# 18 Dell PowereEdge servers



## NatiYati (Mar 26, 2012)

I have acquired 18 Dell rack mounted PowerEdge servers to scrap. They consist of:

11 PE 1855 Blade systems
2 Cabinets for Blade systems with many power supplies and fans
2 PE 1850
2 PE 6650 Each has 4 xeon processors
3 PE 1650

All the servers have dual power supplies and dual xeon processors. From the above I have:

42 Xeon Processors
34 Sticks of ram
32 SCSI2 15,000 hard drives

I have stripped them down and separated everything. Anyone willing to ballpark what kind of numbers in PM recovery I might get? To the learned individual on here, how would one proceed? I have ordered sub zero, have muratic and lye in volume.I have all the safety equipment. Many of the boards i baked in the oven and scraped all the components off already. That stunk up my house and made my girlfriend pretty mad. I am reading Hoke's book. Ordered the DVD's from Steve and other various tools.

Seems many directions i can go. Anyone care to tell me how they would proceed?


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## Geo (Mar 26, 2012)

sub zero? i know what it is, but why are you.. you know what, never mind. 

you should check out some of the post on gold recovery before you make a costly mistake. if you are just starting out on your recovery you have time to learn what the chemicals you will be using are and how to deal with them safely.

you have been on the forum all of four days and this is your first post. dont do any process without downloading and reading Hoke's book "refining precious metal waste". free to download from the books section or from some of our members signature line.

go to the guided tour and follow steves post on reactions and abbreviations of chemical names.

just FYI, subzero is plain sodium nitrate. you can buy it at any plant nursery or hardware store.

good luck.


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## jimdoc (Mar 26, 2012)

Safety equipment won't help you when you do stuff in your oven.
Your girlfriend should be mad. You need to study safety some more.

Jim


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## butcher (Mar 26, 2012)

In the house, in your oven?

Who are you trying to kill, yourself and your girlfriend?

You do not need acids, you need to learn not to poison yourself and those around you, forget trying to get a tiny bit of gold, (you would not get enough to pay to have yourself buried),

Study the safety section, and dangers involved, before you hurt someone.

All of the safety equipment in the world will not save you if you do dangerous things you have no knowledge about.


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## Acid_Bath76 (Mar 26, 2012)

Pretty Mad? You're lucky. Try that again, and maybe she won't wake up to tell you how upset she is. All for a couple bucks of yellow metal. Come on.


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## silversaddle1 (Mar 26, 2012)

A common mistake made by people who can't take a little time to educate themselves. You would have been way better off to sell the PCBs to a scrap yard and made your money there. For a small time operator like yourself it is very difficult to refine whole boards for a profit. Stop, back away from the mess you have made and read the forum.


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## AztekShine (Mar 26, 2012)

In the oven?????? Really? Wow that's all I gota say bout that!?!?!?!


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## NatiYati (Mar 27, 2012)

The oven is outside. I work for a jewelery repair company and have refined polishing and bench sweeps. Just not electronics. Not a very friendly board.


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## jimdoc (Mar 27, 2012)

NatiYati said:


> The oven is outside. I work for a jewelery repair company and have refined polishing and bench sweeps. Just not electronics. Not a very friendly board.



Even if the oven is outside, if it as you said "stunk up my house and made my girlfriend pretty mad", then you shouldn't be doing it there either. Also you didn't say where this oven was, how are we supposed to know that it is outside? How many people have outside ovens?

Jim


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## butcher (Mar 27, 2012)

NatiYati,
We are a very friendly group.
Your friends here care enough about you and your girlfriend to try and protect your health, we want to see you safe, so if I see my friend do something stupid, I care about my friend enough to tell him he is doing something stupid.

NatiYati, my friend doing this in the house, or where you stink up the house was a stupid thing to do, please be my friend also and study like I said, we want to keep our friends on this forum alive.


