# Ceramic CPU processing



## denim (Jan 15, 2013)

Howdy all,

I ran across these ceramic cpu's yesterday. I plan on processing them with poor man's AR. I have done a few smaller batches of these ceramic cpu's and have always been very pleased with the results. I paid $825.00 for the lot (local computer repair guy). I don't know if I will keep a detailed analysis of the yield of each type as some of the types are low in number, but for the ones that are higher in number I plan on reporting the yields. I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to process this many ceramic cpu's. Wish me luck- any advice is always welcome.


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## damezbullion (Jan 15, 2013)

jealous right now :shock: good luck man


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## tek4g63 (Jan 15, 2013)

That is a truly beautiful sight. You are a lucky man. I wish you great success. Keep us updated.


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## etack (Jan 15, 2013)

looks like you need some buckets to get started. :lol: 

Eric


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## srlaulis (Jan 15, 2013)

$825.00 for the lot :shock: I truly hope you get your monies worth out of that.


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## texan (Jan 16, 2013)

As has been mentioned here before it might be prudent to check to see if a "chip" collector see's any value in any of them before scraping them.

Texan


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## srlaulis (Jan 16, 2013)

I would be interested in buying a few. I am trying to collect one of every type of chip. I want to have one of every type b	efore they are all gone.


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## denim (Jan 16, 2013)

Thanks to all those who have shown their support. I am currently, and will be for the next few days, in the dissolution phase. Don't have much of an update yet. 

srlaulis,

I don't really want to sell any of these but if you can see any that you do not currently have in your collection I might be persuaded to get rid of a couple. I do have an appreciation for collections of things like this. PM me if you see anything you absolutely got to have. I can send you a higher resolution picture if you like. If you have an idea of a particular one you want by name, make, manufacturer etc I'll look through them and see if I have one.

I'll post results when I have them.


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## srlaulis (Jan 16, 2013)

No worries, denim. There are tons of people selling vintage cpus. I can find one easily. I am interested in seeing your final yield.


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## lioser (Jan 19, 2013)

I have a question ,how many cups you bought at $ 825 , or how weight ?
if the price is a little higher?


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## denim (Jan 19, 2013)

lioser- total weight was right about 22 lbs.

Update on progress- still in the dissolution phase. I broke my only 2000 ml beaker. Note to all buying beakers: make sure that what you are buying is a good quality beaker like Pyrex by Corningware. The Pyrex beakers seem to have much thicker walls than the other cheaper brands. It did not take much to crack the 2000 ml beaker when I was adding some cpu's. :evil: Now I am left with using 1000 ml beakers so it will take much longer. So I will keep trudging along and when I have some results I'll surely post them.


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## tek4g63 (Jan 19, 2013)

Good point about the lab glass. 

On a side note. Ceramic breaks glass with very little force. I'm not sure why, just know it does. 

The hammer that firefighters use to bust car windows to save peoples lives has a piece of ceramic on one side. It will pop a car window without having to swing so hard that you risk hurting the person inside. 

A fun little experiment if you have the chance. If you know someone with a old junk car that doesn't mind if you break the window. Take a regular old hammer and lightly tap thewindow now a bit harder. It will take some serious force to break it. Now take an olold spark plug and remove the white ceramic insulator off of it. Take the ceramic insulator and throw it at the window. POP goes the window.

Grew up next to a junk yard. Had to do something for fun.


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## philddreamer (Jan 19, 2013)

I like to use coffee beakers, from the second hand store, for the first steps in processing ALL my scrap, especially the ceramic cpu's. They're much cheaper than the lab beakers, so if a brake a coffee beaker, it doesn't "hurt" so much! :mrgreen: 
One way of surely braking a beaker is to have the chemicals in it, and then add the ceramics. First, I place my ceramics in it, gently, and then add the chemicals.
Save the lab glass for the refining steps... unless you don't mind putting it thru the "steps" and running the risk of breaking.
Take care! 8) 
Phil


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## mitchd (Jan 19, 2013)

coffee beaker really work well and you can get them for next to nothing around a buck each at yard sales and good will stores you should get the ones that don't have a fold or bump on the pouring side so that last bit of gold does not get trapped making it harder to clean out the pot..
I like to use old crook pots, very cheep at yard sales and they get nice and hot. They do tend to burn out after about a month or so
but a lot of gold can be run thourght them befor that happens.

happy recovery! 

Mitch.


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## denim (Jan 20, 2013)

Great advice on the coffee pots guys. I actually have a couple of them sitting on a shelf in my garage. Don't know why I didn't come to that conclusion myself. I think I will be making it a priority to look for them at garage sales from now on. Do you suggest keeping the factory lid on them, or removing the lid and using a watch glass/saucer to get a little tighter seal? And yes, I do very carefully add cpu's to the beaker before adding water/hcl. 

tek4g63- Interesting point about the spark plug against the window- who would have guessed.

