cell phone camera chip process

[lanfear]

Hi guys,

It's easter and still snowing in Norway. So I am doing a small boredom process with camera chips I have collected, and thought I would share my findings. I am doing them all together even though they are mixed ceramic and board mounted. About half is ceramic with bonding wires.


15,43 g

Right now they are outside in hot HCl on hotplate, to remove solder.



Next I will process in AR. My only worry is that the board mounted chips could suck up some AuCl. But they are hopefully saturated with HCl. That is it for now. I will update as I go.

Edit: double picture insert

 

[maynman1751]

Let us know how it turns out. Good Luck!

 

[patnor1011]

I would hit them with hammer repeatedly till reduced to about 1mm pieces.

 

[lanfear]

After a second hot HCl wash, the chips are now in AR. There is not much of red fumes, so there is apparently not much to recover. All the ceramic chips were smashed and with the board mounted chips I removed components and cut in two. Why would you smash it up more patnor? The bonding wires are not protected by epoxy. And the board mounted chips don't have bonding wires, only gold solder or traces.

Jon

 

[patnor1011]

Just to liberate plated areas, expose metals to acid more.

 

[lanfear]

So I finished the AR process last night. Because there was so little red fumes I suspected I overdid the nitric.
So I added my first dolphin button of once refined gold.

Almost sad to see it go. I melted it without borax and crucible. This was done because I was moving and wanted my powders in solid state.

So the AR ate most of it


I have now dropped lead and silver if present, out of the solution. And it has bin filtered twice.


At the moment I am making a fresh batch of SnCl2 to test for gold in solution. And will proceed to drop.
I am afraid the yield data on the chips has bin bungled, but i will way it before and after washes to see if I can get some results.


Jon

 

[lanfear]

Sorry for the delay guys. As I suspected my use of a dirty button bungled the result. After drop I was left with 6,07 grams of gold. If I add the leftover button it is a total of 6,19.
On the bright side I get to clean up my button and make it ready for display with a nice pipe I hope.
I will continue to save camera cells of the ceramic type, and next time I will post a new process walkthrough.

Jon

 

[amt]

hello miners
I have a few ccd chip to process but i do not know if put them in hot HCl or nitric acid with water.


what you think is best?

Thanks you