Hello,
1. first I want to say hello to the forum. I do gold recovery from old electronics with a good chemistry graduate friend of mine. Im a programmer but I love Chemstry, Physics and Biology (mostly self-learned). I already obtained a lot of knowledge from all the wisdom everyone provided so far. So thank you all first of all. I know everyone takes PPE, etc. very serious so as a newbie I want to say that im fully aware of the dangers and only operate with respirator(outdoors), eye protection, gloves and more. But im open for improvements (just dont want to make this a safety thread )
2. I have a lot of PCB with gold plated on them. The problem is i want to remove/depopulate the resitors, capacitors, chips, etc. from the boards to get a clean solution and dont get all of it stuck in the filter at the end. My Idea was to put the boards in conc. HCL and remove the solder so that everything would fall out of the "socket". Ive never done this before so are there any tips for that? Temperature wise (do i need heat) or adding oxygen with an aquarium bubbler (im a litte afraid to oxidise some copper to copper oxide and further get copper chloride in my solution).
Maby additives or not?
I dont have the picture of mine but the PCB's are from PC displays. I added a picture from google. Mine though have some more gold plating on them.
Im sorry if this thread is already out there on the forum but i could not really find what im asking.
Thanks for everyone who takes time for this. I would really appreciate this
David
Edit: canedane pointed out that there is mostly flash plated gold on it which is not rly worth anything. Due to the fact we do this for fun and try this acid depopulation on diffrent kinds of PCB's I would still appreciate some tips regarding to the acid process of removing the components leaving the plating and the fiber.
1. first I want to say hello to the forum. I do gold recovery from old electronics with a good chemistry graduate friend of mine. Im a programmer but I love Chemstry, Physics and Biology (mostly self-learned). I already obtained a lot of knowledge from all the wisdom everyone provided so far. So thank you all first of all. I know everyone takes PPE, etc. very serious so as a newbie I want to say that im fully aware of the dangers and only operate with respirator(outdoors), eye protection, gloves and more. But im open for improvements (just dont want to make this a safety thread )
2. I have a lot of PCB with gold plated on them. The problem is i want to remove/depopulate the resitors, capacitors, chips, etc. from the boards to get a clean solution and dont get all of it stuck in the filter at the end. My Idea was to put the boards in conc. HCL and remove the solder so that everything would fall out of the "socket". Ive never done this before so are there any tips for that? Temperature wise (do i need heat) or adding oxygen with an aquarium bubbler (im a litte afraid to oxidise some copper to copper oxide and further get copper chloride in my solution).
Maby additives or not?
I dont have the picture of mine but the PCB's are from PC displays. I added a picture from google. Mine though have some more gold plating on them.
Im sorry if this thread is already out there on the forum but i could not really find what im asking.
Thanks for everyone who takes time for this. I would really appreciate this
David
Edit: canedane pointed out that there is mostly flash plated gold on it which is not rly worth anything. Due to the fact we do this for fun and try this acid depopulation on diffrent kinds of PCB's I would still appreciate some tips regarding to the acid process of removing the components leaving the plating and the fiber.
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