Any good ideas how to process computer scrap big scale

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Shark said:
The quality of his product is what Kurt is talking about. To run it in a copper cell it needs a higher copper content. Also it needs any other base metals reduced as much as possible. 4metals mentioned this but I think was waiting to see if the owner had more input instead of going into a broad general detail.
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A refiner would take those bars as they are but then hit you with “deleterious metals” charges. So it will be more costly because they will have to oxygen sparge the melt.

But as a copper based bar, even with deleterious metals, it is a ways along the process and easier to process for the refiner.

If the bars were oxygen sparged before shipping processing would cost less.

And if the slimes were cleaned up and shipped as melted slime bars they would be even less costly. The higher the PM content, the better accountability, which means it costs less.
 
Showing my lack of experiance, but is there a minimum weight or set weight for the copper bullion that needs to shipped or is it based on the over all weight of the shipment?
 
Yes he invest a lot now he can't go backward .need the equipment for electrolysis .and of course . Just like your prosses . Iwill see what he's doing this week .hes looking to buy .the rest of equipment .he found some company in turkey iwill post all the equipment he's trying to purchase for electrolysis. To make sure it's the good one . And in same time there is some company wants to buy the metal the way it is to refine in Europe .
 
Shark said:
The quality of his product is what Kurt is talking about. To run it in a copper cell it needs a higher copper content. Also it needs any other base metals reduced as much as possible. 4metals mentioned this but I think was waiting to see if the owner had more input instead of going into a broad general detail.
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Iam trying to figure out how it will work yes 4metal idea it's very good . Just my lack of knowledge about electrolysis. Never got that far in refining . I can follow instructions if he get the rest of equipment . And get him started .
 
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Biom said:
Shaker table looks very safe .iwill give him that option too . I didn't ask him how he separate the material yet may be by hand cause of the sheep labor .iwill see him this week and what he's options thank you pete
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Seeing the pictures, seems a very good equipment.
The advantage of using a mill and shaker table with a magnetic separator lets you work as clean as you can, generates low toxic waste and create a lots of base materials for other products.
I use the fiberglass to mix it with concrete and make decorative pavement bricks, the plastics(granules) can be used to make road covers(asfalt, mixed with the ash and bitumen and other components) the magnetic material can be processed(if) containin any gold, in a sulfuric cell then recycled as metal at any junkyard.
You can make more money then jus burning everything and creating waste and poisoning your neighbourhood.
If labor is cheap, recovering and sorting would be an economic and feasable way to separate everything before proceeding to other processes, and there is more money to make from copper and silver, gold would be the clean profit this way.
There are several solutions for processing the material your friend has, some of them already presented by the members of this forum...but planning everything in advance could help very much.

Be safe,

Pete.
 
kurtak said:
I am sorry but I don't currently have a lot of time to post much (which is why you haven't seen me much lately)

I am seeing a lot of talk here about investing in & setting up a copper cell - which is fine - BUT -----------

Isn't that kind of putting the cart before the horse ????

I mean this current operation is not even close to producing a product that can go to a copper cell

And from what I can see (& maybe I am wrong) it looks like it is going take a fair amount of more money invested in this operation just to produce a product that can go to a copper cell

Shouldn't we be focusing on getting the current operation up to what is needed to produce the product for a cell (which is going to require more money) before talking about setting up a cell --- which we currently have no product for
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kurtak said:
I am sorry but I don't currently have a lot of time to post much (which is why you haven't seen me much lately)

I am seeing a lot of talk here about investing in & setting up a copper cell - which is fine - BUT -----------

Isn't that kind of putting the cart before the horse ????

I mean this current operation is not even close to producing a product that can go to a copper cell

And from what I can see (& maybe I am wrong) it looks like it is going take a fair amount of more money invested in this operation just to produce a product that can go to a copper cell

Shouldn't we be focusing on getting the current operation up to what is needed to produce the product for a cell (which is going to require more money) before talking about setting up a cell --- which we currently have no product for

Kurt
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He does have a lot of products for next few months and he keep buying from Morocco and af
GoIdman said:
Seeing the pictures, seems a very good equipment.
The advantage of using a mill and shaker table with a magnetic separator lets you work as clean as you can, generates low toxic waste and create a lots of base materials for other products.
I use the fiberglass to mix it with concrete and make decorative pavement bricks, the plastics(granules) can be used to make road covers(asfalt, mixed with the ash and bitumen and other components) the magnetic material can be processed(if) containin any gold, in a sulfuric cell then recycled as metal at any junkyard.
You can make more money then jus burning everything and creating waste and poisoning your neighbourhood.
If labor is cheap, recovering and sorting would be an economic and feasable way to separate everything before proceeding to other processes, and there is more money to make from copper and silver, gold would be the clean profit this way.
There are several solutions for processing the material your friend has, some of them already presented by the members of this forum...but planning everything in advance could help very much.