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## AztekShine (Mar 27, 2012)

NatiYati said:


> The oven is outside. I work for a jewelery repair company and have refined polishing and bench sweeps. Just not electronics. Not a very friendly board.



I meant no ill will by saying what I said. I apoligize for seaming un friendly but I am concerned about anyone in our brother/sister-hood family. I have been looked out for by friends here to make shure I'm safe. I pass that along. I hope we can be friends and learn together. SAFELY!


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## ericrm (Mar 27, 2012)

do you poeple realise at how much $/hour you work?? have you only ask yourself the question :lol: 
mother board on the small scale recovery fetch less than 1$/hour *stop dreaming* :roll:


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## glorycloud (Mar 28, 2012)

The overarching concern here is for safety first and foremost!
Most comments stem completely from that great concern for
everyone's health while they pursue their individual interest
in processing and refing precious metals. 

We are a friendly board. We are just a friend to your health and safety first. 8)


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## Geo (Mar 28, 2012)

people say "we learn from our mistakes". some do and some dont, but after gagging for a few hours of breathing the gasses from these baking electronics, i kind of feel like this lesson was learned. after you first touch a hot pan and burn a blister,do you again reach for a pan without an oven mitt? some mistakes are minor enough to be a nuisance, like the lingering smell of baking motherboards for a month or so, but some can be on a scale that cause a more serious effect that will never go away. i have done many things that i would have done even if my father had told not to do it, and did many times, just to see what would happen. so we tell would be recyclers and refiners the safety issues to try and convince them to do the right thing but really we do it to make ourselves feel better because we know that what we do can be deadly and would not want someone killing themselves trying to follow our lead. but ultimately its up to the individual whether or not they will be responsible for their own safety.

Natiyati, be safe.know what you want to do and know what will happen before you do it. if your not sure about the outcome, ask before you do something that can harm you and not after.


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## AztekShine (Mar 28, 2012)

Geo said:


> some mistakes are minor enough to be a nuisance, like the lingering smell of baking motherboards for a month or so,


 :lol: :mrgreen: :roll: :lol:


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## NatiYati (Dec 15, 2012)

Thought I would update you guys and apologize for my comment about unfriendly. I mistook concern for elitism I suppose. Turning down the sensitive nerves.....

I took all the memory plus about 200 pounds more ram fingers i acquired and 100 pounds of processors, some bench sweeps, etc...

First after i stripped everything down as much as I could, and after reading Hoke, And after following all proper safety precautions, I started with 4926 grams of material.

After running the material thru my nitric/hydrochloric wash (aqua regia) and rinsing and reweighed material and new net weight was 4481.

Logic tells me I now have 445 grams of dissolved metal in my solution.

I neutralized my solution which resides in a 5 gallon bucket with urea.

I now have a a 5 gallon bucket about 2/3 full with a dark blue/green solution with a ph of about 7.

Covered solution and put in shed as some things came up and had to revisit later.

About a month later I boiled most of the water off my solution to the point I can now fit entire contents in a 2 quart pyrex measuring cup. 

Pretty Dark green. Put solution aside as I didnt have anything to precipitate my metals out with at the time.

This morning I discover what you guys see in the pics. Crystals have now formed in my solution. And the 2 quart pyrex measuring cup still contains the 445 grams of dissolved metal.

Any thoughts as to what the crystals are? best method to precipitate? Sodium Biomethysulfate (sp?)?








Any advise is welcome.


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## Pantherlikher (Dec 15, 2012)

WOW....All that can be said. 
You got quite a mess there now.
Good luck
Still concerned for your safety as you did Not do what the knowledgeable here told you to do. You tried it the shor way without having everything needed to completely finish the project. I can only hope someone will at least give you the "how to" bail out for your safety. Screw what you can or could have gained by doing this.
BS.


