Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)

I had some time and was interested to find how to get that gold out. There was few processes mentioned here already so I just combine few of them and here is what I did.

We all know that there is gold inside. I do not have ball mill build yet so I decided to try another way. Incineration, or poor man`s pyrolysis. I used bucket of coal and made it red glowing hot. I then placed iron vessel in the middle where I dug small hole. Chips in vessel did not even burn with flame, they just turned yellow/red from temperature and when I took them out they were whitish/grey and practically powdered. There was no visible smoke and hardly any smell.
I did not took any pictures up until this moment maybe I will do it later and upload here.

Incinerated chips were powder like so I put them in my pan. Some of powder floated on surface so I used drop/two of washing up liquid. Then came hard - long part of panning all that material. When I panned all or say 99% of non metallic material I have used magnet from hdd to pick up all iron/nickel pins. Then I panned out most of copper pins. All panned pins went to my stock pot - lets say I throw them to my spent AP solution I will wait till all dissolve. What was left was small amount of fine gold wires and dust. All this was put to nitric to get rid of any small metallic pieces. Last two pictures show end product at this stage which is like 90% gold and 10% of some small pieces of ceramics.

pictures again

and again. Sorry they are mixed.

Very nice Pat! 8)
Are these from ram black chips memory only, or mixed?

Thanks!

Phil

Very nice Pat. I am proud of you trying something new! Can you post some pics of some of the same chips, and the hole with the charcoal?

Thank You for this wonderful tutorial.
I have been looking for a good and economical way to process the flatpacks and memory chips.
I know you said this was black flatpacks but I think it might work with the ram chips also. I'll try it as soon as I finish removing the chips from the ram I currently have.

thanks again 8)
Tom C.

Hi all how are tricks ?
I hope all is well!
Patnor, I've heard and read of this, but I've not seen any real results, until now!
Nice work chief!!
Well, I'm off to bed soon, long day tommorow, gotta burn some chips and dig the pans out, lol's :lol:
Once again, nice work!
All the best and kind regards,
Chris :-@)

It would be interesting to know a yield from these packages. How many grams/ounces did you start with? How much Gold will you get when finished? A picture of the packages would be nice but that's impossible now, although you could post pictures of similar packages. I tried a similar technique awhile back but was side tracked and never got much past the incineration point. :|

That was an awesome idea Patnor. just one question before I attempt this how many chips did you have in the pot.

Ill try to reply all question in this post...

Phil, Claudie I can post picture of chips but they are pretty much broad mix of all you can find on mobos, video, network, sound cards, top - black parts from these ( ファイル:Sis 755 northbridge.JPG - Wikipedia )
also chips from ram sticks. I was trying to get some numbers together but then I decided not to post any numbers here as results are not perfect. AAAh my english - it's hard to explain. Point is that I have started two batches, one of 420g of mixed chips from which I incinerated, panned and nitric leached 270g - 150g still waiting. Second batch was 200g of black chips from ram sticks. Surprisingly I found more gold when panning mixed batch and I was convinced that ram stick will yield more.
I can't provide exact numbers for many reasons. Few chips ended up in fire, there was quite few pins which were gold plated - they ended up in HCl with all metallic parts from crushed chips, some gold got dissolved when I put bit of peroxide to HCl - solution turned bit yellow. Some gold got lost as my panning technique is not great and some gold was plated on silicon center square piece which was crushed so I had zillions of light glassy like gold plated pieces swirling in pan - unfortunately lost when I was panning. Gold wires are heavier and it is actually not that hard to work them in pan as they are always on bottom of pan.

So if I can say I processed about 470g of mixed chips (regular various chips as I mentioned) and I have on that picture 1.7g of mostly gold. I would say that ceramics and garbage will be less than 10% of weight. Powder was leached in nitric so I don't think there are other metals present.

Mic, it is perhaps my english :lol:
It is hard to name procedure properly as pyrolysis of done when combusting material without oxygene present. I did incineration or poor man's pyrolysis. I have fireplace outside. I loaded that with coal - not charcoal but normal regular coal for use in stove. When I had coal burning / glowing red hot I just make small hole in middle of that burning coal bed and placed small iron vessel inside so it was resting on hot coal and top part of vessel was on same level as coal. Well picture is better than thousand words, my holidays start next week and I have about 15 pounds of chips to play with. I will make more pictures and I will find out with mods about how many I can upload here.

