# refined keyboards



## geonorts (Feb 1, 2010)

I tried refining of keyboards mylars and I thought i would post my results. Mylars taken from 40 keyboards all white keyboards from 10 to 4 years old, it took about a minute a keyboard at a casual rate, mylars were cute into quarters and put in a bucket with enough nitric acid and water to cover them, left them in the bucket for a week then converted the silver nitrate to silver metal using the silver chloride method as in steves video. ended up with 10.5 grams of silver.


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## escrap (Feb 1, 2010)

Just curious, how much nitric did you end up using. Right Now in my warehouse I have something like 5 Gaylords stacked nicely with keyboards.


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## geonorts (Feb 2, 2010)

I used just under a litre of nitric topped up with enough distilled water to cover the mylars I think next time I will use less acid and more water


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## escrap (Feb 2, 2010)

Do you think that there would be a way to do it to were it is profitable. I mean i could probably have a 4 to 500 lbs of mylars.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Feb 2, 2010)

UMMMM You could burn them in a cast iron pot till all you have is ash and finish the job on a crucible.


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## escrap (Feb 2, 2010)

Oh no, burning is no good. I actually have a buyer that I deal with that purchases my bare mylar. I do get only .05/lb for it, but it will help make this process worth it. Plus the wire off the keyboards, the plastic and the steel. I am just wondering if the price of breakdown and everything else is worth it. I have a near unlimited source of keyboards.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Feb 2, 2010)

That 10g looks equivilant to others as far a quantity per key board recovered that I have seen. What dilution nitric to water did you use? You could check on the ratio of silver that will disolve in nitric/water solution and find that you can use the same batch of fluid to process 3-4 batches of maylars. The more of the maylar you can trim off the more you can process at a time.

Good job there.


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## Oz (Feb 2, 2010)

To dissolve his 10.5 grams of silver he would need 25ml of 50/50 nitric (12.5ml of 70% nitric/12.5ml of distilled water). In other words he wasted a bunch of nitric. At the current spot price of silver his 10.5 gram button (if pure) is worth $4.77, so the question is how much do you pay for “just under a liter” of nitric? 

I'm sure he lost money but he earned an education.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Feb 2, 2010)

He said he wanted to keep the maylars and sell them for .05 /lb. 

Save a penny spend a dollar.


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## escrap (Feb 2, 2010)

Yes, see i get the keyboards for free, I am just wondering if taking the extra time to break them all down is really worth it. In this previous post it is said for ever Kilo gram of mylars, there is 17 grams of silver. 

So 1Kilo/9.00(spot price for 17grams)=.24/lb..that is a little bit better than the plastic and the steel price, Plus i would get an extra 5 on top of that for the mylars. That is .29/lb for mylars.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=4924&p=42380#p42380

that is the other link.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Feb 2, 2010)

You can work it that way just keep using the solution till you know it is saturated and then drop it with copper. It all depends on how you want to treat the maylar. In small pieces or large pieces. Heck if you can do them in small pieces you might get by with running them thru a paper shreder, I have not tried this way myself.


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## geonorts (Feb 2, 2010)

I get my nitric for 3.80 a litre, mylars free so there was some profit, this was just a test to see how much silver I could get out of the keyboards as an average, like many of you I have hundreds of keyboards and currently haven't been getting much for them as it was calculated I could have added fresh mylars to the acid to boost profits but this was my first preliminary test next step is to increase profits by calculating amount of acid needed for the next batch. I also wanted to work out how long each keyboard took to get the mylar out so i can work out hourly profits to see if its worth the time, from calculations i believe I can get profits to around $5-$8 australian an hour


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## Platdigger (Feb 3, 2010)

Think sodium thiosulfate would be cheaper for doing these?

Of course it depends on how cheaply you can come by nitric, right?...


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## butcher (Feb 3, 2010)

what if you use dilute nitric in stoichiometric amounts, (capture red fumes in water while digesting), then distill the major portion of silver nitric solution, previous batch of nitric could be distilled into next batch, some addition of new HNO3 as needed.


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## Chumbawamba (Feb 18, 2010)

I've been accumulating mylars through my e-cycling business in preparation for extracting the silver. So far I have a couple hundred at least. Just as an aside, I've found that the very best keyboards are the beefy Keytronics kind. Sorry, I don't have a part number, but they sold a lot of them as I see quite a few of them come through my plant.

The reason I like them is manifold:

1) They come apart extremely easily - no screw driver required; in fact they aren't assembled with a jillion screws like other keyboards. Just bang them on their side on a hard surface and pry them apart.

2) Inside, you will find:

a) mylar film with silver (what we came to this party for in the first place)
b) a stainless steel clip that attaches the silver mylar data connector to the PCB inside
c) SOMETIMES the contacts on the PCB that mate with the silver mylar are gold plated
d) the data cable comes off easily

With enough of these keyboards you end up with a bunch of plastic, a bunch of copper (wire), some stainless steel, a little bit of gold, and of course some silver. All saleable commodities.

