1,000,000 plus SIM cards

[patnor1011]

Thickness of plating is only one side of the story.
Gold bonding wires on the other side encapsulated in drop of resin are the cream in this case.
(if your chips look like this one)


http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=19050

 

[kjavanb123]

Henrik,

Thanks for your advise, it is very helpful to cut the amount of plastic, it can be sold as plastic scraps at even higher prices which can add the profit.

Patnor,
I will investigate it once I received the samples.

I am also considering $2000 donation if indeed this deal goes through and upon completion to go to this unqiue and great forum and some of the members here who have been my mentors during my years here.



Regards
Kj

 

[Anonymous]

Henrik,

Thanks for your advise, it is very helpful to cut the amount of plastic, it can be sold as plastic scraps at even higher prices which can add the profit.

Regards
Kj

I really wouldn't recommend factoring a profit from the plastic that you cut from these things.

 

[patnor1011]

I got 3.3g from 10k sim cards. I would like to stress one point here - that they were new, probably rejects from manufacturing therefore plating was not worn as you may expect on used cards.

 

[necromancer]

this is what i was saying........

3.3g from ten thousand sim cards (new) X 10 = 33g from one hundred thousand cards

33g from one hundred thousand cards X 10 = 330g from one million cards

330g from one million cards (used) divided by 50% = 115g of gold

take the time to punch out the contact area of 1,000,000 cards, say you had a custom manual punch built ($800.00)
you can punch out (if your real fast) one card every 2 seconds (not including reloading the pile)

30 cards a minute
1,800 cards a hour
14,400 for a 8 hour work day (no lunch, no breaks, no going pee)
936,000 for 65 weekdays at 8 hours a day

i don't know what the average wage there is but unless its real cheap i can't see a clear profit.

if this was ontario canada here is the math: (min hourly wage as of june 1st 2014 $11.00)

$11.00 X 8 hours X 65 days = $5,720 + 4% vacation pay = $228.80 = $5,720 (+ employer contributions) (CAD)

gold price (right now) $1,289.50 Toz (USD) i am not going to convert USD to CAD

115g divided by 31.1 = 11.05466237942122 troy ounces

11.05466237942122 toz X $1,289.50 = $14,254.99 (USD)

$14,254.99 - $5,720.00 = $8,534.99

$8,534.99 - travel - food - customer incentive (? $400.00 + $150.00 + 300.00) ($850.00) = $7,684.99

$7,684.99 - shipping - processing fees - equipment (if needed) - time - long distance phone calls - ? - ? = lets say $5,000.00

$5,000.00 and you make 20% (tops)

$1,000.00 not sure about taxes or other expenses.

this does not the 64,000 cards i left out of the math (just to round it out)

EDIT: please - the $800.00 for the punch machine, i forgot that

 

[glondor]

With a quick wooden jig, you could run them continuously through a band saw, if the chips are all in the same place. Just stack them edge side down against a properly adjusted fence, have a thin metal curve on the out-feed to separate the waste from the usable parts, 4 runs and you are through. I would think of water cooling the blade somehow, as I am sure the plastic will want to melt. You would have to be mindful of the chip orientation in your stacks.

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

Thanks for your input. One way to be assured about any profit, would be to receieve a kg of sample, cut the plastics, market it as scrap, then fire assay the gold plating part to find the gold content and AA ( atomic absorbtion ) for copper. I will be receiving that sample next week. I will do the tests, and post results, so we can plan further procesess.
Labor is cheap here.

Thanks for your responses
Kevin

 

[kurtak]

I really wouldn't recommend factoring a profit from the plastic that you cut from these things.

spaceships

There is actually a fairly good market for plastics (if you have enough volume) I get 19 cents a pound (about 2X the price of tin) for the ABS plastic from scraping electronics so it factors in to the money made - another words - though the plastic its self may not "make a profit" - getting paid for it factors in at the bottom line

Kurt

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Kurt.

Thanks for the info - just as an FYI I sell my plastics by the bail.

 

[kurtak]

With a quick wooden jig, you could run them continuously through a band saw, if the chips are all in the same place. Just stack them edge side down against a properly adjusted fence, have a thin metal curve on the out-feed to separate the waste from the usable parts, 4 runs and you are through. I would think of water cooling the blade somehow, as I am sure the plastic will want to melt. You would have to be mindful of the chip orientation in your stacks.

glondor

if he stack the cards thick enough he should be able to run a fairly to very aggressive blade (which will give him a bit wider saw kerf) with a fairly fast blade speed which means faster feed speed all of which will help cut down on melt down from friction - I could be wrong but I don't think he will need to worry about water cooling

Kurt

 

[kjavanb123]

Kurtak,

Considering the volume of cards, the amount of plastic will be huge something around 8 tons, that is gotta cover some of the expenses, so I will definetly look into cutting as much plastic as I can get from the cards.