Niteliteone, I had RAM chips there included but pretty much any chip from motherboard and peripheral cards too. On a side note, I had plenty of time when I was removing them, I was not time pressed and I take all this as hobby so I removed them all with knife. I figured that by cutting exposed leads on every side I eliminate most of tin and unnecessary metals and save on acid. Well as I said I had plenty of time but if you have a lot of material to process simply heat board, tap and collect chips from ground. There is possibility to put them whole to HCl or Nitric to get rid of exposed legs and go to incineration after. Everyone can do whatever will suit him better.

Kuma, all this (incineration) was done only because I did not had access to ball mill and incineration was much faster than crushing chips by hand with mortar and pestle. Also when you incinerate whole chips I do believe that there is much less or pretty much no loss of valuables comparing to incinerating crushed material (which is little bit faster). I crushed chips after incineration and it was easy as crushing dry cookies. :lol:
I would like to advise to use as strong fire or heat as possible to practically burn smoke too or try to incinerate material that it will not catch fire it will just ashes from heat not flame. As I mentioned my coal fire produced so intensive heat that there was no smoke coming out and hardly any smell. Believe me smell of burning plastic is last thing you want to experience.

All metallic parts (pins, leads, square middle sections) are saved for later as I do believe I can find some Ag and Pd on them. I placed them to HCl / H₂O solution and I will test with DMG as soon as they will dissolve.

I will try to snap some pictures of material I started with but actual incinerating will have to wait till next week.

TXWolfie said:

That was an awesome idea Patnor. just one question before I attempt this how many chips did you have in the pot.

Click to expand...

My vessel was smaller one and I did not wanted to put everything in fire at once as it may start actually burning with flame so I did handful at a time. It took about 5 min and they turned white/gray and were so fragile after that "heat treatment" that you could "powder" them in hand (when removed from fire and cooled).

I need to find out way or place where I can upload original size of pictures. When I took these they were over 5MB each. I did not wanted to waste forum quota so I resized them to 25% but they lost much of detail which you can see. This fine gold wire is so small it is hardly visible with naked eye. Only when concentrated like I had it in pan. I left one bit bigger than the rest it is picture DSCF0947.JPG my second post third picture from top but that one is resized to less than 50% of original size.
20 pictures of over 5MB is 100MB of space and I don't want to increase costs of running this forum even that I donated small amount every year since I joined here.
I am not so sure but I would say that BGA (- I incinerated only top black part) is probably the best. I will do few more batches of different types and will try to get more accurate numbers next week.

Pat

What a great post, thank you.
Ever since "NoIdea" posted his poor man's pyrolysis post I've been flirting with the idea and even went to buy today some fire bricks to build a small kiln for that purpose:


Pat, you can email me some of your pictures and will host them for you on my server and post them here.
[email protected]

Edit: I have practically unlimited disk space for storage, so this suggestion is open to all members.

Note: Always pan in a larger catch pan with water so you never lose your material. Never do over a drain.

Few more pictures as promised of material I started with.

And picture of that 1,7g in small 10ml glass vial.

I have these but they may require bit different approach - they were marked on box as Au/Pd plating - this is probably plating on pins inside chip. I can get about 3-4 pounds of them.

And I have some of these, I did separate them from the rest as I am not sure if there is anything inside. I guess they will be my next experiment.

Great pictures Pat.

So.. I've setup my mini coal fired kiln for some trial and error.
took a little video to: (better mute your speakers)


The fan is rated 12V but for the trial is working on 5V. With the 12V connected, this buster blows all the ash out... haven't figured if it's a good thing or not... :mrgreen:

I've punched some holes at the bottom of a SS jug so the smoke will exhaust stright into the heat, which i reckon is about 800-900°C, enough to barely smell any burning plastic.



The kiln works as I expected it to, I think I need to make some minor size enhancements to perfect it.
I did notice however, that as the ash build up, it's getting harder to maintain high temp'....

p.s. - Pat, on your last picture, I would expect a very low Au/Pd/Ag yield out of them processors...

Based on my own less-than-successful experiments in the past, I believe your combustion process needs oxygen with the ICs, not just with the charcoal.

The charcoal you are using as a fuel source is created by burning carbonaceous material (wood, from various and mysterious sources :shock: ) in a reducing (oxygen-free) atmosphere, leaving unburned carbon to use as a more efficient fuel.

if you "burn", "incinerate", "roast", "fricasee'", or "whatever", carbon-based materials (i.e. "plastics", from petroleum products) in a reducing atmosphere, you will still wind up with an abundance of carbon, which you actually want to eliminate, as it acts as a precipitant, in some cases, and a general pain in the a** in most others.

If you could inject the oxygen/air into the combustion chamber, an effect that, I imagine (without proof ), was created by convection in Pat's hearth/forge/kiln, the results could be even better.

just my redneck, uneducated dos centavos.

dtectr