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## Smack (Dec 15, 2012)

You said you process sweeps? I read nothing about you incinerating your material first or about how you treated the base metals first....Still jumping the gun I'd say. Sodium Metabisulfite, it's cheap. Why wouldn't you have your precipitant there waiting to be used? Also I find it hard to understand why you processed all that material together. This post from me should give you more questions than answers in hopes that you will find out what it all means and you can find it all here on the forum.


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## g_axelsson (Dec 15, 2012)

NatiYati,

I have just read this thread for the first time. All I can say is that we really are nice. If you see a friend doing something stupid you tell him but if he is doing something really stupid you could give him a slap in the face so he understand the severity of the situation. It can seem hars sometimes, but I too think you needed a dose of reality, based on your first posting.

Okay, back to the problem at hands, do you have any pictures of what you put into aqua regia? Can you describe what type of material it was? What did you remove that didn't dissolve? Have you tested any solution with tin chloride? Do you even have any tin chloride for testing?

Help us help you by describing as much as you can. Don't panic, any gold in the cup is still there, it just takes a bit of planning and a cool head to get it out. The better we understand the mess, the better advice we could give. I'm not going to give any advice right now as I don't know enough about your mess to help right now, I could make things worse. There are also many more better suited persons here that can give you better advice than I can.

Just don't think you are in an unique situation, I've been in the same situation myself, having really dirty solution forming crystals and drying up. I left some experiments for two years until I got back to it as I didn't know what to do with it at the time. I had to rerefine it three times until it started to behave as normal gold. First two drops looked like a black sludge and would never settle. :lol:
In the end it turned out that I only had 0.3 grams of gold instead of the several grams that I thought I had from the beginning.

(Don't as about the bucket I have outside with tin chloride paste and gold flakes)

/Göran


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## NatiYati (Dec 15, 2012)

Ok a little back ground.

My company (which I recently sold to the Russians) was responsible for doing all the jewelry repair for 375 Zales. Zales Outlet, Helzeberg and Gordons stores. On average we did between 16 to 23 thousand repairs a week. 61 employees. 22 Bench Jewelers. 17 Polishers. Sizing line using induction instead of flame so we could size a ring up or down in less then 2.5 minutes from cut to final polish. Using $8 an hour non skilled labor on assembly line.

I'm not a jeweler. However I designed the system that allowed us to do so many repairs a week using state of the art technology and a security and accountability system that allowed me to pick any job at any time and go to exactly where it was in our process on camera when need be and also to hold responsible party accountable for those that tried to test their skill and pilfer items. And yes people tried. No one ever got away with it. Not one time. When an item hit our building we had approx 24 hours to repair and fed ex it or brinxs truck it back out. And from time it hit our building till it left it was always on camera and being tracked via bar code and RFID tags. The 18 Dell servers I used for this experiment was what I replaced with faster new Blade systems as speed in our network and SQL servers had to be as fast as possible. (Side note.... It took a 5 ton 3 phase AC unit to keep a 10x10 room where I had 2 server racks 68 degrees)






Having said that, naturally we generated an enormous amount of bench sweeps and polish sweeps etc. All polishers had filtering systems and once every three months I would ship all our bench and polish sweeps to New York to be refined and would get a check back for $65 to $85 grand for recovered material.

I started wondering what the actual amount of recovered material was as all I had was their word as to amount recovered. Wasn't that I didn't trust them so much as I had no baseline to even know really if they were keeping a fee based on amount recovered and not just telling me something I was ok with hearing.

So I took 1 month of polish and bench sweeps. I incinerated the polish sweeps in our kiln, did all the proper procedures and used the Shor refining system and I forget exact numbers but I believe I recovered 2 1/2 pounds of gold and some platinum and a little silver that i discarded. I believe I sold my recovery for about $35 grand or so. So company I was using was giving me a fair shake.

When I replaced the servers I heard about the precious metals in the systems and I guess curiosity and too much free time got me wondering.

I also accumulated a vast amount of ram 16 large bins (16"x20"x16") and 6 large bins of processors.

