would be about 8 hours vs 1-2 days using other chemical process.Thanks in advance.
> 
> ...


Easy enough to test. Try 500.
Note the amount of leach it took and the time to filter and so forth.
Then simple math's will tell you how much recovery you get for how much liquor you have to handle.
My personal preference is to do one process that catches every thing possible first time instead of having to do two separate recovery's.
My panning is a little rusty to be going after supper fine Au and the bond wires are prone to making some very find particles when pulverised. I would want a good large table to insure as little loss as possible.
Doing a side by side comparison of each possible scenario would be informative and let you compare effective results.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 11, 2016)

justinhcase said:


> I am surprised that a Chemistry Teacher has not studied how metal alloys and amalgams work.
> Where are you, In my younger day's we use to take weekend in Rotterdam. There where some great clubs hidden in it's industrial district's.
> But have not had time for a holiday for over ten years. :lol:



J. I am in the Netherlands (Holland), I live near the city of Arnhem, about 100 km from Rotterdam. The whole metalurgy is a science by it self, during a chemistry study you are only informed about the basic Chemistry principles that occur in many situations. I understand how alloys work, but understanding and applying the understood theory in practice is a different kind of skill. It is like reading and writing.
Interesting to see a lot of people doing great in applying Chemistry, I know for sure a lot of them don't have a Chemistry background, so tumbs up! On the other side it sometimes scares me a bit seeing people working without the proper safty precautions like gloves for instance or using the kitchen! :shock: as a labratory, terrible thought!


----------



## archeonist (Jun 11, 2016)

Ahhhh.., saturday evening a beer, television, and popping a thousand cards. Cheers! :mrgreen:


----------



## g_axelsson (Jun 11, 2016)

Only 999 to go! :mrgreen: 

Cheers!

Göran


----------



## archeonist (Jun 11, 2016)

Finished them in just over an hour 8)


----------



## Barren Realms 007 (Jun 12, 2016)

archeonist said:


> Finished them in just over an hour 8)



Yea But did you get the wires inside?


----------



## archeonist (Jun 12, 2016)

Yep, got everything, the whole chips. Tomorrow this test batch will get an AP bath, so I can collect the foils. After that I will incinerate the rest..
I'll post pictures of the process.


----------



## kurtak (Jun 12, 2016)

Stop complicating what is really a simple process :!: 

There is NO need to run them in CuCl2 (AP) to first recover the foils & then incinerate to recover the bonding wires

regardless of whether you choose to go with smelting or leaching - do it ALL in one recovery process

incinerate them AS IS --- then ether smelt them - OR - leach them --- done deal

You will save time (lots of time) you will create less waste (lots less) & you will suffer less value loss (the more steps you put in the process the more chance of value loss - at each step)

Kurt


----------



## nickvc (Jun 12, 2016)

Excellent advice as usual from Kurt.


----------



## patnor1011 (Jun 12, 2016)

kurtak said:


> Stop complicating what is really a simple process :!:
> 
> There is NO need to run them in CuCl2 (AP) to first recover the foils & then incinerate to recover the bonding wires
> 
> ...



AP can be reused so there is no more waste created than usual. Another point is that he is keeping eyes on gold all the time. 
You suggest direct leach of incinerated material but for that there will be more AR needed compared to amount needed for panned wires. Majority of base metals will dissolve in AP. 
There is value loss risk here too - if he will not incinerate completely there will be carbon present and that may suck out some gold from direct leach. 
Smelting presents potential loss to people who do not have experience doing so. It require addition of other chemicals to thin melt and if not done correctly then again bits of metals can be lost in slag. Smelted material will need to be further processed anyway. In my opinion there is no need to melt bonding wires and plating along with copper and nickel present there when AP (and quick nitric bath after incineration) will sort them out.

I am convinced that AP - incineration - panning - AR on concentrate and foils may be better suited in his case as he process quite a lot of material.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 12, 2016)

Guys, what does the word 'leach' means? Is it like dissolving everything in AP in this case?


----------



## FrugalRefiner (Jun 12, 2016)

You'll find many of the terms we use in A Glossary of Common Terms.

Dave


----------



## archeonist (Jun 12, 2016)

FrugalRefiner said:


> You'll find many of the terms we use in A Glossary of Common Terms.
> 
> Dave


Thanks!


