dannlee
Well-known member
Here is a share about getting a few things apart on the cheap, a beginners study on methods & values from salvaging ‘just’ two early 1990’s laptop notebooks. As a cure for cabin fever, I stripped laptop chassis and cut everything apart, snipped caps off PCBs then oven pre-heated and depopulated by heat-gun…
The bulk waste from the units got stuffed into an old printer housing and sent to free recycling at a big-box retail store (surprise!) and the copper and aluminum went off to salvage yard along with a couple of buckets of junk from the basement ($43, no complaints) plus every gold plated piece sorted away for a future clean-up. Then last week we had a day last week above freezing (yippee!) that saw me digging out the snow from BBQ area to uncover my #30 propane tank.
For this version of my incinerator: I stacked together $15 (box of six) 4-1/2" x 9" x 1-1/4" firebricks on top of a 12”x18” sheet of 5/8” drywall. I lined the tiny firebox with 3/16” fiberfrax aluminosilicate insulation I’d nabbed a roll of some time back, and fired up my $15 Harbor Freight (Coupon) 500K Btu torch with everything perched safely on top of my trusty Weber grill.
Once the fiberfrax latex binder cleared off I started dropping chips down the flue. About 35% bounced into bad locations efficient burn wise so I will be playing with placing them with a ladle next time. Had chips stacking and not firing up well too, so am looking into a way to jounce them around and/or tumble them, or have swappable stacking trays w/ lift rings. I have nabbed a chunk of titanium alloy mesh to see if It will do a rocker or shaker plate to keep chips out of corners or wedging to the floor away from heat flow. So far, I have more than three or four kilos of chips stashed so I cannot help not scheming faster & smoother production line methods for small scale reclaiming.
Lobbing plastic/epoxy chips into the near blue-hot firebox was like dripping naphtha or gasoline into a fire, very vigorous fireball with near zero smoke and almost no smell since there was surplus propane acting on it. For urban camouflage, using a small system with very high temperatures seems a good place to be; the only smell was a very faint asphalt or hot rubber odor.
Also, on incinerating effectively, I’m looking to explore using a reverse-draft or semi-spiral flow burner to slow down or stagger that hyperactive fume cloud, then give it a place to expand into before it leaps into the sky to keep it super-heated longer for an efficient & cleaner burn. On this trial by doing a 45° to 60° downwards bounce of the flame off the floor into the back wall got the chips surfaces incandescent blue hot that I had me thinking to myself was impressive to watch – then I hit the gas valve ‘turbo’ wide-open lever and saw the chips go to white-hot-shimmering-like-mirrors HOT.
The insulation layer over the firebrick sure improves efficiency even if this choice of insulation has the strength of angel food cake once fired. High temperature I got with most of the bonding wires reduced to gold beads, with plenty of gold alloy & copper beads too… but still had lumps of hard char to sort. I have no pictures of the chips beforehand, not more than six ounces or so. I also did not time the length of the burn as I’d had gotten impatient from being indoors too long and this was just a trial run, could not have been more than 10 minutes as I am propane stingy with that thirsty burner.
First mistake: not eliminating the 60/40 solder before processing chips, the razor cut-away method was NOT used separating chips from the PCBs and that would have helped. Standing next to it looking down at the black stains on pure white ceramic insulation from solder made me think atomizing Lead long term is not the brightest idea.
Another mistake: saving the large chips until last, drop those 386-486’s etc. in first to give them enough time to ash thoroughly. I thought making a bed of smaller chips for big ones to perch on would work fast enough to not be a waste of propane to process them, but plainly, the processing of large (old) chips is more a function of time at temperature versus peak surface temperature.
The results: about 1/3 of the ash screened easily through 0.6mm mesh, 1/3 was larger magnetic chaff with attached ash lumps taken off the screen without rubbing any down or pulverizing, that other 1/3 was char hunks portion from the larger chips.
