Separating gold from gold-plated contacts/pins

Ilikegold · Aug 1, 2012

I am new to refining have an recently disemboweled a cell phone and have ended up with many gold-plated contacts and pins. I don't have the means to use chemicals neither do I want to, but I can melt gold. I am wondering how to separate the gold plating from these pins/contacts effectively without using chemicals. How is this possible?
Thanks!

jimdoc · Aug 1, 2012

a cell phone?
How much gold do you expect?

Jim

MMFJ · Aug 1, 2012

Ilikegold said:
I am wondering how to separate the gold plating from these pins/contacts effectively without using chemicals. How is this possible?

It's not.

Read the forum - everything you need to know is here, but there is no 'magic pill' and certainly no way to get clean gold without chemicals.

Understand, though, that it doesn't have to be YOU using the chemicals, you can hire others to do that work for you (many on this forum will refine for a percentage of the take).

READ first - 99.9% of your questions will be answered (yes, that's .999......)

Ilikegold · Aug 2, 2012

Im planning on recovering from more cell phones, but am not sure exactly how to separate the metals.

nickvc · Aug 2, 2012

I'm not trying to kill your dreams but that lovely rich looking gold you see is worth next to nothing in one phone. The reality of nearly all e scrap is that you need volumes to recover any substantial amount of values, there are several members of the forum who advertise their buying prices for various types of scrap, this should give you some idea on how much scrap you need to make the effort worthwhile.
Refining isn't for everyone it's time consuming and can be frustrating and sourcing some chemicals especially nitric can be nearly impossible or very expensive or both. The forum helps those who decide not to refine find ways to collect materials to either sell or have refined by others and if you can find good amounts of e scrap you can still be actively involved in the forum.
Spend some time reading here on the forum and I'm sure you will realise that whole phones can be worth more than their scrap value and that you need hundreds of PCs to recover an ounce of gold but we discuss base metal values which can be a large part of the value of a PC.
If as your user name suggests you like gold you will soon realise why it's worth what it is, take the guided tour to start and read Hoke even if you don't want to refine and just to confirm the response to your first question no you can't melt the gold off alone and even if you manage to it will be maybe 1% of the total metals you recover while 10k is 41% Au.

NoIdea · Aug 2, 2012

Evening All - Weeelll 8) , i was waiting for someone to ask this question.

I have been looking into the answer. Only works for male pins or surface gold plate, not gold filled, even silver plate. Recovery Process Only.

I came up with and now use this process for most PM recovery, saves on acid by a large margin, less waste solutions to deal with and I can recover saleable brass and copper. Even those items I have see on this forum as not worth it, can be done with very little effort, an example is the TO type packages, see picture below

Process:

1. Roast the pins, turning them bluish.
2. Spread pins out evenly in a shallow container, i use old record player lids, and other similar trays/containers.

3. Only just cover pins with tap water
4. Sprinkle some table salt, 1/4tsp per 500g of pins. (Alright, I know, salt = chemical)
5. Set aside and let nature take its course.

6. After awhile (days/weeks, depends on ambient temperature, warmer the faster) water is added, swirl, pour off and filter sediment. Rinse with hot water through filter.

NoIdea · Aug 2, 2012

7. Dry and ash sediment. Wash and filter

OK, this is where the non-chemical process ends for the silt, Sorry, though from here, you can carefully pan or sluice the ash, the less dense copper, nickel oxides wash away very well, leaving behind the denser gold power.

Now, the pins will still have an appreciable amount of gold still left intact. The pins are put in a tumbler which effectively removes more gold.

From here, if the pins still contain gold, re-oxidation in the tray, and the cycle repeats until the pins are clean. Sorry, no picture of cleaned pins, they went into the brass scrap pile some time ago, what you see is what I am working on at the moment.

Chemical treatment involves pre-treatment of the ash with cold battery acid, filter and then with hot battery acid for a few days, heat off at night on during the day.

Left side after hot H2SO4, right side cold pre-treatment.

From here, it’s time to refine using true and tried methods delivered in detail within this forum.

Good Luck

Deano

Note: This oxidation method works for all base metal, may be slow, butt hey, they don’t call me “Speedy”

Palladium · Aug 2, 2012

You amaze me Deano!

samuel-a · Aug 2, 2012

Palladium said:
You amaze me Deano!

Me too.

I very much like your 'out side of the box' way of thinking.

Were you able to compare yield vs. some other recovery methodes (AP or a cell for example) ?

TXWolfie · Aug 2, 2012

So basically your rusting away the metals away from the gold plating? ( gigles to himself) I am what you consider a layments type person.

NoIdea · Aug 2, 2012

Morning, Thanks for the kinds words.

Yield? Im too much of a bucket chemist to consider yields :lol: , however, what you see in the white tray was weighted at exactly 500g, i want to see what sort of weight loss i get using this process.