I got in a heavy duty paper shredder that does cross-cutting as well. I ran a few mylars through and while it doesn't turn them into the little bits of confetti that I was hoping for, it still comes out as shredded lengths usually no longer than an inch or two (I call it "tinsel" as that's what it reminds me of), making it much easier to dunk in a tank of dilute nitric.

I was initially trying to dream up a device that would work like a scanner: stick a stack of mylars in a hopper, use some steppers and rubber roller bars to grab a sheet and feed it across a reservoir filled with the acid solution, so that as the mylar passes over it dissolves the silver into a solution tank, then eject the mylar, wiping it down on the exposed surface so that any solution is directed back into the reservoir. It is doable, for sure, but not without lots of R&D. Certainly a project for a time I am preparing for far in the future when I have nothing better to do 

In the meantime, I'll see how cutting up the mylars into tinsel works out.


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## Chumbawamba (Feb 19, 2010)

I forgot one of the biggest reasons why I like these keyboards. Their mylar is one large "sheet" folded in half, with the separator film loose inside the fold, not spot welded to the sheets as with other keyboards, which sometimes makes separating the sheets a pain. Not only that, but they tend to have large silver traces and electrical ground areas where there's just a solid box of silver print.

Next time I come across one of these keyboards I'll note the model number.


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## dick b (Feb 19, 2010)

Chumbawamba:
Here an idea for you. Think of a french fry basket from McDonalds.
If it was made our of plastic so the nitric wouldn't attack if and was set in the wash tank with a slow back and forth motion, the fluid would wash the tinsel and disolve the silver, the heavies would settle to the bottom and the acid could be decanted out of the tank. That might work and you wouldn't need to watch it. Just change the tinsel and clean the tank when depleated.
Thats a fairly simple machine to build.
Good luck.
dickb


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## Chumbawamba (Feb 21, 2010)

Hi Dick.

Well, your idea certainly is not only feasible but sensible. I tend to over-think things sometime, but that's the curse of all engineers 

The real trick here is figuring out how to extract the mylar sheets from the keyboard quickly and easily. Right now it takes upwards of a minute per keyboard. That's only about an ounce of silver per hour, not counting all the further recovery and refining time


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## dick b (Feb 21, 2010)

Not sure that its possible to do it for a profit, unless your considering recovering everything from the disposal of pc's and getting the material for free. Around here there charging a disposal fee for TV's & CRT monitors of $5.00
dickb


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## Chumbawamba (Feb 22, 2010)

As far as I'm concerned, any material you can mine out of electronic scrap is profitable, if you wait around long enough. And in this case, "long enough" will be within the next 5 years as the precious metals commodity bull market continues its stampede.

I've charged in the past, and in fact just dropped my (minimal) fees that were a response to the commodities collapse of 08, but I accept most things through my e-recycling business at no charge (the exception being appliances). Being in California I am reimbursed for CRTs through the (stupid) state system. So yes, I'm getting my source material for free, and the only thing costing me money is warehouse rent and other incidental costs.


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## dick b (Feb 22, 2010)

No doubt about it every little bit adds up.
They use the handicap development center here to provide work for those people. They disassemble the pc's and do the recycling.
I can't see it just being sent to the landfill! 
dickb


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## Chumbawamba (Mar 4, 2010)

I got the model number of the Keytronic keyboard which yields a lot of silver while being extremely easy to disassemble. It is the E03601QUSASI-C. Apparently the E03601 part is the product family, so I would look for any Keytronics keyboard that begins with this part number.

Here is a description and photo:

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&q=keytronic+e03601qusasi-c&oq=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=4650256903893496865&ei=FhaQS_noGI7CsQPQrpW6CA&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBAQ8wIwAw#ps-sellers

Other keyboards that are great for disassembly are the black Dell variety (I had the part number but deleted it from my records before I had a chance to record it here). Also the Microsoft ergonomic type split keyboards have good silver on the mylar and they aren't too much of a pain to take apart (and I do it with glee as I've always hated those stupid keyboards, and Microsoft for that matter). Sometimes the flat Compaq keyboards that are black with a silver trim on the top around the special function buttons have gold plated connectors on the PCB inside.

I just pulled apart one last night that is quite the sight. Almost the entire bottom of one of the mylars is coated in silver print. Mmmmmmm, delicious. At least I hope it's silver, but I can't imagine what else it'd be. It's a bit darker than the traces which are on the opposite side of the same mylar. I imagine it functions as a ground plane. If the typical mylar yields .25g per sheet, this one ought to yield about 5g on its own.

The mylars have "Mtek" imprinted on them. As for who made the keyboard itself, I tracked down by it's FCC ID (https://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm) to Monterey International Corporation(?) out of Taiwan. The keyboard was made in 1991. It's just a run of the mill generic, so no way to tell what you have until you crack it open like a nut and extract the goodness. FWIW, the FCC ID is FKD46AK208.


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## silversaddle1 (Apr 25, 2010)

As silver continues to go up, mylars are even looking better! :lol:


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