Be safe,

They separate material by hand .and he finish with machines and melt . That's what they doing for the moment . Iwill take more pictures or make a vedio .every body from the forum referring electlysis. That's the only option he's got to finish
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GoIdman said:
The advantage of using a mill and shaker table with a magnetic separator lets you work as clean as you can, generates low toxic waste and create a lots of base materials for other products.
Click to expand...
This is all very true but there is one thing you didn't factor into this reply; the equipment for the incineration has already been purchased and installed.

Shaker tables were originally introduced for use in mining where physical separation is not possible unless you have a river flowing through your claim.

The method of burning off whatever can be incinerated followed by treatment of the metal fraction has been the go to technology in the e-scrap recovery industry for years now. Likely because incineration has been around for many many years and the first e-scrap processors used what they had.

I think it would be a great test for someone set up to granulate and incinerate to split a lot and process half the typical way to quantify the values, and granulate and ball mill the second half and pass it over a table. You are absolutely correct about the minimized environmental impact and it has the potential to radically change the process.

GoIdman said:
There are several solutions for processing the material your friend has, some of them already presented by the members of this forum...but planning everything in advance could help very much.
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Advanced planning is always wise but I don't see the table manufacturers trying to implement this technology very often. Back in the early 90's I generated a lot of processed sweeps from jewelry production which was incinerated, and milled to a -60 mesh. This was shipped off to Degussa, if I remember correctly, for processing. I had read about shaker tables and thought there was potential. The material I produced had a gold content as high as 1 ounce per pound. After discussing the feedstock with Action Mining Services, I was assured the equipment would work. I took a few pounds, hopped on a plane, and they had a table set up for me to have my sample run over. After it was processed the table could not separate the wheat from the chaff as it were. No gold remained on the table, it all passed off with the fines. To this day there is a huge market if this type of separation was effective for fine powders processed, as most refiners today ship these powders to Europe for smelting. If the tables worked there is a huge potential, huge. If any of the table experts here would be willing to work on this application I know a good number of refiners generating these powders and I could easily connect the interested parties. Huge potential! (not for me personally, I'm mostly retired and in the giving back mode)
 
When you were doing oxygen sparging on a small melt lot to get low melting point elements out, how did you determine end point? Were you lucky enough to have XRF and the ability to take a quick pin sample and know that a majority of the lead, tin and zinc were gone?

Once completed with oxygen sparging, did you pole the copper to reduce oxides, or just ship it as is and make that the copper refineries problem?
 
4metals said:
This is all very true but there is one thing you didn't factor into this reply; the equipment for the incineration has already been purchased and installed.

Shaker tables were originally introduced for use in mining where physical separation is not possible unless you have a river flowing through your claim.

The method of burning off whatever can be incinerated followed by treatment of the metal fraction has been the go to technology in the e-scrap recovery industry for years now. Likely because incineration has been around for many many years and the first e-scrap processors used what they had.

I think it would be a great test for someone set up to granulate and incinerate to split a lot and process half the typical way to quantify the values, and granulate and ball mill the second half and pass it over a table. You are absolutely correct about the minimized environmental impact and it has the potential to radically change the process.


Advanced planning is always wise but I don't see the table manufacturers trying to implement this technology very often. Back in the early 90's I generated a lot of processed sweeps from jewelry production which was incinerated, and milled to a -60 mesh. This was shipped off to Degussa, if I remember correctly, for processing. I had read about shaker tables and thought there was potential. The material I produced had a gold content as high as 1 ounce per pound. After discussing the feedstock with Action Mining Services, I was assured the equipment would work. I took a few pounds, hopped on a plane, and they had a table set up for me to have my sample run over. After it was processed the table could not separate the wheat from the chaff as it were. No gold remained on the table, it all passed off with the fines. To this day there is a huge market if this type of separation was effective for fine powders processed, as most refiners today ship these powders to Europe for smelting. If the tables worked there is a huge potential, huge. If any of the table experts here would be willing to work on this application I know a good number of refiners generating these powders and I could easily connect the interested parties. Huge potential! (not for me personally, I'm mostly retired and in the giving back mode)
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I agree, i still work on my separation processes, and allthough i dont want to reinvent the wheel, i try to optimize the already known processes to minimize environmental damage.
There is still a long way to go, but sometimes success doesnt come cheap or fast, and i am sure i will fail in some cases until i find the correct way....allthough the fiberglass mixed with concrete makes very nice pavement bricks.. :)
 
