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Wanted Buying Bulk Gold Fingers From Australia or Asia

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Bondi Ewaste

New member
Joined
Apr 18, 2023
Messages
2
Location
sydney
Hi miners, Im new here and ive been looking for a reliable place to buy gold fingers in Australia or import from Asia.
Would anyone have any advice or tips where i should be looking or any great contacts.
Thanks in advance.
 
Hi miners, Im new here and ive been looking for a reliable place to buy gold fingers in Australia or import from Asia.
Would anyone have any advice or tips where i should be looking or any great contacts.
Thanks in advance.
Welcome to us.
You are poking in to the main problem for every small refiner now.
Getting hold of material is the main concern, and usually buying it do not cut it if you plan to make money.
One can get lucky though.

What are your plans for the fingers, sell on or refine?
 
Welcome to us.
You are poking in to the main problem for every small refiner now.
Getting hold of material is the main concern, and usually buying it do not cut it if you plan to make money.
One can get lucky though.

What are your plans for the fingers, sell on or refine?
Hi thanks for your reply,
Yes i'm seeing it as a problem.
I do collection of e-waste here in Sydney but would like to grow.
I would be more interested in refining myself but if i can source them in bulk i would be interested in on-selling to the community at a very good price so that we can all benefit.

Any advice would be most welcome Yggdrasil
 
Hi thanks for your reply,
Yes i'm seeing it as a problem.
I do collection of e-waste here in Sydney but would like to grow.
I would be more interested in refining myself but if i can source them in bulk i would be interested in on-selling to the community at a very good price so that we can all benefit.

Any advice would be most welcome Yggdrasil
You are probably better in the e-waste in Australia than me, since I'm on the opposite side of the Globe ;)

If you are going to process them yourself I have some study material for you.

1. Read C.M. Hokes book on refining jewelers scrap, it gives an easy introduction to the most important chemistry regarding refining.
It is free here on the forum: Screen Readable Copy of Hoke's Book
2. Then read the safety section of the forum: Safety
3. And then read about "Dealing with waste" in the forum: Dealing with Waste

Suggested reading: The Library

Forum rules : https://goldrefiningforum.com/threads/board-policy-this-should-be-read-by-everyone.4646/
 
In all honesty, I don't think you can buy flingers as a refiner and make a profit, unless you resell them for the E-bay prices we see today, far exceeding the actual gold value that is there.
The thing is, gold fingers do not exist on their own. They have to be cut off some PCB to either process easily or make it look more attractive to sell, = labor
So in my view the only reason for cutting fingers is if you're scrapping yourself and refining the gold, so you need clean cut fingers to process, or you're making a shiny product to resell in the community for prices that only the seller has any benefit from.

Martijn.
 
There is a scraper in Sydney I watch on YouTube that specializes in ewaste. Ewaste Ben maybe he can provide you something or give you some ideas. He says he doesn’t refine just sells for scrap. Here is a link to his channel https://youtube.com/@eWasteBen
 
Here in the US the going price of quality close trimmed fingers is $30 per pound. These buyers do not process them but stockpile them and sell them on after getting some large volume.

Edit; that's not eBay prices, but an actual e-scraper price.

I process my own and don't see how you can make money buying them at any price, I get them for free when tearing down old computers.
 
Some advice on buying fingers.

1) Pay attention to the cleanliness of the finger boards. Are they trimmed closely to the gold plating? Do the fingers appear to have other debris mixed in, a common scam is to mix in or "salting" of the batch (especially larger batches) with useless junk such as screws, wire, odd pieces of junk, etc.
2) Keep an eye out for mixed batches which contain various grades of finger boards. Older thick plated fingers tend to have wider traces and wider spaced traces. Modern fingers have red, green, purple, etc colored solder masks. The newer ones can be much lower value than the older ones. The much older ones are higher value and the board material is more brown than tan/yellow.
3) Be aware that unscrupulous sellers with access to Cyanide will pre-strip the fingers leaving a very thin Au layer over a shiny nickle layer. These are nearly worthless.
4) Watch for EDIN (*ENIG)(flash plated) Telcom board trimmings and pieces mixed in. These boards look pretty but produce no where near the Au.
5) Watch for batches with board pieces thrown in that only contain a thin ring around holes and edges or large EDIN (*ENIG) plated areas.
6) Do the finger boards have other components or metal near the board side of the finger where the trim cut took place?

I always ask losts of questions about the history of the source of the fingers from the buyer. Also ask for lots of pictures of the material spread out and not just the top of a pile which could be hiding any of the above mentioned pitfalls.

Typically if the price on a batch seems too good to be true, there is a reason for it. If you find 100#s (or even 1000s) of fingers for $25-30/pound and the buyer is anxious to sell, ask lots of questions. Good quality, well trimmed, clean fingers "should' produce 1.5 to 2 grams of Au per pound and will be easy to sell for $50-60/pound at today's spot leaving you a small profit margin when run using the proper methods.

The largest single batch of fingers I've personally ever run was 550# and was a mix of various types across the spectrum mentioned above. Final yield for the batch was 1.25 grams per pound. The entire 550 pounds was run in 8 hrs soup to nuts thru cyanide using a cement mixer doing 30-35# batch sizes in each load.

On the other end of the scale the highest yield fingers I've ever run was nearly 6g per pound final yield. They were pre-1970s 100% clean, all identical, well trimmed, wide spaced thick fingers on dark brown boards.

Steve
 
Last edited:
To clarify for Bondi: In point #4 of his reply above, I believe lazersteve meant ENIG (Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold). It’s a lot thinner than hard plated gold.

(edited to fix misspelled name)
 
If you can buy fingers for 60 dollars a pound, why even mess with refining them? Just re-sell them on ebay for 120 a pound. Even after the fees it still would make more money than refining them.
Good ,clean, close cut fingers have been selling on ebay for 100+ dollars a pound for years now. Someone's buying them all up, and it's not just the greenhorn new refiners buying them all.
 
If you can buy fingers for 60 dollars a pound, why even mess with refining them? Just re-sell them on ebay for 120 a pound. Even after the fees it still would make more money than refining them.
Good ,clean, close cut fingers have been selling on ebay for 100+ dollars a pound for years now. Someone's buying them all up, and it's not just the greenhorn new refiners buying them all.
That must be the 'cyanide strip and resell' guy. I see no other way.
Or someone is storing them waiting for higher prices.
 
To clarify for Bondi: In point #4 of his reply above, I believe lazersteve meant ENIG (Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold). It’s a lot thinner than hard plated gold.

(edited to fix misspelled name)
Yes, my mistake

Thank you for the correction. I will not edit my original post so this all makes sense.

Steve
 
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