# Fiber CPU's that act like ceramic ones



## Dude4ever (Apr 25, 2012)

Hi.

I took some pictures of some CPU's that I found it impossible to free the pins from with heat.
Take a look at them 

I am thinking about running this CPU's together with the ceramic ones, as shown in Samuel-a's video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ_R8Gr26kk

But it is clearly a fiber-type, and it is Pentium 3 processors, and one completely the same Celeron processor. So I do not want to make a lot more work than is necessary 










Comments??

Thanks


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## Geo (Apr 25, 2012)

those particular CPU's are processed in the same way as ceramics. i process them with like processors though because of the greater solder content. process the ceramics together and the black fiber together.they have been discussed at length on the forum. these processors should be run until light can be seen through the holes the pins are in.run whole without breaking, breaking them exposes more copper base metal. run in AR until the reaction stops from all metal being dissolved.


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## Dude4ever (Apr 25, 2012)

Geo said:


> run whole without breaking, breaking them exposes more copper base metal. run in AR until the reaction stops from all metal being dissolved.



Haha, I have already breaked them  Wasn't many, it's a start 

But I have searched all of the posts in the ceramic CPU Q&A for some pre-knowledge, in case it dissolves too much copper and I have to deal with it 
but I can't find what to do if that's the case, only that copper retards the whole process a bit..

Thanks


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## Geo (Apr 25, 2012)

when you process them, be sure to let the reaction proceed until all the base metal dissolves. if you stop the reaction early, any values (like gold) will cement out of solution before you can pour it off.


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## lazersteve (Apr 25, 2012)

Those are MMX fiber cpus or 'black fibers'. The pins will come out if you heat up the solder and beat the cpu against the edge of a metal pan while the cpu is hot. Alternately you can use dilute (35% ) nitric acid to strip the solder out of the holes. This leaves the legs loose for easy picking. 

The up side to using nitric is you are likely to find silver in the solution.

After the legs are all remove incinerate and crush. Then leach the final product with AR or HCl-Cl to get the gold out.

Steve


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## Dude4ever (Apr 26, 2012)

Ok guys, thanks! 

I have some ceramic ones, and some of these black fiber ones. Just in case, I submerged both types in HCl (separately) over night - no colour change.
So I will follow your advices and incinerate the black CPU body after removing the pins with heat or with nitric, then straight to AR.

EDIT: I have done exactly what I wrote, and now my AR is extremely green:







This is due to the iron right? I have seen gold foils actually come off the pins, floating around, and be gone the next time I look after the solution (10-15 mins apart)
The solution is now at 100ml, I will use HCl rather than more nitric to compensate for saturation.

Can you tell me if I just can use SMB in the solution as is when it's done, or if I have to deal with the other metal(s) first?
After completion I think about diluting it with water, but this could slow a eventual cementation wouldn't it?

Thanks


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## Geo (Apr 26, 2012)

when the dissolution of ALL the metal is complete, let the solution cool and then filter the solution into a clean glass vessel. prepare another container that will hold the solution you have and 3X that amount of water.add to this container a couple of cups of ice. decant solution into the container and rinse container with a little water and add that to your solution. stir the solution with a non-metallic utensil until the ice melts.if you see a white precipitate, that will be silver chloride. after the ice melts add the remaining volume of water. more silver will precipitate. let the solution sit overnight to let everything settle. tomorrow you will filter the solution again to remove the silver chloride.

after the silver has been removed you can add the SMB either dry or in a solution of water. just a few grams is all you will need.


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## Dude4ever (Apr 26, 2012)

Thank you very much Geo ^^,


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## Palladium (Apr 26, 2012)

I would save them filter residues. It looks like you went to ar with the pins before trying to get rid of all that copper in the pins ? As saturated with copper as it looks some of your gold has probably came back out as a black powder. Everything (base metals) needs to be dissolved or else that's where you will find your gold is in the filter residues.


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## Dude4ever (Apr 27, 2012)

Palladium said:


> It looks like you went to ar with the pins before trying to get rid of all that copper in the pins ?



No Palladium  There is no copper that I have seen in these pins, just iron metals. The Green solution turned golden yellow when I diluted it with water after Geo's instructions.
Steve has another post on the forum where he wrote that this black fiber ones is mainly kovar, I think. But everything is fine now, just have to percipitate the gold with SMB 



Palladium said:


> Everything (base metals) needs to be dissolved or else that's where you will find your gold is in the filter residues.



Everything did


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## Dude4ever (May 6, 2012)

It worked out fine following the basic instructions in this forum and Sam's website, and the help I got in these posts 
It may not be rocket science, but I certainly understand the difficulties and the challenges for us noobs, and as I get better, I will help others 
Now I got the re-refined and washed powder, and is about to melt my first button. Thanks 

Edit:
It turned into 3 buttons, or small BB's. A very small batch, but a successful one. I may have lost some gold in the process, but as one get better, loss is minimum  Here's some pics (My scale is a little off when it comes to light weighting) 0,090g is as right as it can be:


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## samuel-a (May 6, 2012)

Good job Dude4ever.

You are now hooked : )


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## Dude4ever (May 6, 2012)

Haha! Yes indeed :lol: Thanks


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## VanMarco (Mar 16, 2013)

so what about the tin that goes into AR?


