Hi All,
Pretty new to gold recovery and also new to this forum.
Lengthy post to follow, but would like to make sure I do this once and do it right.
Firstly, I'm doing this as a hobby and I realise that hobbies cost money. My aim out of this is not to necessarily find the most cont effective way of recovery, but to try and balance best practice for optimal results - and obviously weighing the cost-benefit factors.
So here goes....
I would like to state everything that I've stockpiled and then explain my approach that I think and would like to ask any improvements etc.
(Oh, and it you are not sure what I refer to in my explanation of certain stock piled good, please ask and I'll upload a pic)
1. First in my stock pile is gold plated PCB board strip that I removed from network card, graphic cards etc....
These I want to start of in a hydrochloric and peroxide solution for a good amount of time until I can see all the strips are cleared.
After this, to make sure no base metals remain, I want to give it a quick Nitric and water bath, rinse properly and set aside for AR
2. Then I have lots of ribbon connectors, ink cartridge ribbons, gold plated plastic button strips from cellphones (where the buttons were and other connection points)
Here I also want to follow the same approach as above, but I would like to keep the gold attached to the larger plastic bits so I can sort it easier after the two acid baths.
Again rinse properly and set aside for AR
3. Next I have loads and loads of IC chips that range from the good quality graphics chips to the stuff that might most likely not contain anything.
Here I'm a little stuck with the best approach :-( I have a couple of options but would like to explore the cleanest option.
Options are between getting rid of the carbon chemically (Hydrofloric (heated), sulpheric(heated), hexane(not heated but apparently expensive)
Other option is incineration - but this always looks messy with many steps of classifying through meshes, panning, etc etc.
Once past the above point, I would again like to follow the two acid bath solution to get the cleanest possible gold out ready for AR
4. Second to last, I have some CPU chips and lost of cleaned pins and connectors from things like cellphone sim card holders. Everything is pretty well cleaned.
Here again just the two acid bath solution and then aside for AR.
5. Lastly, the PCB boards. I do realize that the gold in your everyday network card won't contain much - if any - gold. But what I do have is a good amount of cellphone boards and some have a very decent amount of gold plating on the board itself as well as some where the gold plating for the buttons aren't on a strip I could remove, it's on the board itself.
Since all my boards are pretty well cleaned from everything that could stick to it with solder, my thinking here is to submerge all the boards in the hydrochloric and then nitric acid baths like before until I can no longer see any gold plating on the cellphone boards. Anything that could have then been stripped from the "low yield" boards should also then have dislodged.
Again, set aside for AR.
This then takes care of my entire stock pile and everything set aside goes into AR, filtered, Urea and then precipitation.
Any giant holes in my approach? Any ideas to better streamline and most importantly, what do I do with those flippin' IC chips?
In advance, many thanks for the advise and assistance.
All the best
JP
Pretty new to gold recovery and also new to this forum.
Lengthy post to follow, but would like to make sure I do this once and do it right.
Firstly, I'm doing this as a hobby and I realise that hobbies cost money. My aim out of this is not to necessarily find the most cont effective way of recovery, but to try and balance best practice for optimal results - and obviously weighing the cost-benefit factors.
So here goes....
I would like to state everything that I've stockpiled and then explain my approach that I think and would like to ask any improvements etc.
(Oh, and it you are not sure what I refer to in my explanation of certain stock piled good, please ask and I'll upload a pic)
1. First in my stock pile is gold plated PCB board strip that I removed from network card, graphic cards etc....
These I want to start of in a hydrochloric and peroxide solution for a good amount of time until I can see all the strips are cleared.
After this, to make sure no base metals remain, I want to give it a quick Nitric and water bath, rinse properly and set aside for AR
2. Then I have lots of ribbon connectors, ink cartridge ribbons, gold plated plastic button strips from cellphones (where the buttons were and other connection points)
Here I also want to follow the same approach as above, but I would like to keep the gold attached to the larger plastic bits so I can sort it easier after the two acid baths.
Again rinse properly and set aside for AR
3. Next I have loads and loads of IC chips that range from the good quality graphics chips to the stuff that might most likely not contain anything.
Here I'm a little stuck with the best approach :-( I have a couple of options but would like to explore the cleanest option.
Options are between getting rid of the carbon chemically (Hydrofloric (heated), sulpheric(heated), hexane(not heated but apparently expensive)
Other option is incineration - but this always looks messy with many steps of classifying through meshes, panning, etc etc.
Once past the above point, I would again like to follow the two acid bath solution to get the cleanest possible gold out ready for AR
4. Second to last, I have some CPU chips and lost of cleaned pins and connectors from things like cellphone sim card holders. Everything is pretty well cleaned.
Here again just the two acid bath solution and then aside for AR.
5. Lastly, the PCB boards. I do realize that the gold in your everyday network card won't contain much - if any - gold. But what I do have is a good amount of cellphone boards and some have a very decent amount of gold plating on the board itself as well as some where the gold plating for the buttons aren't on a strip I could remove, it's on the board itself.
Since all my boards are pretty well cleaned from everything that could stick to it with solder, my thinking here is to submerge all the boards in the hydrochloric and then nitric acid baths like before until I can no longer see any gold plating on the cellphone boards. Anything that could have then been stripped from the "low yield" boards should also then have dislodged.
Again, set aside for AR.
This then takes care of my entire stock pile and everything set aside goes into AR, filtered, Urea and then precipitation.
Any giant holes in my approach? Any ideas to better streamline and most importantly, what do I do with those flippin' IC chips?
In advance, many thanks for the advise and assistance.
All the best
JP