I had someone take all the ram and cut it down to just the fingers. I had all the pins removed from all the processors. I had the processors incinerated to remove ceramics etc. I had all the ram seats removed and card slots removed. I also threw in some bench sweeps, some old Jewelery an ex girlfriend left behind, some incinerated polish sweeps, some gold solder, gold from some cell phones, etc. As previously stated the Gross weight of this menagerie was 4926 grams. All reduced to the smallest reasonable amount of "non" metal as possible. Here is a pic (albeit not a good one) of some of the left over after processing.




Again after processing my menagerie had lost 445 grams of weight and was now in the aqua regia.

I had some odor free precipitant somewhere but must have misplaced it or threw it away by mistake. I have stanous chloride. I have everything but a precipitant per se'. I have heard or read about using hydrogen peroxide. I am not really concerned with platinum or silver that may be in there. If any it is negligible.

I am in the Ft Worth TX area so if any of you guys are local let me know. I am doing this more for my own edification and knowledge and curiosity than I am trying to get rich. I do know there is AT LEAST 9 ounces of gold in that solution in a liquid or crystallized as it were state. And I know there is a rather simple or not so complicated way to bring it forth. 

So I suppose, having given you guys more information, if any of you guys were to find yourself in my position, what method or methods would you pursue to recover aforementioned gold?

Thank you for your time and comments. They are appreciated and respected.


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## butcher (Dec 15, 2012)

NatiYati,

From what I can tell of the photo it looks like a 5 gallon bucket of crystallized copper chloride, not something I would normally see in my aqua regia, It seems you missed some of the fine points of Hokes book, like eliminating the base metals before using aqua regia to dissolve gold.

Those crystal are probably fairly pure copper salts, but they can trap gold, I would pour off solution filter the solution and them add a buss bar, (add just a little HCl to get solution acidic) values will cement out of solution as a fine black powders.

Dissolve the copper crystals in water and HCl, heating will help, then do the same thing filtering and cementing values with copper,

the solution is mainly copper chloride and can be used in a later leach, if you wish to dispose of liquid then cement copper out of solution with steel or iron, decant iron chloride solution and raise pH to about 9, let settle siphon off clear salt water and dispose of, dry copper and iron hydroxide and either save copper powders or you can dispose of them with the dry iron hydroxide.


once you get the values cemented Clean off copper bars (old tooth brush) rinse powder off into solution and let settle, when settled decant solution from values.

Here I would put the powders in a corning casserole dish on a cast iron solid burner electric hot plate, decanting solution with a suction bulb and a pipette, leaving powders in the dish, letting the powders settle well before decanting solutions, filtering decanted solutions.

Wash the powders with hot water until water comes off clear, decant these washes hot but with powders well settled, then use a solution of sodium hydroxide NAOH till solution with powders tests to pH 7, wash out salts that formed from this, wash well in hot water, (NaCl formed from HCl acid and caustic soda).

dry the powder on low heat when dry raise heat in increments until burner is on high and incinerate the powders use a torch to get powders red hot, if powders fuse or cook together heat until dry again and crush them back to powders, crushing and keeping powder exposed to air as they are heated red hot, let these cool, and give a water rinse,

Now we can dissolve the gold in HCL and bleach (much easier than dealing with aqua regia),filter and heat to remove excess chlorine gas let cool filter to clean vessel and cover let this set overnight, filter off this clear yellow solution to another clean vessel and precipitate the gold with SMB


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## goldsilverpro (Dec 15, 2012)

When you evaporated the solution, you over saturated the solution with copper and the other base metals. These were soluble when the solution was hot. When it cooled, they crystallized out as nitrate and/or chloride compounds. They will re-dissolve with the addition of warm tap water and some strirring. Take your time. How much it will take, I don't know. Add a little extra water after they have dissolved. 