----------



## archeonist (Jun 13, 2016)

Well there we are, chips are soaking in AP. The picture is about 4 hours into the reaction, the first foils already are starting to come loose.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 20, 2016)

After a few days almost all of the chips were stripped.
Under the copper layer where the gold foil was on, there seems to be more visible gold, a dot with several small dots surrounding it. They were not stripped, I think because they are embedded in the chip so the etching solution can't reach it. After I separated the foils 
(in the picture there is only a part of the total amount of foils) I incinerated the resulting chips with the golden dots an grind them to a fine powder.


Now I have to take the next step, should I go straight into AR or should I pan the gold out? Point is, I expect there to be extremely small gold particles that I for sure will not catch. Straight AR will give me a very dirty gold solution. What would you guys recommend?


----------



## patnor1011 (Jun 21, 2016)

You do exactly what I did. Now, do not be concerned about possible loss of some plating from "dots", they amount to mere cents not even that. Do pan a little to remove carbon and concentrate bonding wires. I do believe that bonding wires account to more than 3/4 of all the gold which is there. Pan slowly so only dirty water is discharged in that way you will not lose next to nothing. Reduce amount you are starting with to lets say 1/4 but I would go and reduce it to just 10%. 
I then washed it quickly with soak in warm nitric to remove small bit of copper and nickel from under plating of "dots" and then AR to dissolve bonding wires. If you will leave a bit more of carbon there then do just AR on concentrate, then filter it and add foils to filtered AR.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 21, 2016)

Thanks Patnor, I will follow your advice! I'll return later to show the results for the rest of the process.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 21, 2016)

Well the panning was quite easy and there is more gold in there than I expected. The gold is the brownish yellow stuff at the top, the rest are mainly copper particles. 

Partnor, you advise a hot nitric bath, for not more than 5 minutes or so?


----------



## patnor1011 (Jun 21, 2016)

Warm is enough just to dissolve that copper.


----------



## archeonist (Jun 24, 2016)

The result I got from 1000 cards is 0.297g


----------



## highlander1066 (Jul 4, 2016)

Sorry to hijack the thread as a new member but I run a mobile phone business and we get lots of old sims - mainly "timed out" new sims but also ex-customers etc. I have enough to fill a 1 litre ice-cream tub to the top - maybe about 5,000 but impossible to count them all - I could be way out in the estimate as it is about 1 years accumulation. 

We used to sell to an old gold dealer who visited our town ( who used to pay about 2p a sim ) but he has retired now. Most have been cut down to "nano" size ( the tiny sim size that fits an iphone 5 ). I was going to list them on ebay but would prefer to sell direct to the trade as some will have personal info on them like messages and/or contacts. anybody interested then PM me - I can weight them / photo them as required. ) 

Brian


----------



## Topher_osAUrus (Jul 4, 2016)

What state are you in?

And at 2 cents a piece, he was losing money most likely. Coild be why he stopped doing it. As the posts above say, there isnt much gold in them. At all. .29 g for 1,000 of them, so 1.25(ish) grams for 5,000 sims, and he payed 10,000 pennies, or 100 dollars for that many, he was taking a loss, a great loss.


----------



## archeonist (Jul 4, 2016)

Well, I did another 1000 of them. This time no AP but just straight incineration. I've panned the powder out and I took a nice picture of the result. The wires seem a bit longer than my first run where I first used AP.
The foils were sieved and I dissolved the base metals using nitric. 
I will post the results as soon as possible


----------



## FrugalRefiner (Jul 4, 2016)

Topher_osAUrus said:


> What state are you in?
> 
> And at 2 cents a piece, he was losing money most likely. Coild be why he stopped doing it. As the posts above say, there isnt much gold in them. At all. .29 g for 1,000 of them, so 1.25(ish) grams for 5,000 sims, and he payed 10,000 pennies, or 100 dollars for that many, he was taking a loss, a great loss.


Topher, his profile says he's from the UK. I suspect he means 2 pence, not 2 pennies.

Dave


----------



## macfixer01 (Jul 4, 2016)

FrugalRefiner said:


> Topher_osAUrus said:
> 
> 
> > What state are you in?
> ...




I'm unsure of their comparative value in dollars currently but I believe 2 pence literally means the same thing, 2 pennies?


----------

