18 Dell PowereEdge servers

[NatiYati]

I have acquired 18 Dell rack mounted PowerEdge servers to scrap. They consist of:

11 PE 1855 Blade systems
2 Cabinets for Blade systems with many power supplies and fans
2 PE 1850
2 PE 6650 Each has 4 xeon processors
3 PE 1650

All the servers have dual power supplies and dual xeon processors. From the above I have:

42 Xeon Processors
34 Sticks of ram
32 SCSI2 15,000 hard drives

I have stripped them down and separated everything. Anyone willing to ballpark what kind of numbers in PM recovery I might get? To the learned individual on here, how would one proceed? I have ordered sub zero, have muratic and lye in volume.I have all the safety equipment. Many of the boards i baked in the oven and scraped all the components off already. That stunk up my house and made my girlfriend pretty mad. I am reading Hoke's book. Ordered the DVD's from Steve and other various tools.

Seems many directions i can go. Anyone care to tell me how they would proceed?

 

[Geo]

sub zero? i know what it is, but why are you.. you know what, never mind.

you should check out some of the post on gold recovery before you make a costly mistake. if you are just starting out on your recovery you have time to learn what the chemicals you will be using are and how to deal with them safely.

you have been on the forum all of four days and this is your first post. dont do any process without downloading and reading Hoke's book "refining precious metal waste". free to download from the books section or from some of our members signature line.

go to the guided tour and follow steves post on reactions and abbreviations of chemical names.

just FYI, subzero is plain sodium nitrate. you can buy it at any plant nursery or hardware store.

good luck.

 

[jimdoc]

Safety equipment won't help you when you do stuff in your oven.
Your girlfriend should be mad. You need to study safety some more.

Jim

 

[butcher]

In the house, in your oven?

Who are you trying to kill, yourself and your girlfriend?

You do not need acids, you need to learn not to poison yourself and those around you, forget trying to get a tiny bit of gold, (you would not get enough to pay to have yourself buried),

Study the safety section, and dangers involved, before you hurt someone.

All of the safety equipment in the world will not save you if you do dangerous things you have no knowledge about.

 

[Acid_Bath76]

Pretty Mad? You're lucky. Try that again, and maybe she won't wake up to tell you how upset she is. All for a couple bucks of yellow metal. Come on.

 

[silversaddle1]

A common mistake made by people who can't take a little time to educate themselves. You would have been way better off to sell the PCBs to a scrap yard and made your money there. For a small time operator like yourself it is very difficult to refine whole boards for a profit. Stop, back away from the mess you have made and read the forum.

 

[AztekShine]

In the oven?????? Really? Wow that's all I gota say bout that!?!?!?!

 

[NatiYati]

The oven is outside. I work for a jewelery repair company and have refined polishing and bench sweeps. Just not electronics. Not a very friendly board.

 

[jimdoc]

The oven is outside. I work for a jewelery repair company and have refined polishing and bench sweeps. Just not electronics. Not a very friendly board.

Even if the oven is outside, if it as you said "stunk up my house and made my girlfriend pretty mad", then you shouldn't be doing it there either. Also you didn't say where this oven was, how are we supposed to know that it is outside? How many people have outside ovens?

Jim

 

[butcher]

NatiYati,
We are a very friendly group.
Your friends here care enough about you and your girlfriend to try and protect your health, we want to see you safe, so if I see my friend do something stupid, I care about my friend enough to tell him he is doing something stupid.

NatiYati, my friend doing this in the house, or where you stink up the house was a stupid thing to do, please be my friend also and study like I said, we want to keep our friends on this forum alive.

 

[AztekShine]

The oven is outside. I work for a jewelery repair company and have refined polishing and bench sweeps. Just not electronics. Not a very friendly board.

I meant no ill will by saying what I said. I apoligize for seaming un friendly but I am concerned about anyone in our brother/sister-hood family. I have been looked out for by friends here to make shure I'm safe. I pass that along. I hope we can be friends and learn together. SAFELY!

 

[ericrm]

do you poeple realise at how much $/hour you work?? have you only ask yourself the question :lol:
mother board on the small scale recovery fetch less than 1$/hour stop dreaming :roll:

 

[glorycloud]

The overarching concern here is for safety first and foremost!
Most comments stem completely from that great concern for
everyone's health while they pursue their individual interest
in processing and refing precious metals.

