Best way to process memory sticks

[Marcel]

Reading here I found two common ways:

1. Clip off the goldfingers and AP them

2.Drop whole memory stick into HCL for a few hours.
2.1 Have tin dissolved, components fall off.
2.2 AP the whole board


While the goldfingers are usually richly plated with gold, the rest of the board often is flash only.
Now did I get 2. right?
Is the HCL process step worth the trouble? Or better use the fingers only, remove and store the chips and discard the rest of the pcb?

 

[jeneje]

I cut the fingers off as close as i can, then process them in AP. Save the PCB's to depoplate the flat packs later. Just to let you know if you use HCL to remove the flat packs they will need to stay in a closed container for at least 24 hours.
Ken

 

[Geo]

some sticks have enough gold plating to warrant removal and some dont. in my opinion, rather than pick through them i process all of them to be sure i get it all. it takes about the same amount of chemicals to a batch whether its a half pound or a pound and a half.

 

[Acid_Bath76]

I previously trimmed the fingers, but now I just process the entire stick in AP. The one thing I noticed early on was making sure the bucket which contained my material was large enough. I use the same method as lazersteve on his videos, but whole sticks instead of fingers. It seems that if the sticks can't move around when you agitate the bucket, it ends up taking a lot longer for everything to come off. My reason for doing this is to keep the chips and smaller SMD's. There is a little extra flash plating on some of the sticks too. The more I read on these chips, which I previously left on and sold, the more I want to start keeping them for processing. It might take a little more HCL to process the entire stick, but I'm finding uses for the dropped copper upon cleaning of the waste acid. I guess it really depends on how far you want to take it, and much time you want to invest.
Some use nitric to strip RAM. I tried it once. It works really fast, but it's beyond my comfort zone.