Bag of Fingers

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floppy

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 15, 2011
Messages
143
It’s been quite a few years but as soon as the weather warms a bit I’m gonna keep my self busy with this bag of goodness!!
13.5 pounds and the vast majority being double sided and heavy plated. All from very vintage telecom equipment. Yay!! 😁☺️
 

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You should have a decent yield there so keep us informed when you start to process them 8)
 
I love to hear your optimism Nick! I believe so too as I have processed a little over 2 pounds fingers from this exact type of boards and posted pics of the yield on hear about ten years ago. And I most certainly will post steps and pics of this process when I get started but it will be a little while yet due to temperatures that will be drastically falling to zero and below in these parts over the next few days. I’m trying to determine what temps would be be needed to realistically start the AP process so it doesn’t take too long.
 
The collection is getting bigger and with the weather being so cold I’m getting antsy. Cut my stock pile into 1lb bags. 18 and counting, sound be getting pretty close to about 90 grams. Cait wait to see if I’m right, hell maybe by the time warming weather rolls around I’ll have about 25 pounds.🤷‍♂️
 

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Nice fingers! You will do well. Maybe not 5 grams a pound well but
you will be pleased with the yield. :G :G :G
 
Nice and simple to process with good yields. I would be getting a bit anxious as well!
 
I'd predict closer to 2 grams per pound. In the mean time maybe you could come up with a mechanical way of getting the gold off the fingers. That would save you a ton of work when you're ready to start with chemicals.
 
I will post results from the first 2 pounds done one at time for results of each yield. The AP process is what I will use, this isn’t the first time for me. I have a few posts from about ten years ago using the same scrap as shown. Of those posts the first was 745 grams of scrap that yielded a 7 gram button and the second was 845 grams that yielded 9 grams of foils. So I’m pretty confident that these will yield between 4.5 to 5 grams per pound, but we will see. All of these fingers come from cards manufactured in the sixties and seventies.
 
And on a side note, the 7 gram button and 9 grams of foils I spoke of in the last reply was tested by an XRF and bought by Matthew Warbet in the day, they were tested at .9995 and .9998 respectively. I thought that was pretty decent by a first timer!
 
You have a nice batch to work with. Very good amount to process. If it were me, while it's very cold outside, I would do this.....

Put the fingers in a 5-gallon bucket that has holes in the bottom of it, placed in another 5-gallon bucket, add HCL/Muriatic Acid, add no more than 3 cap fulls of Peroxide, and with an air bubbler, add the same amount of distilled water to the solution.

With the air bubbler and the water to dilute the solution, you can let the fingers sit in the solution for a month or whatever, and when you are ready to work on the fingers, the most you'll need to do is pick through all the fingers that are completely stripped of the foils, without dissolving the gold, and not having to check on it until you're ready to process them.

Just be sure to have a copper bus bar to collect any possible gold that may dissolve. But if you double the solution with the distilled water, the most that would probably happen is that the copper would dissolve and you'll probably have nothing but gold flakes and some blank fingers in the bucket. The rest of the fingers may be loose enough to just use a toothbrush to remove the other foils, without ever using any heat. The air/bubbles are the keys when letting items sit in solutions without heat.

scrapparts.
 
scrap parts, I’ve thought about getting started, buckets and bubblers is what I’ve always used. But I don’t know how the AP will handle -10 and lower temps. I think I should probably wait until the lows get back up in the high 20’s atleast
 
@floppy, I have I think about 1 pound of fingers if I can find them I like to trade Sterling Silver flatware for them.
 
I appreciate the offer jmd, but fingers are the only that recover and refine, and this is the first batch of fingers I’ve had in a very long time.
 
Well I will have those fingers if ever want to trade or buy. And I weight was only 14.75 oz I thought I had 1 pound but that about 10 years ago.
 
I thought these were a really cool find, just little cards for slots in chassis, no board attached to them.....well component board. Didn’t have to break nothing off, just pick up the pile
 

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floppy said:
scrap parts, I’ve thought about getting started, buckets and bubblers is what I’ve always used. But I don’t know how the AP will handle -10 and lower temps. I think I should probably wait until the lows get back up in the high 20’s atleast
As long as you're using something like a 5-gallon pickle bucket AND you have a lid, it'll be fine in the cold. I have 13 lbs of contacts (4 contacts) that have copper on them. I put them in solution of straight muriatic acid and it's been a bit over a month now, and a lot of the copper is dissolved. I used 1-1/2gal of acid and an air bubbler. It's been cold here for a long time and seem to be getting worse, but the acid is good to go. It won't freeze. Well, it shouldn't freeze.

If you're wanting to work on them, you could easily setup your unit and the good thing about it is that you can leave the bucket outside, in the freezing cold. As long as the lid isn't tight on it, and an air bubbler is used, it's a set-n-go way to processes them without spending much time on them.

Wow, you have a nice score there. From here on out, if you do process them, you'll having your own yields data, and know if it's worth it to collect certain gold-bearing items. Certain items I've been saving over the years are being dealt with, yet, there are gold-bearing items I no longer collect for the gold they hold.

If you want to see if saving/collecting/buying them, process them and see the yields you'll have.

scrapparts
 
Scrapparts, do you use HCL/bleach to turn your foils into solution? Only reason I ask is because I noticed that when I did this quite a few years ago, when I got to processing about 4 pounds at a time it took forever to get the foils into solution with that method. If I only had 10 or 12 grams it seems to go to solution fairly quickly. That’s one reason I was thinking of stripping in smaller batches and processing. I don’t use nitric and am not going to start now.
 
One more question if you don’t mind scrapparts, what do you use to keep your bubbler hose in the solution? I used the stone it came with years ago and it turned to solution, I ended up making a ring with hose only and kept it down with the bucket. But it always floated to the top when I would agitate the finger bucket.
 
You can use a small hot nail or pin to punch holes in the sides of the tubing, heat, and seal the end of the tubing if needed you can use a weight to hold it down with something inert to the solutions like a piece of PVC pipe over the hose where it goes down into the bucket before it gets to your loop of hole and holes...
 
I think it was GoldSilverPro that suggested using PVC and making a frame that fit snug to the bottom of the bucket and used a pipe running down to it for the air supply. (You need to add several small holes for the bubbles to escape of coarse) Not to snug as it will need to be removed between processes. He also advocated using a bucket warmer to help things along, and it may be just what you need in really cold weather.
 
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