Gold from over 15000 telephone cards

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archeonist

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 27, 2012
Messages
286
Hi guys, I would like to share a little experiment on extracting gold from 15000 telephone cards. I know some of this has been done already (not in this amount I guess), and yields are also out there, but it is just for fun and I want to create a bit of realtime evidence on how low these yields probably will be.
All telephone cards are from 1994-2004 and each one was peeled off by hand :mrgreen: Because of the age of the cards the glue has been deteriorated so the chips popped right off.
The gold will be extracted using AP, for the foils, and pyrolising/incinerating the black epoxy dots on the back of each card for the bonding wires. I believe there are 8 bonding wires in each card so that would make a total of 15000 x 8 = 120000 bonding wires.
First I dissolved the residual glue using acetone. This was nessesary to prevent foils to stick on the glue in the AP step
The total weight of the chips was 1676 g
 

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I'm excited to hear the results- just out of interest how long did it take to peel 15,000 by hand?
 
Here we have the AP process of the cards, it looks easy but it was a hell :evil: of a job to wash all the tiny foils from the cards. To reduce waste I used the filtratie over and over again after each filtration of foils.
 

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anachronism said:
I'm excited to hear the results- just out of interest how long did it take to peel 15,000 by hand?

It took hours, but I did it during winter watching television :D It is just a hobby, not gonna make a profit here.
 
After setteling the foils it formed a layer of more than 200mL of foils :shock:
 

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Next pictures show that a big amount of the foils consists of a brown non soluble substance. Examination told me that this substance consisted out of brown fibers that had probably came from a layer in the cards that deteriorated in the process. Last picture is after adding SMB to the gold solution. Tomorrow I'll weigh the gold and we know how much gold there actually is on the outside of 15000 telephone cards. Tell me what you think there will be 8)
 

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Finally the results.

My yield of gold from foils from 15000 cards was:
3,42g

Next I will incinerate the remaining cards to get the gold wires.
 

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Why not incinerate them with the foils on? Would the gold be lost?

Sent from my LG-H872 using Tapatalk
 
rickzeien said:
Why not incinerate them with the foils on? Would the gold be lost?

No, gold would still be there. But I would never know how much gold there was from just the foils, and this was my goal.

If 15000 cards give 3,42g of gold from foils, each card should have around 0,00023g of gold from foils.
 
archeonist said:
rickzeien said:
Why not incinerate them with the foils on? Would the gold be lost?

No, gold would still be there. But I would never know how much gold there was from just the foils, and this was my goal.

If 15000 cards give 3,42g of gold from foils, each card should have around 0,00023g of gold from foils.
Thanks for the response. Following to see the results from the rest of your processing.

Sent from my LG-H872 using Tapatalk
 
It's been said a number of times that they aren't worth the time to process. I guess some folk think that either they'll get a different result or that their time is worth nothing. Personally I listen to people whose opinions I value and I value my time.

Jon
 
It's been said a number of times that they aren't worth the time to process.
Gold is where you find it and Gold is Gold in any quantity.
Figuring yields this way helps others learn how much Gold they can expect from various scrap materials, so you see, it's not always about money. Plus, he has a piece of Gold for his time! :)
 
Good work, can't wait to see the results from the chips.
One last bit of info is: how much did the batch of cards weight?
 
anachronism said:
It's been said a number of times that they aren't worth the time to process.

Yes Jon, that's correct. It's been said.. And my goal is to show that it is nothing. I had a great time doing this experiment.
 
a_bab said:
Good work, can't wait to see the results from the chips.
One last bit of info is: how much did the batch of cards weight?
You mean, whole cards, or just the chips?
 
I meant whole card, you posted the chips weight already (1676g).
That way we can average the real yield against the actual bucket of cards you've got there :)
 
noos said:
is it possible to skip steps here?
Sure, use a drill press with a jig, drill the cards 50 at a time, incinerate, melt, sell as refiners bar to a copper smelter. You need a lot of cards though to get the economy of scale.

Göran
 
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