# PCB contents - weights



## patnor1011 (Dec 10, 2009)

I have got another Precision Scales after my old one hit floor and while stripping PCBs I have decided to put up this thread with data. I will try to sort out various types of PCBs and weight of components. At this moment I am stripping and separating to this types: fully plated pins, partially plated pins, ICs, capacitors and flatpacks with gold corner.
My first is Dell MB with pentium one type slot.
fully plated pins 7,5g
partially plated pins 9,5g
capacitors 1,8g
ICs 9.3g
flatpacks 3 pcs

I did not take into total weight pins in black slots /marked red in picture/ as they are pain in the a*se to remove them and not really worth hurting your hands or spending electricity on heatgun. I am sorry for poor quality of pictures but dont have better camera here, another pictures will be better I promise. I will try to put up more data from various PCBs later.


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## patnor1011 (Dec 10, 2009)

Another Dell MB W46-Z2-03-36

fully plated pins 7,3g
partially plated pins 7,4g
capacitors 5,1g
ICs 4,2g
flatpacks 2 pcs


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## samuel-a (Dec 11, 2009)

hi pantor, by looking at some catalogs i have learned that most of the "fully plated" (header pin - male) run between 10 - 30 µin in thickness.
"partially plated" pins split in two:
the female slot on board are useally flashed 5-8 µin
connector on the sides, run between 15 - 30 µin but most of them are 30 µin

IC's, i don't know the lenght of the wires inside, but do know they are 4-7 µin in diameter.

whay save the orange/yellow capacitors? PGM's?


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## patnor1011 (Dec 11, 2009)

samuel-a said:


> whay save the orange/yellow capacitors? PGM's?



Well to be honest at this moment only becouse they are easy to strip ... I broke some and there is cube of crushy dark grey metalic matter inside. I want to ask my friend to Xray that for me to find if there is any pd in there...


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## gorfman6154 (Dec 11, 2009)

patnor1011 said:


> samuel-a said:
> 
> 
> > whay save the orange/yellow capacitors? PGM's?
> ...



Patnor1011, here's a link to a nice cross section of the surface mount capacitors, showing Tantalum, and Silver. This is the same for the yellow and black caps. The orange ones are made with Niobium.

If you still do the x-rays, please post them as we love x-rays of electronic stuff!! 8) 

If you have the time and storage area, it would be worthwhile to stockpile all of these caps, imho. When i get more time i'll find a patent for recovering Tantalum, and Niobium from caps.

http://www.nec-tokin.com/english/product/tantalumcondenser/outlineneo.html

I'm still waiting for Gomez to activate me :| , for processing. As of now i've got 5700 minutes of online time.

Good luck, Gorfman


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## patnor1011 (Dec 11, 2009)

heya....
gomez is lazy outfit it takes few days to activate. i have about 7000 min I think and only handful of processed time about 25c but I will not give up and we will see if it will have any effect. I am storing all of them and have few other things to xray but my friend is 1000 km away and I will do that xray-ing in january when I will go home for some holiday.


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## gorfman6154 (Dec 11, 2009)

patnor1011 said:


> heya....
> gomez is lazy outfit it takes few days to activate. i have about 7000 min I think and only handful of processed time about 25c but I will not give up and we will see if it will have any effect. I am storing all of them and have few other things to xray but my friend is 1000 km away and I will do that xray-ing in january when I will go home for some holiday.



Yeah, i noticed that. But at least we are trying something to benefit the Forum. I hope other will join in :idea: , it's the power of numbers that would make it an effective fundraiser. 

Besides that, i just posted a patent for refining Tantalum and Niobium, under Patents, on the board index.

Enjoy your Holiday Season, 8) Gorfman


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## plamenppp (Dec 12, 2009)

patnor1011 said:


> I did not take into total weight pins in black slots /marked red in picture/ as they are pain in the a*se to remove them and not really worth hurting your hands or spending electricity on heatgun.



I agree completely. They are only partly plated - only from one of the sides and less than 5% (approximately) of the surface.


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## patnor1011 (Dec 23, 2009)

3COM 56k Global GSM&Cellular Modem PC Card
Model 3CXM756

fully plated pins N/A
partially plated pins 0,1g
capacitors 0,9g
ICs 2.8g
flatpacks N/A
there was small piece "finger-like" and ceramic crystal oscillator with little bit of Au inside.


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## patnor1011 (Dec 23, 2009)

NEC DVD ROM

fully plated pins 1,1g
partially plated pins N/A
capacitors 0,8g
ICs 5.8g
flatpacks N/A


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## patnor1011 (Dec 23, 2009)

Elite DVD Drive

fully plated pins 0,9g
partially plated pins N/A
capacitors 0,3g
ICs 9.6g
flatpacks N/A


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## patnor1011 (Dec 24, 2009)

Another Dell MB oldish one

fully plated pins 7,7g
partially plated pins 8,1g
capacitors 4,6g
ICs 12,4g
flatpacks 3 pcs


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## patnor1011 (Dec 25, 2009)

Compaq MB

fully plated pins 8,9g
partially plated pins 7,1g
capacitors 1,6g
ICs 2,8g
flatpacks 2 pcs


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## plamenppp (Dec 28, 2009)

Where did you get the partially plated pins? Are they from the white PCI slots? What is µin? I know it a measure for lenght.
About the long black slots - I found something very interesting yesterday. I don't know how is this part called but it contains half plated pins. I post 2 pictures.