Update on progress- still dissolving and will be for the next week or so. I have created and dropped six auric chlorides, and have now some precious brown powder- I would guess about 5 grams so far (many more cpu's to process). I will be refining all of the brown powder at least twice using Herald's method- hcl wash/ammonia wash/hcl wash etc... 

Problems encountered so far- Broke my 2000 ml beaker  , one of my hot plates went on holiday- trouble shot it to be a very corroded thermostat. I took the thermostat out of the circuit so now the burner stays on constantly. I then put a 1/2" thick 12 inch square piece of steel on top of the burner to act as a heat sink so the solution in the beaker does not boil too rapidly. Low and behold it works fine 8). I've had two foam overs due to adding too much nitrate but this was no problem as the burners are set in containment devices. Just a little time to clean up the solution and put it back in the beaker and I was back on the road. To anyone reading this who is considering doing this refining thing as a hobby please understand that containment devices are an absolute must as you will have an unfortunate foam over, or other spills.

Other than that everything is going as expected- slowly.


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## bswartzwelder (Jan 20, 2013)

Denim,

If you ever need one of the coffee carafes and can't find one at a yard sale, I believe they are only about $4 new at WalMart. I could be a little off on the price, but they are cheap and you can get them any time the store is open and no waiting for yard sales.


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## Geo (Jan 20, 2013)

thrift stores is a good source.Goodwill stores will have them. second hand stores and clearance warehouses is a good place to look for useful bargains.


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## Palladium (Jan 21, 2013)

It might not be the beaker quality at fault. Ceramic cpu pieces are like little glass cutters and will scratch the glass. Just like when you cut a window pane. You score a line and with just the right pressure.... pop !


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## denim (Feb 2, 2013)

As I promised in my original post here are my final yield results from these ceramic cpu's. 

Total yield = 22.2 grams 8) The scale shows 21.4 gr then I cleaned out my beakers of some residual brown powder and recovered another .8 gr. I started off with 345.5 ounces (21.6 lbs) in total of all cpu's combined (this includes all heat sinks). So some quick math: 22.2g x $53.60/gr= $1189.92 x .958 (23 karat) = $1139.94 x 95% spot = $1082.94. I sold it to a friend at 23k and 95% spot. I paid $825.00 so total gain (without considering operating costs) = $257.94.




Here are some yields as per make, model, etc....


AMD K6- some with heat sink and some without heatsink (I removed heat sink before weighing)- 1068 gr of cpu's = 2.1gr AU = .90gr/lb




Sun Ultra Sparc IIe- 100.1 oz (includes 69 oz of heat sinks)= .75gr AU = .12gr/lb if you include heat sinks in weight. These yield about the same as some green fiber cpu's so I guess that is why the big boys pay so little for them. A waste of time in my opinion for the average small time hobbyist refiner.




Intel Pentium 1 (no gold top)- 2174gr= 5.1gr AU= 1.07gr/lb



Intel 486- 995gr= 6.4gr AU = 2.95gr/lb Sorry- forgot to take picture, but these cpu's do yield much more than many others per lb.

The balance of the rest of the cpu's seen in my original post were all too few in number for me to do yield tests on- didn't have the time unfortunately.

As far as the gold plated heat sinks/cover plates go I have this to say. There are basically two types involved here. The thick kovar ones like on the top of the Pentium Pro, and the much thinner, and smaller cover plates seen on the bottoms of some chips as well as on the tops of rectangular 'centipede' ic's. The thick kovar heat sinks yielded 1.0 gram, while the thinner cover plates yielded 3.9 grams. I forgot to weigh these so all I can say is that I was very surprised at the yield for the smaller thinner cover plates. I processed all of these in nitric acid. Perhaps in the future I will process the kovar heat sinks in a cell instead, but I had too few of them to use a cell this time. Indeed the smaller plates were very worthwhile to process.
This was a fun experiment albeit very labor intensive. Next time I will process them in much larger batches as I will not be doing a test for yields. All of the dissolution was performed by poorman's AR (HCL with small incremental additions of sodium nitrate) on a hot plate. I am not experienced with the use of acid/peroxide on ceramic cpu's but I would like to investigate that. If I could put all of them in one bucket with acid/peroxide to dissolve the base metals then proceed with hcl/cl to dissolve the foils that would save a tremendous amount of time. Anyone care to chime in here? Thanks in advance!
I read on some previous post (I believe it was one by Harold) that if you drop a button of 24k AU in your dissolved chloride solution then you don't have to evaporate it down nearly as far(to a syrup) to get rid of the excess nitric acid. I was having trouble with the smb drops taking a long time to react so I started using this button in the chloride trick and it really made a difference. The subsequent drops with smb went very quickly (maybe one hour to drop 99%). I can only guess that before the button addition I was not ridding my solution of the excess nitric acid.
I started this with the intent to do a much more scientific test a far as yields go but it got out of control time wise. I do actually have a day job, thankfully. I was going to attempt using oxalic acid for my second refining (as per Sam @ Gold-n-Scrap) but time got away from me. I had to sell the button to pay mortgage. There is always a next time- until then- it's been real!!


