# Are any of these worth processing?



## Grelko (Oct 11, 2015)

Are there any PMs in these and if so, would they be worth processing myself?

I've been tossing them in a bucket until I find out if they're worth keeping or not.

Number 1. (Edit - The face plate from an older stereo/vhs/dvd player.) it looks like a metal circuitboard encased in glass on the back of it. There are also plastic ones with numbers that are filled with glue, but I forgot to take a photo of those.

Number 2 I don't believe there's anything in the electrolytic capacitors besides aluminum?

Number 3. Looks like a box filled with glue, with layers of metal or ceramic inside it.

Number 4. Dipped capacitors? I heard they might contain silver but I'm not sure.

Numbers 5,6. Some types of capacitors.

Number 7. Ceramic resistor or diode?, the last 1 is a glass power diode I believe.

Number 8. Diodes? The 2nd one looks like a zener, the last 1 i have no idea.

Number 9. It looks like a type of switch that might contain silver?


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## g_axelsson (Oct 11, 2015)

Not a lot of value in these, I send this type of material with my brown boards so it doesn't pile up. There could be a little precious metals in the diodes (last of line 7 and all of line 8. They contain a small semiconductor and it might be mounted with a silver or palladium braze and one bond wire. But in my mind not worth fiddling with when a single IC could have hundreds of bond wires.

Göran


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## Grelko (Oct 11, 2015)

g_axelsson said:


> Not a lot of value in these, I send this type of material with my brown boards so it doesn't pile up. There could be a little precious metals in the diodes (last of line 7 and all of line 8. They contain a small semiconductor and it might be mounted with a silver or palladium braze and one bond wire. But in my mind not worth fiddling with when a single IC could have hundreds of bond wires.
> 
> Göran



I've been reading about capacitors for the last couple hours. I was hoping some of line 4 were the "silver mica" ones, but mine didnt have that odd shape to them. I did find a couple tantalum dipped ones on some brown boards though. 

The glass one in line 7 and all of line 8, I find those all over the place. I "was" thinking about using a mortar/pestle on those, but they're mostly BMs and I would end up wasting acid. Plus I haven't tried to process silver or palladium, since I'm not setup safely enough to make/use nitric yet. I'll just toss those in with the pile of boards I'll be taking the the scrapyard for now. Thanks for the info.


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## macfixer01 (Oct 11, 2015)

That looks like a Vacuum Flourescent Display. I didn't find a lot of specifics on metals used, other than the filament wires are made of tungsten. Here's a link to a Noritake page with a little bit of construction info:

https://www.noritake-elec.com/display/vfd_operation.html


I also stumbled across this Electronics Museum site. It may be useful to members trying to identify odd parts on old boards:

http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/tubelist.php


Macfixer01


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## Grelko (Oct 11, 2015)

macfixer01 said:


> That looks like a Vacuum Flourescent Display. I didn't find a lot of specifics on metals used, other than the filament wires are made of tungsten. Here's a link to a Noritake page with a little bit of construction info:
> 
> https://www.noritake-elec.com/display/vfd_operation.html
> 
> ...



That must be what number 1 is. It looks almost exacty like the completed picture in the "2. VFD construction" section on that page.

That online museum was quite interesting. I still have a couple old tubes from the 60-70s. I'll look around for some other "vintage/retro etc." electronic component sites, because I have couple boxes of older material. "some are still unopened"




Edit - This site has alot of links to different collections of components, chips etc. Some of them are in other languages like, Chinese, or German. (I haven't checked them all, so click at your own risk) http://www.cpu-world.com/links/

This is a virtual CPU museum "CPU and FPU collection" by name and type, that has ALOT of pictures. http://gecko54000.free.fr/

This has information and some pictures of computer chips. It looks to be more of a "collector" site. Has a section for chip collecting, different manufacturers and other pages that contain information on "how to store your chips" and "what's my chip worth". There is a grading system for them on here also. http://www.antiquetech.com/


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## Grelko (Oct 26, 2015)

I've been wondering if these happen to be silver mica capacitors. They look about the same as the picture in this link, http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=9163 , except that the brackets are on the sides and they don't have the "dog bone" shape to them.