After all the crystals have dissolved, put the solution back in the bucket and put several (8-10) lengths of copper bus bar (the best thing to use - usually found at a large scrap metals yard - make sure it's clean copper with no plating or solder on it) or copper tubing in the solution. Make them long enough to stick up out of the solution.That way, they can be easily removed. Don't use copper wire. After a period of time, which is mainly dependent on the chemical composition and the surface area of the copper, the precious metals (only) will precipitate out onto the copper as a dark, mostly black, powder. This process is called cementation. Search the forum and learn how to test the solution for the PMs using stannous chloride (Au and Pt) and dimethyl gloxime (Pd). When the testing shows no PMs remaining in the solution, remove the copper, scrape it and brush it down gently (wear eye protection) into the solution to remove any black particles clinging to it (if copper tubing was used, there will be some powder on the inside of it - use a bottle brush), rinse the copper with water in a squirt bottle, and then filter and collect the dark powder, which should contain all the PMs. The powder is then dissolved in aqua regia and the metals are separated according to the standard methods given on the forum.

There are probably other people that have different ideas on how to handle your mess.

Don't discard any of the material you leached. By the sound of what you did, there are probably values left in it.

In the beginning, it would have been much better to process the types of scrap separately, especially the buffing dust.

Precious metals refining is a vast field and no one on the planet knows it all. After you've been here awhile, you'll learn who is expert in the various specialties. When it comes to processing sweeps or buffing dust (or, karat gold, for that matter), the 2 people I would listen to, first and foremost, are Harold_V and 4metals. They have both done this professionally for many years. Harold has written the most on this subject. Here's some threads to get you started with Harold.
http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/search.php?keywords=sweeps+polishing&terms=all&author=harold_v&sv=0&sc=1&sf=all&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

I would read this one first. Concentrate on Harold's posts. Page 2 of the thread starts to lay it all out. One thing about Harold's processes, if you follow them closely, they will always work.
http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1253&hilit=sweeps+polishing


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## g_axelsson (Dec 16, 2012)

Hi NatiYati,

See, I told you so, describe your mess a lot better and you will receive good advice. Both Butcher and GSP giving you advice is great!

I just made some observations of your description.



NatiYati said:


> As previously stated the Gross weight of this menagerie was 4926 grams. All reduced to the smallest reasonable amount of "non" metal as possible. Here is a pic (albeit not a good one) of some of the left over after processing.


Is this from after processing, then I see a potential problem. To me it looks like there still is some metal pins sticking out of the RAM holders. If you had it in aqua regia some gold might have cemented out on the base metal and is now together with the solids leftovers.



> Again after processing my menagerie had lost 445 grams of weight and was now in the aqua regia.
> 
> ... snip ...
> 
> I do know there is AT LEAST 9 ounces of gold in that solution in a liquid or crystallized as it were state.


How do you know that? You claim that the 445 grams you have in solution is made up of at least 270 grams of gold, the rest, at most 175 grams is base metals. You would get that if you dissolved 445 grams of 16 karat gold.

If you have too high expectations when refining you will overdose acids and reducing agent, creating yet more mess totally unnecessarily.
This is not a problem though if you cement the values on copper as suggested, as it will cement out whatever is in that soup.

/Göran


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## silversaddle1 (Dec 16, 2012)

We scrap Dell poweredge servers all the time. By the truckload sometimes. I can assure you without any doubt that if you think you are going to get 9 ounces of gold from that list you first posted, I sorry to say you are in for a major shock.


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## NatiYati (Jan 9, 2013)

You guys are great. I apologize for the lapse in responding. Life sometimes gets in the way of projects/hobbies as it did in this case.

I have a follow up question. I bought from some site two metal bars and a pyrex dish. The two metal bars were to be hooked to a battery charger one piece on each lead, and used to remove copper I believe. Anyone know to what I am referring?


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## Acid_Bath76 (Jan 9, 2013)

How did the five gallon fiasco turn out? I got ahead of myself on my first run as well. Hoke really does clear it up. If you get a chance, can you post some more pics of your progress? Did you find any other info on that two bar, copper, and battery setup you bought?


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