I think I like the ‘wires into beads’ burn. So far am not seeing traces of gold wire stubs at the spot welds on the kovar leads so far, but have not finished washing/separating/processing the magnetics completely.
Five photo limit, result beads on next post.
The bulk waste from the units got stuffed into an old printer housing and sent to free recycling at a big-box retail store (surprise!) and the copper and aluminum went off to salvage yard along with a couple of buckets of junk from the basement ($43, no complaints) plus every gold plated piece sorted away for a future clean-up. Then last week we had a day last week above freezing (yippee!) that saw me digging out the snow from BBQ area to uncover my #30 propane tank.
For this version of my incinerator: I stacked together $15 (box of six) 4-1/2" x 9" x 1-1/4" firebricks on top of a 12”x18” sheet of 5/8” drywall. I lined the tiny firebox with 3/16” fiberfrax aluminosilicate insulation I’d nabbed a roll of some time back, and fired up my $15 Harbor Freight (Coupon) 500K Btu torch with everything perched safely on top of my trusty Weber grill.
Once the fiberfrax latex binder cleared off I started dropping chips down the flue. About 35% bounced into bad locations efficient burn wise so I will be playing with placing them with a ladle next time. Had chips stacking and not firing up well too, so am looking into a way to jounce them around and/or tumble them, or have swappable stacking trays w/ lift rings. I have nabbed a chunk of titanium alloy mesh to see if It will do a rocker or shaker plate to keep chips out of corners or wedging to the floor away from heat flow. So far, I have more than three or four kilos of chips stashed so I cannot help not scheming faster & smoother production line methods for small scale reclaiming.
Lobbing plastic/epoxy chips into the near blue-hot firebox was like dripping naphtha or gasoline into a fire, very vigorous fireball with near zero smoke and almost no smell since there was surplus propane acting on it. For urban camouflage, using a small system with very high temperatures seems a good place to be; the only smell was a very faint asphalt or hot rubber odor.
Also, on incinerating effectively, I’m looking to explore using a reverse-draft or semi-spiral flow burner to slow down or stagger that hyperactive fume cloud, then give it a place to expand into before it leaps into the sky to keep it super-heated longer for an efficient & cleaner burn. On this trial by doing a 45° to 60° downwards bounce of the flame off the floor into the back wall got the chips surfaces incandescent blue hot that I had me thinking to myself was impressive to watch – then I hit the gas valve ‘turbo’ wide-open lever and saw the chips go to white-hot-shimmering-like-mirrors HOT.
The insulation layer over the firebrick sure improves efficiency even if this choice of insulation has the strength of angel food cake once fired. High temperature I got with most of the bonding wires reduced to gold beads, with plenty of gold alloy & copper beads too… but still had lumps of hard char to sort. I have no pictures of the chips beforehand, not more than six ounces or so. I also did not time the length of the burn as I’d had gotten impatient from being indoors too long and this was just a trial run, could not have been more than 10 minutes as I am propane stingy with that thirsty burner.
First mistake: not eliminating the 60/40 solder before processing chips, the razor cut-away method was NOT used separating chips from the PCBs and that would have helped. Standing next to it looking down at the black stains on pure white ceramic insulation from solder made me think atomizing Lead long term is not the brightest idea.
Another mistake: saving the large chips until last, drop those 386-486’s etc. in first to give them enough time to ash thoroughly. I thought making a bed of smaller chips for big ones to perch on would work fast enough to not be a waste of propane to process them, but plainly, the processing of large (old) chips is more a function of time at temperature versus peak surface temperature.
The results: about 1/3 of the ash screened easily through 0.6mm mesh, 1/3 was larger magnetic chaff with attached ash lumps taken off the screen without rubbing any down or pulverizing, that other 1/3 was char hunks portion from the larger chips.
I think I like the ‘wires into beads’ burn. So far am not seeing traces of gold wire stubs at the spot welds on the kovar leads so far, but have not finished washing/separating/processing the magnetics completely.
Five photo limit, result beads on next post.