First thing is to find iut the yield for this time of cards, as far as usage, they get inserted at the pump, so it is very frequently, unlike SIM cards that once inserted they donky usually change them. So I am assuming they might have thicker plating.

Here are some photo,


Regards
Kevin

 

[necromancer]

think about this band saw idea for a minute........

lots of stacking, lots of cutting & lots of picking out & sorting gold parts.

 

[g_axelsson]

A wild idea, use a drill press to drill the chip out. Use a jig in the form of a small iron box with a hole on top and bottom where the chip is located and leave the short side open for loading and unloading stacks of 40-50 cards. Pack them tight to get a clean cut and no shavings between the cards. The gold will be in the shavings.

Göran

 

[glondor]

When you quote the tonnage, impressive amount. By eliminating 90+ % of the plastic from incineration, wow, the savings! If they are metric tonnes, you will save over $10000.00 in incineration fees alone, plus the added value as sale-able plastic scrap. Even @ 5 cents a pound the plastic would let you buy lunch for the workers for a month!
A quick, rough and dirty calculation says that all cards, placed on edge, in a horizontal stack would be 2 km long!

Re: incineration. will you be able to claim the ash that goes up the flue and to the bag-house? Is there a way to do this without putting a percentage of gold up the chimney and into the incinerator operators pocket?
Does any one know the proper procedure to rep something like this?
Will the incinerator operator allow close scrutiny and possible intrusive reclaim of all material?

Just a few thoughts.

 

[Anonymous]

Kevin fair play. If you're talking 8 tonnes of plastics then I appreciate the point about recovering some of your money with the sale of these.

 

[kjavanb123]

Spaceship,

I got that number by assuming 5g per card, by cutting 80% of plastic that is 4g of plastics per card, they claim to have 1.7 million cards they dispose, so that is 4 x 1.7 million which is 6.8 tons of plastic which paid up to 10 cents per kg, which brings the total plastic value at 6800 kg x $0.10 which $680.

Glondor,
Incineration these parts I get to have the bag house contents as well as the main incinerated materials, it is done by government itself.

Thanks
Kevin

 

[butcher]

Build your own card cutting tool, or get a welder friend to help, I will try to describe one idea.
A pipe, the pipe passes through guide bushings, the pipe is also sharpened on one end like a plug cutter, weld a fitting to the pipe end at its side, (so as not to obstruct the openings of the pipe, this fitting fits a hydraulic ram rod ,(a cheap hand pump type like a bottle jack, or hand operated log splitter or an motor operated electric gas hydraulic power pack...), a base frame to hold a long stack of cards, can be welded out of angle iron, as a frame base for the cutting pipe, the pipe cuts through the cards the round gold parts are pushed all the way through the pipe, a base plate at both ends of the frame allow pipe to pass but not the rest of the cards on forward and reverse travel...
A press (geared hand) or hydraulic, using the pipe and similar idea as above.

A lever operated hole punch (like a very large paper punch), the large lever hinged at the back of a metal bench, a base plate holds a stack of cards to be punched in the proper place, again the pipe bit punches out the spot and they pass through the pipe, as the pipe cutting head passes through the stack of cards and out the hole in the base plate, the box that holds the cards also has a hole on top the pipe passes through, so when the lever is lifted the cards are held in place as the pipe cutter is lifted out of the stack of cards, the large lever is hand operated, and has enough of a fulcrum to make it easy on the operator.

Another way, use a table saw and guide, make a few wood boxes to hold a stack of cards, each of these boxes are different sizes to hold the cards where they need to be cut, the boxes slide down the table saws guide rail to cut the plastic from the target material, the remaining cards are moved to the next guide box to make another cut (the boxes are made so the table saws settings,or guide bar does not need readjusting to make the different cuts in the card.

Too bad I cannot post pictures that are in my mind, they would be more simple to understand than my writing.

Removing as much plastic as possible will make recovery easier, safer, more environmentally friendly, and more gold in your pocket.

Incinerating all of that plastic, the toxic fumes, ash, waste... would just cause problems in most any recovery method used, and most likely loss of more gold in the process. Less trash is always better, and if you can make money off the plastic Trash, you may be able to help cover some of the cost of building the tool needed, and some of the labor of cutting the cards.

 

[kjavanb123]

Butcher,

Thanks for your tips, I had a very similar method as you mentioned, a pipe squared shpe a little bigger than the size of chip, somehow heat it, and press it down the stack of cards while it is hot, that way all the chips are inside the pipe, and it leaves a hole in the stack of cards.
I talked to them this morning, their paper work will take 10 days to complete, plus they can supple 400,000 cards on monthly basis while this went through.

Thanks
Kevin

 

[Anonymous]

Funnily enough I have the same quantity of sim cards arriving next week but still on the reels they were manufactured on.

 

[patnor1011]

Whole cards, sim cards or just chip?