Keyboard Mylars

powerbuy · May 19, 2009

Has anyone come up with a good way to process these for silver in large quantities? I have read all of the posts concerning this subject in this forum, but it appears there are no conclusions yet on how to recover the silver from the keyboards economically.

I currently have over 4,000 keyboard mylars and would like to attempt to recover the silver if possible. Is incineration the key here? Or will some of the values be lost by incineration? Any ideas would be welcome. I would be glad to post results once I have a plan of action.

lazersteve · May 19, 2009

I would do them in a tall heated container of dilute (35% or less) nitric acid.

The silver should dissolve off of each mylar in just a few minutes. The mylars will need to be separated so that the acid can get to the traces.

Harvest the pure silver as a chloride or with solid copper.

Lou has also posted a method of harvesting from pure silver nitrate as the carbonate. This sounds like the best route to me. Carbonate decomposes at relatively low temperatures to the oxide then to silver metal at slightly higher temperatures.

Steve

powerbuy · May 19, 2009

I have watched all of the videos several times over now.... haven't done alot of processing yet personally though.... I will give it a shot this weekend and will post results and yields afterward.

Must be 200-300 pounds of mylars here.... several boxes that I have a hard time lifting...

I will start at around 35% nitric, that way I can process them in batches and use a spray nozzle to rinse them with water back into the solution as I take them out. That way I don't lose any of the silver as I pull them out....

lazersteve · May 19, 2009

Don't forget silver nitrate will stain your skin a very dark color for about a week if you don't wear good thick chemical resistant gloves!

Steve

Juan Manuel Arcos Frank · May 20, 2009

Yes Sir,Steve is right...nitric acid process is the best for keyboard maylars.

There are many types of them(normal,small and large)...from my own research one kilogram of these maylars have 17 gr. of silver.This silver content (17,000 gr/Ton) is better than any silver mine.Some of these maylars,specially the biggest have 0.5 gr of silver each.

I hope it helps.

Regards

Manuel

kjavanb123 · Apr 12, 2013

Can boiling in 5% oxalic acid remove the silver from the keyboards, as you mentioned from x-ray films?

Thanks
Kevin

kjavanb123 · Aug 2, 2013

All,

I think I have some ideas of how o process large quantites of keyboard mylars, you would need the following items, a 200 gallon bucket, fill it up with 7 gallons of 50/50 nitric and distilled water, a smaller plastic container for rinsing the sheets.

Here is the picture of bucket yellow container, and on the very right the rinse bucket,

Then one by one add the mypars to the bucket, try to add them one by one and crossed way so they dont stick together, I did 762 mylars in one shot and all of them were cleaned of traces of silver, here are some info,

Broke 364 keyboards, this lot weighed 681 lbs, out of those 57 lbs were metal sheet it seems scrap iron, some 11lbs of small printed circuit boards, and 12.8 lbs of mylar sheets after removing the blank sheets between them. Currently a copper slab is inside the solution to perecipitate the silver metal.

Regards,
Kevin

Smack · Aug 3, 2013

Oh my God! My eyes hurt from squinting to see the fume hood.

patnor1011 · Aug 3, 2013

I do not see fumes washing silver mylars in diluted nitric.

kjavanb123 · Aug 3, 2013

No fumes at all,

Smack · Aug 3, 2013

You'll see what any steel in your shop says about that.

FrugalRefiner · Aug 3, 2013

kjavanb123 said:
fill it up with 7 gallons of 50/50 nitric and distilled water

No fumes at all,

I find that very hard to believe.

Dave

pgms4me · Aug 3, 2013

Kevin: Thanks for sharing your method,I dont know about the fumes short term wise,but my math tells me from what I have read previously in this post, that 12.8 pounds of mylars will only yield about 85 or so grams of silver. That looks like a lot of time and chemicals to get 50.00 worth of silver. I suppose if you can store the dilute nitric mix for several more uses you could make a little something. I purchased 1600 keybords at my state surplus property sale 2 years ago.(4 gaylords worth) for 1.00 per gaylord.. After loading transporting,unloading,storing and dissassembly of 400 of them, I quit, cut the wire off the remaining 1200 and sold them for 10 cents each keyboard. My yield from scrap wire on them exceeded the potential silver recovery. They were older non-usb models so had 3- 4 ounces of wire on each one. Since then I have passed on all keyboard lots. I found it more worthwhile to pull pins out of computer ribbon cables and sell them

kjavanb123 · Aug 3, 2013

It took me and a guy that works for me a day and half to break the keyboards and separate the mylar sheets. Another half day to leach silver and now it is being dried. Plastics and steel paid for labor and cost of getting those 364 keyboards, so I silver valueminus chemical cost would be profit. I got them by $0.50 per kg.

Regards
Kevin

Pantherlikher · Aug 4, 2013

I would process them as you get any investment back in the wires and steel.
Then you have mylars but also a nice board to process as well for long term profit.
Looks like the picture is the right idea but open containers with metal/flesh dissolving solutions will have fumes of some kind. Might be concidered "safe" but will still add up and do damage. Even with wearing that super, filters everything type of useless mask worn in the picture.

B.S.
...People walk past the easy penny on the street. 100 times and it's coffee time to pick it up if easy...

kjavanb123 · Aug 4, 2013

Actually the yellow bucket is the leaching tank, it has a top which was closed after everything was put into the dilute nitric solution, the pans are for rinsing purpose only. Silver mud is drying up today, will post results soon.

kjavanb123 · Aug 5, 2013

All,

The silver powder is finally dry and ready to be melted and pour into one troy ounce ingot. Total silver recovered from 364 keyboards was 143 grams, ratio to total mylar sheets which weighs 5.8 kg is 20 grams per kg of mylar.

Here are photos,

And

Thanks
Kj

pinwheel · Sep 21, 2013

so that comes out to $12.96 a pound at 21.80 ag price. hmmm Scrap keyboards are cheap.

pgms4me · Sep 21, 2013

the math says that is about 2.5 keyboards per gram of silver. In other words at todays price of 21.80 their is approximately 28 cents of silver in each keyboard. thanks for this thread it has been helpful to me

AndyWilliams · Sep 22, 2013

kjavanb123 said:
All,

The silver powder is finally dry and ready to be melted and pour into one troy ounce ingot. Total silver recovered from 364 keyboards was 143 grams, ratio to total mylar sheets which weighs 5.8 kg is 20 grams per kg of mylar.

pinwheel said:
so that comes out to $12.96 a pound at 21.80 ag price. hmmm Scrap keyboards are cheap.

Actually,

143.3 grams out of 5.8 Kg is 24.65 grams per kg of mylar.

5.8 Kg = 12.76 pounds
143.3/31.1= 4.6 ounces
4.6*$21.83= $100.41
$100.41/12.76= $7.87 per pound

Keyboard Mylars

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