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## tek4g63 (Feb 2, 2013)

Awesome post! Thank you for the data!

As for processing them in AP. That is a good but time consuming way to rid the parts of more base metals ( mostly in the pins ). But you will still need to do the AR thing because there are tiny gold wires inside the chips that won't come out in like foil form. It would be a much cleaner solution after the AR so the gold would probably drop much faster. 

If you still have all your waste solutions it would be a good idea to place a copper bar on them. You will surprised at how much silver you get from them. Its usually close to the same weight as the gold.

Thanks again!


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## FrugalRefiner (Feb 2, 2013)

tek4g63 said:


> If you still have all your waste solutions it would be a good idea to place a copper bar on them. You will surprised at how much silver you get from them. Its usually close to the same weight as the gold.
> 
> Thanks again!



Are you sure about that? I know a small amount of silver can be in solution in strong AR, but it should precipitate when you dilute your solution prior to precipitating your gold. I have a hard time believing he would find that 21 grams had remained in solution, but I could be wrong.

Dave


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## tek4g63 (Feb 2, 2013)

Really should be careful how I word things.

Yes you are correct most of the silver would have already been filtered out as silver chloride. Some may still be in solution. The lower quality ceramics some times have notable amounts of silver. I'm probably should not have said nearly as much silver as gold. Just thought that I'd give him a tip on recovering as much values as possible.

What I do is:

Collect the filters with the white/ grey powder in them. Dry and incinerate when I have enough. Then put the powder and ash in a jar for later processing. This jar is labeled silver chloride dirty. Don't have enough collected to bother converting back to metal yet. Then I cement any other values, dry the powders and incinerate. Then when I have enough of those powders I will digest with dilute nitric and filter then recover that silver.

So you are right, I have no way to know the exact amount of silver, I just know that it is there. I will not make this mistake again. Thank you for keeping the data accurate.


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## FrugalRefiner (Feb 2, 2013)

Wow, I really hate to do this again, but I don't think you should let your silver chloride dry out. If I recall correctly, it causes it to create a crystaline structure that will make conversion more difficult when you try to process it back to metallic silver. It would be better to keep your AgCl wet until you're ready to process it.

Dave


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## tek4g63 (Feb 2, 2013)

FrugalRefiner said:


> Wow, I really hate to do this again, but I don't think you should let your silver chloride dry out. If I recall correctly, it causes it to create a crystaline structure that will make conversion more difficult when you try to process it back to metallic silver. It would be better to keep your AgCl wet until you're ready to process it.
> 
> Dave




Thank you for that advice. Hopefully this will keep others from making the same mistakes. I'll start keeping them wet from now on.

By wet do you mean with water, or something else? Please clarify.


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## FrugalRefiner (Feb 2, 2013)

I believe water should be fine. If I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct _me_. :lol: 

Dave


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## denim (Feb 2, 2013)

Hey tek4g63- thanks for the compliment. I believe FrugalRefiner might be correct with the silver chloride thing being as I did use ice cubes and 3 times volume dilution. I did check the five gallon bucket of smb solutions and found no traces of gold, but I did not ever think to check for silver. I've had my head wrapped around gold only but maybe in the future.... I do actually keep the silver chloride in a jar with- you guessed it- H20. I believe I read in Hoke that one should keep his silver nitrate in HCL, but silver chloride will do fine in water. As you can see by the picture below I really believe in testing with stannous.

Best regards,

Dennis


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## g_axelsson (Feb 3, 2013)

denim said:


> ... I believe I read in Hoke that one should keep his silver nitrate in HCL, but silver chloride will do fine in water.


I guess that you were going to write silver chloride, not nitrate.

Göran


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## denim (Feb 3, 2013)

Thanks for the correction Goran. I had wrongly interpreted what Hoke was saying on pages 48-49. She was talking about using HCL instead of salt to precipitate silver chloride from a nitric acid solution. Since I was not using nitric, and had already precipitated silver chloride using dilution this was a mute point. As you can see I have plenty to learn. 

Dennis


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## Geo (Feb 3, 2013)

Harold has taught me that gold and silver can not stay in the same solution together except under certain situations such as cyanide leach. AR will hold a tiny bit of silver in solution but its relative to the temperature.the colder the solution, the less silver it can hold.dilution will drop a certain amount at ambient temps.as the solution is chilled,more will drop.it is a certainty that if silver is in the mix when you dissolve the metals, the silver will report with the gold to the final process. thats why you have to follow the washes and rinses with hcl and ammonium hydroxide to reduce the silver to trace amounts.


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## denim (Feb 3, 2013)

Thanks Geo. Actually I did refine as per Heralds method of hcl wash, ammonia wash, then another hcl wash. I did this for each of the two refinings. The first hcl wash was the only one that showed any color change, after that the rest were perfectly clear. I tested the first hcl wash with stannous and it showed some (very little) gold. It went in the stock pot.

Dennis


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