snoman701 said:
When you were doing oxygen sparging on a small melt lot to get low melting point elements out, how did you determine end point? Were you lucky enough to have XRF and the ability to take a quick pin sample and know that a majority of the lead, tin and zinc were gone?
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I have always believed, and it has rewarded me well in my refining career, that analytics, knowing what is in your material before processing, leads to the best choices. Back in the pre XRF days we always melted the copper fraction coming off the sifter into 1000 ounce bars. Those bars were run on an Atomic Absorption to determine the metal concentrations. From there, experience taught us that a minimum of 1 hour was needed in a sparging melt for the "average" bar and the bars were classified by their content so bars of higher concentrations of some metals were treated longer.

So the end point was not determined during the process because the speed and efficiency of a quick pin dip sample followed by XRF did not exist. Tin and lead are effectively removed by air sparging and fluxing so we were able to produce low enough concentrations of the problem metals such that they were not an issue for copper cells. Even though we shipped the bars, the problem metals, often listed as deleterious metals by the large reiners, were low enough to be accepted without up charges from the refiner.

snoman701 said:
Once completed with oxygen sparging, did you pole the copper to reduce oxides, or just ship it as is and make that the copper refineries problem?
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While we could have remelted the bars in a strong reducing melt to break the oxides it wasn't worth it to do a second melt. Plus a copper refinery will remelt and cast into large anodes in their normal process. I am not totally sure what you mean by pole the copper.
 
4metals said:
I have always believed, and it has rewarded me well in my refining career, that analytics, knowing what is in your material before processing, leads to the best choices. Back in the pre XRF days we always melted the copper fraction coming off the sifter into 1000 ounce bars. Those bars were run on an Atomic Absorption to determine the metal concentrations. From there, experience taught us that a minimum of 1 hour was needed in a sparging melt for the "average" bar and the bars were classified by their content so bars of higher concentrations of some metals were treated longer.

So the end point was not determined during the process because the speed and efficiency of a quick pin dip sample followed by XRF did not exist. Tin and lead are effectively removed by air sparging and fluxing so we were able to produce low enough concentrations of the problem metals such that they were not an issue for copper cells. Even though we shipped the bars, the problem metals, often listed as deleterious metals by the large reiners, were low enough to be accepted without up charges from the refiner.


While we could have remelted the bars in a strong reducing melt to break the oxides it wasn't worth it to do a second melt. Plus a copper refinery will remelt and cast into large anodes in their normal process. I am not totally sure what you mean by pole the copper.
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4metals just a smart professional refiner you deserve a big respect.
 
4metals said:
While we could have remelted the bars in a strong reducing melt to break the oxides it wasn't worth it to do a second melt. Plus a copper refinery will remelt and cast into large anodes in their normal process. I am not totally sure what you mean by pole the copper.
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Poling copper is just melting it in a reducing atmosphere. Traditionally, green spruce poles were used, hence the term. Now lots of methods, but I think mostly injection of a reducing gas through tuyeres.
 
4metals said:
There is often a big difference between what a refiner is processing the material for and what yield they are paying on.

And tin is readily fluxed from a smelt to the point that I wouldn’t get worked up over a metal selling for $1.50 a pound. As the song says, you got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.
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$1.50 tin? In when, 1965 or so ? Tin is probably the highest value to actually be recovered in most boards. Spot is right around $13.00 and its the lowest it’s been in a while. Not only is it a reasonably rare metal indium tin oxide is about the only visible light transparent conductor that we presently have been able to discover. ROHs made it a more demanded metal, and touch screens are being produced in quantities i find unimaginable. One of the largest tin refineries is outside of Philadelphia, PA and I believe that they are paying 11$ for mine run metal right now so if you have some of that 3k a ton tin i think I can get rid of it for you.
 
Shark said:
I am just a hobbiest that enjoys learning, and helping where I can. 4metals is the professional.
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Me too iam just refining for hobby .I wish I can make my own small lab in Morocco or USA . .. one day
 
Biom said:
Me too iam just refining for hobby .I wish I can make my own small lab in Morocco or USA . .. one day
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I learned a lot from this thread. It's great to get every body involved .iam sure we all benefit some how from this conversations .
 

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