Ok, thinking of doing a small batch for first time, suggestions?

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Macwildstar

Member
Joined
May 18, 2017
Messages
6
Been collecting scrap for 2 years, more or less. Not into this big time, but I do have a fair amount of gold coated fingers, connections, CPU pins, fingers, some gold Diabetic test strips (800 of them) and some boards with gold on them.

This will be my first time doing this. Not sure how to go about doing it. Someone said I need to clean the green stuff off the circuit boards first. is this true, or is this done to see if there is any more gold underneath it?

I am looking for an easy way to do this. I can set it up to let the stuff sit and soak for as long as necessary, and would like to do it with as few chemicals as is necessary. Any suggestions?

The large pill bottle is about 3/4 full of little fingers, wires, inkjet cartridge gold connector pads, stuff from memory chips,etc.. the stuff inside weighs over 1.5 lbs. Figure it might give me a 2 or 3 grams.


Tried to find a local processor to do this, but unable to locate anyone in our area. so any help appreciated.
Thanks.
 

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Macwildstar,
If this is going to be your first attempt at recovery from e-waste I think it may be a tough batch to start with. I would really consider putting all or part of this on ebay and using the money to buy a batch of memory fingers or cpu's to process so you get to see how it works in a simple reaction. If you are set on doing these items have patience, it is going to take more than one process and will probably be a little bit of gold.
I would put the test strips in an AP bath with an air bubbler and process them like memory fingers. The jar of (cell phone?) boards I would soak for a few hours in warm hcl and depopulate the components on the boards then save and separate them for processing later. The green "masking" can be removed with a solution of hot sodium hydroxide but if there is any plating underneath it is called "enig" and is very thin so many people don't go to the effort. I would then strip any foils from them in AP like the test strips. The chips and bga's will have to be incinerated and sifted and ran in AR to get any bonding wires but you will need to save up many more to make it worthwhile.
If you only have the two cpu's just save them until you have more- the black one needs to be done differently than the ceramic one.
The little pill bottle is what really concerns me. You say it weighs 1.5 lbs and is a mixture of things. This is exactly what I did before I knew better. I ended up using a lot of acid incorrectly before I got it all dissolved then had to cement it out on copper and then reprocess the gold powder. All of that extra handling resulted in losses and chemical waste(that I had to learn about later) but I did learn to carefully harvest and separate my items.
If you decide to continue and do this yourself post some pictures of the boards and what is actually in the pill bottle so we can see if there is a better way.
 
Ok, kinda thought thats what I had. A miss mash of various things that needed different processes.

I have to do a lot of running around tomorrow, but will post a pic of what I have in that pill bottle, in the next couple of days.. As for the boards, yeah, thought I was going to have to clean them up a bit more.

Yeah, I just might take inventory and offer it up for sale to someone doing a lot of processing.
 
Macwildstar said:
Yeah, I just might take inventory and offer it up for sale to someone doing a lot of processing.

That is a very good idea my friend, unless you want to do a LOT of work for very little reward.

As others have mentioned this industry (ewaste refining) requires vast quantities of any one item to make it worthwhile, let alone multiple items.

Dennis
 
ok, finnaly got a few mins to myself. got 2 more pics of that pile of scrap, n the circuit boards,
 

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Have you ever sold anything on Ebay? I think this is an excellent canidate for that marketplace. You may be able to get as much more than the value of the gold. I would offer it as two batches. One with the cell boards and CPU's. and one with the pins, fingers and test strips. Look at the sold listings for similar items to help with pricing.
If you decide you do want to process it start the fingers by trimming the resistors and anything with solder off then process it in AP with a bubbler for a few days until the foils fall off. Do not add the depopulated ram boards they would go with the cell baords. When that is done i would reuse the AP on the test strips and the orange film peices. I would soak the cell boards in warm HCL for a day then rinse and use a chisel to depopulate the components from them (save them) then soak them in warm lye solution to remove the green/blue masking then into your used AP solution when the test strips are done. Depopulate the cpu pins off the green and purple ones by soaking in warm hcl then using a scraper to remove them then incinerate and process in dilute nitric. (black cpu pins probably wont fall off that way) Black cpu and cell components get incinerated into ash, seived, and run in AR. I have to think some more about the pill bottle of pins- Probably short HCL boil then AR and cement on copper. This is a lot of work for what you will recover but would teach you a lot. Let us know what you decide.
 
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