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## g_axelsson (Mar 17, 2013)

VanMarco said:


> so what about the tin that goes into AR?


What do you mean? Usually it turns into metastannic acid and creates a mess if a lot or just hard filtered solutions if it's just a small amount.
There is a ton written about it on the forum, search for metastannic acid and you will find it.

Göran


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## artart47 (Feb 4, 2014)

Hi all !
Was reading this post so I put my almost 800grams of black mmx cpus to the nitric bucket ( 50%HNO3/50% distilled H2O ) 
Worked well gathered the pins, you can see light thru the holes in the cpus, but! ,the nitric solution is a rose/mauve color and there is a lot of grey/purple mud in the bottom. I'm surprized all that solid came out of the small amount of cpus!
Remember long ago, getting mauve powder. gonna go search my notes and posts.
artart47


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## Alentia (Feb 5, 2014)

Those CPUs are heavy in kovar alloy and contain almost no copper, but lots of Iron. If processing them with ceramics, most likely you will end up with gold loss from ceramics, which will be plated onto fibers kovar, as it is very hard to dissolve only with HNO3 or HCL alone for that matter.

Check the thread discussing before those specific CPU processing. They are best processed separately with HNO3 and diluted H2SO4 combination, before AR treatment.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=19516


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## kurtak (Feb 9, 2014)

Sorry I'm late responding to this one but after just rejoining the forum I am way behind in my reading so just now caught this one

Anyway - I don't see where anyone mentions the fact that the black epoxy center on the bottom of the CPU contains gold bonding wires - a lot of wires

Steve came the closest to hitting on this when he said to incinerate & leach - if you don't - if you just brake them open & leach the same as ceramics you are not going to get the gold from the epoxy underside center - only the gold in the center cavity so you are missing somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 your gold

Personally what I do is start with incineration - then brake them up - then use a magnet to remove kovar pins (& process the kovar pins as per instruction for such) - then I add a fair amount of my cement silver (or some sterling shot) to increase the amount of collector metal (there's not enough copper to start with) then smelt with a flux of borax, soda ash & fluorspar - pour into cone mold - re-melt - pour shot - treat with nitric - Gold settles out as mud/powders - cement silver back out to reuse as smelting collector metal again

Of course if your not set up to smelt you can go right to leach after incineration & kovar pin removal - what I really wanted to point out here was that no one mentioned anything about the wire's in the bottom epoxy center of these CPUs 

Kurt


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## Geo (Feb 10, 2014)

Here you go kurtak, maybe this will save you a little time. This way you only need to incinerate the part of the chips with bonding wires.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26q6ILMFe4k[/youtube]

Theres no need to incinerate the whole CPU.


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## bmgold2 (Feb 10, 2014)

Every time I see this thread it encourages me to keep working to get my first button of gold. I was working under the impression that I needed to make sure I had at least a gram of gold in the end to get a bead of gold big enough to see and hold without loosing. Now it looks like 1/10 of a gram would be enough for a first try. I still want/hope for at least a gram before I move on to the next step in my goal of getting my own refined piece of gold mainly because I am using a stripping cell and don't want to dilute the acid until it is worth doing even though I am only dealing with 1/2 cup of concentrated acid.

After I figure out the sulfuric stripping cell and finish processing my pins and connectors, my next try will probably be with the I.C. chips from my boards. My small tests have proven that there is gold in them. I also have a small amount of the fiber CPU's that I bought years ago when I first joined this forum. I'm sure I paid too much for them but eventually I will process them to recover what I can.


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## g_axelsson (Feb 10, 2014)

bmgold2 said:


> I was working under the impression that I needed to make sure I had at least a gram of gold in the end to get a bead of gold big enough to see and hold without loosing. Now it looks like 1/10 of a gram would be enough for a first try.


Even smaller are possible... http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=7056 :mrgreen: 

/Göran


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## bmgold2 (Feb 10, 2014)

g_axelsson said:


> bmgold2 said:
> 
> 
> > I was working under the impression that I needed to make sure I had at least a gram of gold in the end to get a bead of gold big enough to see and hold without loosing. Now it looks like 1/10 of a gram would be enough for a first try.
> ...



Thanks Göran,

That should encourage me to get my first button now. I'm getting really impatient to see some results from my work. I never would have thought that one chip would make a visible bead of gold. The little torch was encouraging too. I guess if you are only melting that small amount of gold it doesn't take a real large torch. The charcoal was a good idea too. I think trying to use a cupel to melt my tiny amount of gold would soak up the heat quicker than the torch can produce. The only torch I have at the moment is a cheap plumber's torch which won't get the whole cupel glowing even with some ceramic wool insulation.

I currently have a tiny amount of crushed I.C. chips in a vial soaking in weak [stt]HCl[/stt] homemade nitric. I can see the gold in the very bottom of the vial so I know there is some there. This was just another test with some very tiny I.C.'s to see if they contained gold. All of my other tests have just been dumped together because I didn't think I could get anything to melt out of them until I got a much larger amount. Looks like I should have been keeping them less contaminated. I'll eventually recover that gold. Nothing was thrown away. Even the Q-tips from the tests have been saved.


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