We are a friendly board. We are just a friend to your health and safety first. 8)

 

[Geo]

people say "we learn from our mistakes". some do and some dont, but after gagging for a few hours of breathing the gasses from these baking electronics, i kind of feel like this lesson was learned. after you first touch a hot pan and burn a blister,do you again reach for a pan without an oven mitt? some mistakes are minor enough to be a nuisance, like the lingering smell of baking motherboards for a month or so, but some can be on a scale that cause a more serious effect that will never go away. i have done many things that i would have done even if my father had told not to do it, and did many times, just to see what would happen. so we tell would be recyclers and refiners the safety issues to try and convince them to do the right thing but really we do it to make ourselves feel better because we know that what we do can be deadly and would not want someone killing themselves trying to follow our lead. but ultimately its up to the individual whether or not they will be responsible for their own safety.

Natiyati, be safe.know what you want to do and know what will happen before you do it. if your not sure about the outcome, ask before you do something that can harm you and not after.

 

[AztekShine]

some mistakes are minor enough to be a nuisance, like the lingering smell of baking motherboards for a month or so,

:lol: :mrgreen: :roll: :lol:

 

[NatiYati]

Thought I would update you guys and apologize for my comment about unfriendly. I mistook concern for elitism I suppose. Turning down the sensitive nerves.....

I took all the memory plus about 200 pounds more ram fingers i acquired and 100 pounds of processors, some bench sweeps, etc...

First after i stripped everything down as much as I could, and after reading Hoke, And after following all proper safety precautions, I started with 4926 grams of material.

After running the material thru my nitric/hydrochloric wash (aqua regia) and rinsing and reweighed material and new net weight was 4481.

Logic tells me I now have 445 grams of dissolved metal in my solution.

I neutralized my solution which resides in a 5 gallon bucket with urea.

I now have a a 5 gallon bucket about 2/3 full with a dark blue/green solution with a ph of about 7.

Covered solution and put in shed as some things came up and had to revisit later.

About a month later I boiled most of the water off my solution to the point I can now fit entire contents in a 2 quart pyrex measuring cup.

Pretty Dark green. Put solution aside as I didnt have anything to precipitate my metals out with at the time.

This morning I discover what you guys see in the pics. Crystals have now formed in my solution. And the 2 quart pyrex measuring cup still contains the 445 grams of dissolved metal.

Any thoughts as to what the crystals are? best method to precipitate? Sodium Biomethysulfate (sp?)?



Any advise is welcome.

 

[Pantherlikher]

WOW....All that can be said.
You got quite a mess there now.
Good luck
Still concerned for your safety as you did Not do what the knowledgeable here told you to do. You tried it the shor way without having everything needed to completely finish the project. I can only hope someone will at least give you the "how to" bail out for your safety. Screw what you can or could have gained by doing this.
BS.

 

[Smack]

You said you process sweeps? I read nothing about you incinerating your material first or about how you treated the base metals first....Still jumping the gun I'd say. Sodium Metabisulfite, it's cheap. Why wouldn't you have your precipitant there waiting to be used? Also I find it hard to understand why you processed all that material together. This post from me should give you more questions than answers in hopes that you will find out what it all means and you can find it all here on the forum.

 

[g_axelsson]

NatiYati,

I have just read this thread for the first time. All I can say is that we really are nice. If you see a friend doing something stupid you tell him but if he is doing something really stupid you could give him a slap in the face so he understand the severity of the situation. It can seem hars sometimes, but I too think you needed a dose of reality, based on your first posting.

Okay, back to the problem at hands, do you have any pictures of what you put into aqua regia? Can you describe what type of material it was? What did you remove that didn't dissolve? Have you tested any solution with tin chloride? Do you even have any tin chloride for testing?

Help us help you by describing as much as you can. Don't panic, any gold in the cup is still there, it just takes a bit of planning and a cool head to get it out. The better we understand the mess, the better advice we could give. I'm not going to give any advice right now as I don't know enough about your mess to help right now, I could make things worse. There are also many more better suited persons here that can give you better advice than I can.

