# What to do with these components



## Bluebloomer (Aug 25, 2017)

He guys, I have been collecting components from PCB's for years now, and it's time to get it cleaned up a little as it is taking too much space now. My qyestion is; what should I do with the following components:

- crystal oscillator (with the metal housing) around 2 kilo's
- different kind of tantalum capacitors around 2-3 ounces
- over 5 kilo's of chips (with no means to incinerate)
- buckets full of transformers and the electromotors from hard drives and floppy drives and PC PSU's

I'm tired of removing the copper from the transformers, but I'm not sure they have any real value. 
The oscillators need a lot of acid to process and I am not sure if it is worth it while.
No idea how to recover the Tantalum, or what to do with these.

The chips might contain a lot of gold but I do not think I can incinerate that kind of volume, unless I can use a barbeque to do so.

Any input is welcome, need to figure out how to proceed with these..


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## mls26cwru (Aug 25, 2017)

what kind of chips? Bga, dipps , quads, or a mix?


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## patnor1011 (Aug 25, 2017)

You do not need to incinerate them. I recovered gold even without incineration. A quite a lot of work but doable. 
All you need to do is to get steel pipe with thread on end. Add iron cap and you have crude mortar and pestle with another iron rod. You just break them into smaller pieces so you can manually remove big pieces of metal which some of them may have inside. Then get a cheap 10euro coffee grinder * and grind material in powder. Wash it up and pan and you have your concentrate. 
Incineration just speeds up process dramatically but it can be done without it. I know, I did it.


* (you may need more than one as blades will be disappearing in front of your eyes when doing bigger amounts but one should do for 5 kilo of IC providing you remove bigger chunks of metal first)


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## Bluebloomer (Aug 26, 2017)

mls26cwru said:


> what kind of chips? Bga, dipps , quads, or a mix?



A mix .. All of the above, mainly from computer components and motherboards.

Thank you Patnor, it seems to be one of the most time consuming jobs with perhaps the biggest gold payout, so I want to do it right. The H2SO4 method seems very scary to me, and messy, so for me that option is out. crushing the chips seems in smaller pieces seems like hard work aswell but doable. 

What about the crystal oscillators, transformers and tantalum caps ?


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## patnor1011 (Aug 26, 2017)

Nothing really. Unless you have like ten of kilograms. Transformers are not good for the coffee grinder as they do have a thick copper piece in them and oscillators if they are ceramic ones with visible plating just crush them like IC.


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## Grelko (Apr 1, 2018)

Bluebloomer said:


> - crystal oscillator (with the metal housing) around 2 kilo's
> - different kind of tantalum capacitors around 2-3 ounces
> - over 5 kilo's of chips (with no means to incinerate)
> - buckets full of transformers and the electromotors from hard drives and floppy drives and PC PSU's



The outside of the oscillators can be dissolved in HCl. I'm not sure if there's any PMs in the metal casing. 

Or just cut them open and dump out the small disc with silver in it. Afterwards, crush up the disc and process the silver. Sometimes cutting them in half flattens them, but you can put a small flathead screwdriver between the sides and pop it back open.

There's a few people on the forum that will buy tantalum caps.

Crushing the chips as patnor1011 said, works very well and is a nice workout for your arms also :lol: . Use a gold pan to get the bonding wires out. If you use a blender... You might want to cover the glass with tape just incase it breaks and don't breathe the dust. Sift out the bits of metal from of the chips every so often, or the blades won't very last long. Process the rest of the metal pieces, which are mostly magnetic. (The blades on my old blender were destroyed after 1/2 pound of whole chips... I didn't take out the metal bits.)

Edit - If you add a little water to the material in the blender, it makes less dust, but after you are done, pull out the blade and check under it. There's a chance that some of the bonding wires get stuck underneath.

For the transformers and motors, check your local scrapyards, they normally take electric motors, and some places take the transformers (and computer fans) as "copper bearing scrap" or copper #3. If they don't, you can always just toss them into the "shred" pile along with dirty steel.

If you really want to get the copper out, the graphite transformers can be crushed with a hammer, but the pieces go everywhere so do this in a trash can, bag, cardboard box, etc.

The metal transformers, you can either cut the steel and pull the copper out with a screwdriver or pliers. Or, cut through the copper with a chisel, dremel etc, then pull it out.

A lot of the tiny motors can be smashed with a hammer and then pull the copper out. Some of them have a bit of brass also. The small floppy drive motors, that have the metal rod coming out of them, sometimes the rod is brass or stainless. If you hold the motor with pliers, you can twist the rod then pull it out.

Edit - If I remember correctly, some of the CD drive motors have a white plastic cap on one end (The motors are attached to the board itself). If you pop that off with a small screwdriver, there may be tiny brass ring inside and 2 legs going to the very center that have silver contacts.

Edit - spelling


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## MicheleM (Jan 10, 2021)

patnor1011 said:


> You do not need to incinerate them. I recovered gold even without incineration. A quite a lot of work but doable.
> All you need to do is to get steel pipe with thread on end. Add iron cap and you have crude mortar and pestle with another iron rod. You just break them into smaller pieces so you can manually remove big pieces of metal which some of them may have inside. Then get a cheap 10euro coffee grinder * and grind material in powder. Wash it up and pan and you have your concentrate.
> Incineration just speeds up process dramatically but it can be done without it. I know, I did it.
> 
> ...



Dear Patnor1011, dear all,
i am also oriented to process IC chips in this way (without pyrolysis/incineration or wet ashing) , i would ask if it is a less efficient method, and if so, do you know how much less efficient than the other methods? (roughly)

thanks all
M.


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## patnor1011 (Jan 12, 2021)

MicheleM said:


> patnor1011 said:
> 
> 
> > You do not need to incinerate them. I recovered gold even without incineration. A quite a lot of work but doable.
> ...



It is not "less efficient". It is more labor intensive, more time consuming but at the end you will recover the same amount as with any other method. Just do it carefully and you recover whatever is there. 
One more drawback with this manual crushing method without incineration is that you will likely have to process pins from inside IC as some of wires will get "mashed in" on pins and other metal present as gold is very soft and malleable.


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## MicheleM (Jan 12, 2021)

Thank you for your reply

M.M


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