Works really well with IC's of unknow PM content, uses very little acid, for an example, the last lot i processed used approximately 2lt's of flat battery acid, yet i processed over 3kg of very mixed up base metal alloys(lead, silver, copper, iron, PM's, etc) after the pyrolyse and ashing of PC boards. After oxidation, the tray is swirled and then gently poured into a sieve made from the screen from CRT or TV monitors, very very small mesh size, the oxidize material passed through, the un-oxidsed material is way too big to pass through, thus it is re-introduced back for more oxidation.

Now if you are carefull when pouring off the oxidised mud you will leave behind your PM's, now if you keep adding more scrap to be oxidized and keep removing the mud, a very nice accumulation of PM's will result in the bottom of your oxidation tray.

After filtering the mud, the filtrate is re-introduced back into the oxidation tray, i guess in a way it is a modified AP process. In fact, it dissolved a 6K gold chain with ease, i do use a little waste spent acid to get things rolling, the idea is to keep it damp.

Deano

Note: the battery acid is only used to clean up the mud after it has been removed the oxidation tray.

Palladium · Aug 2, 2012

Have you tried adding an aquarium bubblier to it yet for oxygen Deano? Like ap only with salt!

patnor1011 · Aug 2, 2012

I am using very similar process for recovery of plating from whatever pins and metals parts are inside IC. It saves a lot on acid but as Deano said it is time consuming but that is a no problem for me.
I just want to ask why do you use H2SO4? I was thinking that ashing (as you said) is used on breaking down plastics.

NoIdea · Aug 3, 2012

Palladium said:
Have you tried adding an aquarium bubblier to it yet for oxygen Deano? Like ap only with salt!

Hey Palladium - Nope, what i usually do is let it evapourate naturally to almost dryness (outside, better yet in the sun)then add a wee bit more water or filtrate from the last time i fltered/washed the mud. After the process gets going, it's better if the pins/solder/contaminated solder or what even you what to oxidize to mud, is, just keep it damp and swirl, this helps by removing the oxide layer exposing more metal. In fact, the more i think about it, its the swirling.

patnor1011 said:
I just want to ask why do you use H2SO4? I was thinking that ashing (as you said) is used on breaking down plastics.

Hey to you to patnor1011 - I use battery acid (H2SO4) because it does the donkey work when it comes to dissolving the base metal oxides and i can use it in my electrolysis cell, which, being constructed of two chambers, the H2SO$ migrates towards the anode and the cations (Ni,Cu,Fe, etc) migrate to the cathode, this way i get to reuse the H2SO4.

Ashing is a destroyer of base metals, and i cant be certain that only oxidized material goes through the sieve, so bingo, bring on the destroyer, and i like burning stuff in my burner. :mrgreen:

Cheers

Deano

eesakiwi · Aug 3, 2012

Two bits of info here.

Those transistors in the pic.
I have just found that if I grab the heatsink horizontally with my needlenose pliers or sidecutters and then twist AWAY from the little black box containing the transistor.
The black box & the middle leg breaks off, leaving me with the copper heatsink, two legs & 1/2 the silicon block stuck to the heatsink in my pliers.

The oxidation of the legs in the pics.
I dumped a cellphone board into some HCL to get rid of the solder, then stripped the gold off it.
Then I left it in the beaker with a 1/4 inch HCL wash in the bottom of it.

After a few days I got the same light blue oxide, a week later I see it must have travelled up inside the cellphone board & oxidised the copper inside it.
Just like rust does to a car.....

But just like rust does, it kept moving & by a month the whole board had turned blue/white oxide & the actual board had expanded into a silicon paper mache' consistancy.

I crushed it up, a paper shredder would do a good job of it, & turned it into mush & extracted the copper out of it by electroplating.

I think this would be a good way of shredding the cellphone boards up into dust to get the gold.

You only need time, & lots of cellphones..

Smile Shaman · Jul 21, 2024

Ilikegold said:
I am new to refining have an recently disemboweled a cell phone and have ended up with many gold-plated contacts and pins. I don't have the means to use chemicals neither do I want to, but I can melt gold. I am wondering how to separate the gold plating from these pins/contacts effectively without using chemicals. How is this possible?
Thanks!

A simple electrolysis using vineger(acetic acid) and non iodized salt as a conductor. You can make a simple anode and cathode from the pos and neg wires from a basic phone charger. Hook the negative wire up to a stainless steel knife (most likely already in your silverware drawer) using an alligator clip, or just wrap the wire around the knife.this will serve as your cathode. Then hook up the positive wire to the gold plated silver piece. This is now you're anode. Now just plug it in and you should see bubbles forming around the cathode. After a few minutes you'll see that the reaction has pulled the gold off of your piece. Save the fluid for later extraction if you wish, but it'll really only be a couple penny's worth of gold. There ya go.

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