Just don't think you are in an unique situation, I've been in the same situation myself, having really dirty solution forming crystals and drying up. I left some experiments for two years until I got back to it as I didn't know what to do with it at the time. I had to rerefine it three times until it started to behave as normal gold. First two drops looked like a black sludge and would never settle. :lol:
In the end it turned out that I only had 0.3 grams of gold instead of the several grams that I thought I had from the beginning.

(Don't as about the bucket I have outside with tin chloride paste and gold flakes)

/Göran

 

[NatiYati]

Ok a little back ground.

My company (which I recently sold to the Russians) was responsible for doing all the jewelry repair for 375 Zales. Zales Outlet, Helzeberg and Gordons stores. On average we did between 16 to 23 thousand repairs a week. 61 employees. 22 Bench Jewelers. 17 Polishers. Sizing line using induction instead of flame so we could size a ring up or down in less then 2.5 minutes from cut to final polish. Using $8 an hour non skilled labor on assembly line.

I'm not a jeweler. However I designed the system that allowed us to do so many repairs a week using state of the art technology and a security and accountability system that allowed me to pick any job at any time and go to exactly where it was in our process on camera when need be and also to hold responsible party accountable for those that tried to test their skill and pilfer items. And yes people tried. No one ever got away with it. Not one time. When an item hit our building we had approx 24 hours to repair and fed ex it or brinxs truck it back out. And from time it hit our building till it left it was always on camera and being tracked via bar code and RFID tags. The 18 Dell servers I used for this experiment was what I replaced with faster new Blade systems as speed in our network and SQL servers had to be as fast as possible. (Side note.... It took a 5 ton 3 phase AC unit to keep a 10x10 room where I had 2 server racks 68 degrees)





Having said that, naturally we generated an enormous amount of bench sweeps and polish sweeps etc. All polishers had filtering systems and once every three months I would ship all our bench and polish sweeps to New York to be refined and would get a check back for $65 to $85 grand for recovered material.

I started wondering what the actual amount of recovered material was as all I had was their word as to amount recovered. Wasn't that I didn't trust them so much as I had no baseline to even know really if they were keeping a fee based on amount recovered and not just telling me something I was ok with hearing.

So I took 1 month of polish and bench sweeps. I incinerated the polish sweeps in our kiln, did all the proper procedures and used the Shor refining system and I forget exact numbers but I believe I recovered 2 1/2 pounds of gold and some platinum and a little silver that i discarded. I believe I sold my recovery for about $35 grand or so. So company I was using was giving me a fair shake.

When I replaced the servers I heard about the precious metals in the systems and I guess curiosity and too much free time got me wondering.

I also accumulated a vast amount of ram 16 large bins (16"x20"x16") and 6 large bins of processors.

I had someone take all the ram and cut it down to just the fingers. I had all the pins removed from all the processors. I had the processors incinerated to remove ceramics etc. I had all the ram seats removed and card slots removed. I also threw in some bench sweeps, some old Jewelery an ex girlfriend left behind, some incinerated polish sweeps, some gold solder, gold from some cell phones, etc. As previously stated the Gross weight of this menagerie was 4926 grams. All reduced to the smallest reasonable amount of "non" metal as possible. Here is a pic (albeit not a good one) of some of the left over after processing.



Again after processing my menagerie had lost 445 grams of weight and was now in the aqua regia.

I had some odor free precipitant somewhere but must have misplaced it or threw it away by mistake. I have stanous chloride. I have everything but a precipitant per se'. I have heard or read about using hydrogen peroxide. I am not really concerned with platinum or silver that may be in there. If any it is negligible.

I am in the Ft Worth TX area so if any of you guys are local let me know. I am doing this more for my own edification and knowledge and curiosity than I am trying to get rich. I do know there is AT LEAST 9 ounces of gold in that solution in a liquid or crystallized as it were state. And I know there is a rather simple or not so complicated way to bring it forth.

So I suppose, having given you guys more information, if any of you guys were to find yourself in my position, what method or methods would you pursue to recover aforementioned gold?

Thank you for your time and comments. They are appreciated and respected.