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## samuel-a (Dec 28, 2009)

µin = microinch

on the motherboards, the blabk slots are only flashed at contact point and are a b**ch to remove.


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## patnor1011 (Dec 29, 2009)

plamenppp said:


> Where did you get the partially plated pins? Are they from the white PCI slots? What is µin? I know it a measure for lenght.
> About the long black slots - I found something very interesting yesterday. I don't know how is this part called but it contains half plated pins. I post 2 pictures.



fully plated - all yellow 
partially plated - only tip or small part of pin plated
it is up to everyone if they want to spend time to harvest partially plated pins - you have to decide if that is worth your time. I have lots of time and doing that as hobby so I am not pushed by some targets or deadlines... :lol:


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## DarkspARCS (May 4, 2011)

I can't give a full PM loadout on the Sony VCR Plus I took apart, however there is some sort of door compartment on it that folds down that has push button controls on it...

this is what I found inside the door:




one gold plated button connector package (weighs nicely),. a small mylar (most likely silver) panel, and a brown board with black overlay over a really thin silver or paladium underlay...


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## lysdexic (Mar 16, 2014)

patnor1011 said:


> ...
> I did not take into total weight pins in black slots /marked red in picture/ as they are pain in the a*se to remove them and not really worth hurting your hands or spending electricity on heatgun...



I can't tell from the picture, are those male pins inside a plastic housing or are they female pins like those on memory and pci slots?

I'm not worried about spending time, like you I decided this is an interesting hobby. For the male pins in plastic I found I could use an old wood chisel to pry the plastic up a bit then work along it's length back and forth until it was raised above the circuit board. Then grab it with vise grips (not tightening to the point of crushing the plastic) and pull it off. Then I sniped the pins of with diagonal pliers. I have very little material to work with and I'd rather do this than watch TV so for me it's worth it. If I had a lot of boards to strip it probably wouldn't be worth it.

The memory slots, the plastic was easy to pull off with vise grips. The pins I bent away from the center at about a 45 degree angle and sniped with aviation snips (or scissors you don't care about) as close to the plating as possible. But the partial plating and they seem to be plated spring steel I only tried a couple of those before deciding there's no good reason to harvest them.


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## joubjonn (Mar 16, 2014)

I don't even mess with the slots, for one they are flash plated at the tips only usually and another thing they use barillium (spelling?) copper material as the base metal to get that spring action to make good contact with the fingers. which is nasty to dissolve, nasty chemicals. I take the IDE male pins only off MB's and toss the rest. just my two cents on that. 

even the IDE male pins are not all that great for gold, need a lot of them to yield a return, they go in the sulfuric cell. 

I'm thinking about figuring out what the exact yield is of those. 100 grams in nitric compared to 100 grams of 1970's plated material. If I do it, I'll keep y'all updated. easier to figure it out with nitric wash then trying to figure it out in a sulfuric cell.


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## joubjonn (Mar 16, 2014)

this is also a hobby for me, I don't do it for the money. 
sometimes advice on what material to scrap can be different for the ones on the forum that do it for a living compared to us weekend warriors. iv probably spent more then I have in gold buttons (and I get most of my scrap for free). but I love it. and someday that will change


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## g_axelsson (Mar 16, 2014)

joubjonn said:


> I don't even mess with the slots, for one they are flash plated at the tips only usually and another thing they use barillium (spelling?) copper material as the base metal to get that spring action to make good contact with the fingers. which is nasty to dissolve, nasty chemicals.


The slot connectors are not made with beryllium copper. They are often made of phosphor bronze wich contains a small bit of tin. Dissolving the metal in nitric acid creates the hated metastannic acid that is almost impossible to filter.
I usually only process these slot contacts when I'm low on better scrap (not likely to ever happen) or when it's older and more heavily plated slots. (I have a couple of boxes stashed away with 386 mother boards.)

The black slots that Patnor marked in red are ISA slots and it was hard to find new computers with them ten years ago. Today they are virtually extinct.

The most common place to find beryllium copper in is CPU sockets.

Göran


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## lysdexic (Mar 16, 2014)

joubjonn said:


> I don't even mess with the slots, for one they are flash plated at the tips only usually and another thing they use barillium (spelling?) copper material as the base metal to get that spring action to make good contact with the fingers. which is nasty to dissolve, nasty chemicals. I take the IDE male pins only off MB's and toss the rest. just my two cents on that.
> 
> even the IDE male pins are not all that great for gold, need a lot of them to yield a return, they go in the sulfuric cell.



As always the answers to things like beryllium copper are already here somewhere once I know what to look for.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=5145#p44161

More insight gained and lessons learned but that belongs on a depopulating boards thread. I didn't mean to hijack patnor's thread.

Thanks everyone.

-Doug


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## gaurav_347 (Mar 14, 2015)

can anyone tell me what is the average weight of one bga chip ?


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## Barren Realms 007 (Mar 14, 2015)

gaurav_347 said:


> can anyone tell me what is the average weight of one bga chip ?



There are really too many types and sizes to answer that.


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## solar_plasma (Mar 14, 2015)

If you mean the bigger ones like north- and south bridges, they are between 2 and 4,5 g.


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## gaurav_347 (Mar 14, 2015)

Thank you!


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