Edit - The picture from the link, on page 2, shows that not all silver mica capacitors have the "dog bone" shape to them.

The ones I've labled silver mica, have brackets on both sides, almost clear film, and what looks to be a rock-like material with alot of extremely thin pieces of silvery material.

Here's the difference between the regular aluminum type and what I think might be silver mica caps.








If the ones labled silver mica aren't the right type, what are they? Some type of plastic dipped multilayer?

------------------
Edit - It is very likely that the ones I have labled silver mica, are actually Multilayer Polymer Capacitors (metallized film capacitors), in a stacked formation, instead of one long single roll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_capacitor 

"As an alternative to the traditional wound construction of film capacitors, they can also be manufactured in a “stacked” configuration. For this version, the two metallized films representing the electrodes are wound on a much larger core with a diameter of more than 1 m. So-called multi-layer capacitors (MLP, Multilayer Polymer Capacitors) can be produced by sawing this large winding into many smaller single segments.[8][9] The sawing causes defects on the collateral sides of the capacitors which are later burned out (self-healing) during the manufacturing process. Low-cost metallized plastic film capacitors for general purpose applications are produced in this manner.[10] This technique is also used to produce capacitor "dice" for Surface Mount Device (SMD) packaged components."


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## kurtak (Oct 26, 2015)

These are the silver mica Caps - they are easy to identify :arrow: http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=22002&p=228983#p228983

(1) they are burgundy in color

(2) they have a "distinct" kidney shape to them 

(3) when break the outside epoxy off - the mica is layered in them - not rolled - & they have a metal rapped band on each end



Kurt


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## g_axelsson (Oct 26, 2015)

With a drop of nitric and some salt you can test for the presence of silver. If you want to go professional I recommend Schwerter's solution.
http://goldrefiningwiki.com/mediawiki/index.php/Schwerter's_solution

Göran


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## Grelko (Oct 26, 2015)

kurtak said:


> These are the silver mica Caps - they are easy to identify :arrow: http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=22002&p=228983#p228983
> Kurt



Thanks for that link. I thought I saw those pictures before, but didn't find that thread when I was looking through the search pages.

I'm actually suprised that I haven't found any yet. I've taken apart quite a few old TVs, monitors, CBs, radios, etc that were from the 70-80s. I was reading somewhere that you can usually find them on things like old analog rf boards or transceivers. I still have a good bit of material I need to go through, so I should come across 1 eventually.



g_axelsson said:


> With a drop of nitric and some salt you can test for the presence of silver. If you want to go professional I recommend Schwerter's solution.
> http://goldrefiningwiki.com/mediawiki/index.php/Schwerter's_solution
> 
> Göran



I'm not setup safely enough to use nitric yet. My neighbors live about 15 feet away. Also, I still can't find any around here unless I distilled my own, or bought it online. I'm slowly saving up to get a fume hood with a scrubber, but it might take a good while.

Is there any other way? I read somewhere that the 18k gold "jewelry test solution" can be used to check for silver, but I think mine has gone bad.


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## MarcoP (Oct 26, 2015)

I think you won't need a fume hood with scrubber for a drop of nitric to test a metal. It's like when you use your 18k test solution, [stt]add[/stt] as long you're not there sniffing it you would be fine.

You can test your 18k test solution with a gold plated pin you have around.

Marco


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## Grelko (Oct 26, 2015)

MarcoP said:


> I think you won't need a fume hood with scrubber for a drop of nitric to test a metal. It's like when you use your 18k test solution, add long you're not there sniffing it you would be fine.
> 
> You can test your 18k test solution with a gold plated pin you have around.
> 
> Marco



I just figured that if I started buying nitric, I should be setup for it first because I have other material to process with it also.

I'll test my 18k solution to see if it's still working, then check a silver round with it, to make sure I know what the result for silver looks like with it. It should be the white color in solution.


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