>200lbs lot of gold fingers scrap for sell or refining

Hello

It's one of the first time I post on the forum despite having been an avid reader, and regular dealer in large quantities of ewaste, from France.

I have a large lot of unusual gold fingers scrap (fully plated on both sides, without non plated lines in between).

In total, i'll be able to extract more than 200lbs of these fingers.

Is there be anyone on the forum who's interested to buy it, or toll refine it?

I'm also looking for your advises, ideas... especially your PM content estimates.

Thanks

Sam

These look more like clips than fingers.

Question for the board. Would the plating on fingers be thicker than the plating on these clips?

PM sent! :mrgreen:

Hello,

Looks like technical parts of PCBs that are removed at the end of the process.

I may be interested for toll refining. I'll send you a PM.

Ben

What did these come from?

Yes Ben, they appear to be the edges of circuit board panels that get trimmed off after plating as part of manufacturing. Logically you'd think actual edge fingers meant to last through multiple insertions and removals would be plated thicker than gold meant only as a ground plane or put on all traces for anti-oxidation? Does anyone know if manufacturers typically would be able to selectively plate some areas more heavily without the whole panel receiving the same thickness of plating? These look pretty uniform though. Other panel trimmings I've seen offered occasionally are visibly sometimes either thinly or incompletely plated.

The big question is of course yield , since the same person is selling on ebay

http://www.ebay.com/itm/111091631286?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649
and the price is going up and up. currently about 20 Us per LBS
and it has still 2 days to go.

This will most likely go over the price of the gold, but i never seen such fingers before still i do not think that one can get more then 4 grams out of it ( I may be wrong I never did these fingers )

It is a pity that the seller does not communicate better and answer the questions posted here.

scm

I think these are in the (POINT) .35 grams per pound range. A batch of very similar (same)material yielded 1.8 g per 5 pound batch. The customer also had hundreds of pounds available. Was not satisfied with actual yield. Don't get golden eyes. Is this material in the Toronto area?

glondor said:

I think these are in the (POINT) .35 grams per pound range. A batch of very similar (same)material yielded 1.8 g per 5 pound batch. The customer also had hundreds of pounds available. Was not satisfied with actual yield. Don't get golden eyes. Is this material in the Toronto area?

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Ebay says they are in France

Hello everyone, sorry for the long delay to come back!

@ silversaddle1 : What do you mean by clips, what would be the difference with a scrap gold finger?
I cut these out of green boards which have on the side these "fingers" plated areas. I'll send attached an example photo of the original boards i cut it out from.

@ ben4 : These could be technical boards, also i've not yet had confirmation on that. The supplier was industrial type. I'll update you when i know more.

@ Claudie : these come from scrap boards that I've collected. Don't know the origin of the boards yet, but it might be a screen frame board for the shape, or some specialist industrial boards. I had never seen boards like that before. Maybe people on the forum will recognise it from the photo i'm sending.
I cut the gold plated edge away with a "guillotine" tool, trying to leave the mininum possible green board (in most cases i manage to leave it under 1 or 2mm green).

@ macfixer01 : the plating looks very homogenous on the eye, and thick, when i tried to pull it away with a knife from a test piece, it detaches in one piece of resistant and reasonably thick golded foil. To compare that foil is much stronger than an alu foil piece. I had seen low quality plating before and it went out in powder, so this looks like good / very good quality. Maybe i could update a clear photo of that too tomorrow. If i knew more about the original use of the boards we'd be able to know more i'm sure.

@ squarecoinman : You complained that i didn't come back earlier, but it was sleeping time then in Europe, i'm doing my best to answer all the questions on ebay and from emails as well. For the yield, what do you base it on? You refined similar material before?
And I'm looking to sell it at a fair price (both for me and the buyer(s)) or get it refined with someone reliable. I'd have sent all of it to Umicore if they hadn't a higher minimum quantity than what i have.

@ glondor : I live in France, no idea what the product you got from someone in Toronto is or who these people are. This is not related. Do you have photos of the material which yielded so little?

Thanks everyone! I'll try to answer faster this time!

Cheers,

Samuel

adarnametal said:

@ macfixer01 : the plating looks very homogenous on the eye, and thick, when i tried to pull it away with a knife from a test piece, it detaches in one piece of resistant and reasonably thick golded foil. To compare that foil is much stronger than an alu foil piece. I had seen low quality plating before and it went out in powder, so this looks like good / very good quality. Maybe i could update a clear photo of that too tomorrow. If i knew more about the original use of the boards we'd be able to know more i'm sure.

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The foil you pulled off the board ins't pure gold. It is a base consisting of copper with nickel plating on top and then a thin gold layer on top of this. The gold plating is probably so thin it would break up in smaller pieces if you dissolve the copper and nickel layers. What you tested was the strength of the copper foil.

From the pictures it looks like you have the frames from the PCB panels, the pieces that is left after the pcb:s was taken out. It looks like flash plating to me and then it would be very little gold on the surface.

The best way to decide the thickness of the plating is to refine a representative test batch and measure yield.

Göran

I have had some similar boards where the edges looked like these. Mine were very thin plated, what people refer to as flash plating, no where close to what fingers, which are plated to be a contact point to be removed and reinstalled.

Ok. I'm sending samples for assay to various people on the forum, so we'll see the results.

adarnametal said:

Ok. I'm sending samples for assay to various people on the forum, so we'll see the results.

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well then at least it would give a clear yield and thus a fair price for buyer / seller

scm

adarnametal said:

Ok. I'm sending samples for assay to various people on the forum, so we'll see the results.

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I like this guy! He replies to questions, and is willing to listen to what people are saying! Then, he is willing to assay some of his stock to get real numbers!

Welcome to the forums!

the plating looks very homogenous on the eye, and thick, when i tried to pull it away with a knife from a test piece, it detaches in one piece of resistant and reasonably thick golded foil. To compare that foil is much stronger than an alu foil piece. I had seen low quality plating before and it went out in powder, so this looks like good / very good quality.

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I would estimate that the gold content is between 1/100th and 1/300th of the total weight of the peeled foil, considering the nickel, copper, and adhesive underneath the gold.

Hate to say this but they are prime eBay material.
I can bet nice shiny silver 1oz round that average yield will be less than half of what we get from fingers.
If we want to stay real, then it will be way below 1g/pound. That is my experience anyway.

I did some calculations when talking with a fellow who had similar material to this. His had much less surface area of plating, so this material seems more worthy.
From my calculations based on thicknesses reported on the forum as typical for gold flash meant the gold was worth maybe 5-10 cents a square inch of flash plated surface area, though this was several months ago before the gold price dropped

Even if I was given this material for free, I would pass on processing it myself. I have done some in the past and it's just crap material. This material would go in one of my Gaylord boxes bound for the refiner. I don't have any pictures of what I had but it was similar to what he has in the pictures. Just looked in my journal, I did a test batch of 7 lbs. and got 2g. Au.

Smack said:

Even if I was given this material for free, I would pass on processing it myself. I have done some in the past and it's just crap material. This material would go in one of my Gaylord boxes bound for the refiner. I don't have any pictures of what I had but it was similar to what he has in the pictures. Just looked in my journal, I did a test batch of 7 lbs. and got 2g. Au.

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So let me see if I got this strait, your yeild works out to 0.2857g per lb of boards. There is 200 lbs so that works out to 57.14285g of refined gold at a current market price of approximately $44.67 per gram. Total lot would be valued at $2552.26 - time and chemicals and you wouldn't bother with this stuff? Am i missing something here?