Fantastic board with fantastic pins!

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Alondro

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This AMAZING board had a TON of chips, a bunch of large gold-plated traces, a handful of the square-shape cross-section gold plated pin, and a total of 272 of these long round cross-section gold-plated pins! I've processed some of these by themselves before, and they have THICK plating! This board is going be a GREAT yield for gold! :D

IMG_3002.JPGIMG_3003.JPG
 
Looks like a basic router or network switch board to me. Those RJ45 (ethernet) jacks as they are known typically are very thin plating. In many instances only one surface of the pin (the side that contacts the plug that goes in the jack) is plated.

Do you know the make, year of manufacture, and model of the original appliance?

Steve
 
Looks like a basic router or network switch board to me. Those RJ45 (ethernet) jacks as they are known typically are very thin plating. In many instances only one surface of the pin (the side that contacts the plug that goes in the jack) is plated.

Do you know the make, year of manufacture, and model of the original appliance?

Steve
Nawwww, this is some type of super-high-grade board. Maybe a switching station for an early internet server. The pins are ALL those round pins, plated all the way down. It has gold plating all over! Every single contact point on the board is plated. A snapped a few of the chips open, and even the gold bond wires look unusually thicker than usual.

But there's very little info on what the board was for. Just a part number. One large chip had a manufacturing year on it: 1997.

I've got a couple other boards that look insane like this, including one with 8 BGA cards from Cisco Systems. That one is from 1996.

The large arrays of jacks are tough to take apart. They have internal strips of tin-plated brass running the entire length of the array, probably for additional structural support. I've gotten the top halves apart, and the pins are VERY long (an inch and a half!) and TOTALLY gold-plated from tip to tip. This is one of those 'jackpot' boards you get once in a while from picking up whole tubs of surplus old electronics. :]
 
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This AMAZING board

Nawwww, this is some type of super-high-grade board.

This is one of those 'jackpot' boards you get once in a while from picking up whole tubs of surplus old electronics.

I am sorry but that is not an AMAZING supper high grade board - it is in the telecom grade(s) of boards worth between $4 - $6 per pound & they are relatively common to find

Now when you find boards like these - that is when you find boards that are AMAZING supper high grade & a jackpot you get once in awhile

Kurt
 

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Thanks Dave, I know he was banned once but didn't remember how/when he left.

In any event, some of those look similar to the stuff he'd get in.
 
I think he was banned about a half dozen times.

I agree, Jon processed some interesting stuff. If he'd just stuck to discussing recovery and refining, I'd welcome him back.

Dave
 
It's a great find for me in a bunch of boards that were all grouped as just mid-grade, and were mostly typical motherboards.

Here's half of those pins. Plucked the other half of them yesterday.

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Nice RF equipment some of that!

As now banned Jon would say...some nice kit!
Those are actually pictures of some of Jon's stuff - I took those pics when Deano, Nickvc, Goran, Patnor & myself got together at Jon's in England a few years ago

I personally have had my own fair share of boards just like those over the years - just don't have pics of any of my own boards

Over the years I have probably personally processed 10 X (or more) boards like those

They are called PAY DAY !!! when you get them ;) ;)

Kurt
 
just plopped this one in the Lye solution to get the epoxy off...

20x30 inches, weighed 8.5 pounds on entering bath #1
 

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This AMAZING board had a TON of chips, a bunch of large gold-plated traces, a handful of the square-shape cross-section gold plated pin, and a total of 272 of these long round cross-section gold-plated pins! I've processed some of these by themselves before, and they have THICK plating! This board is going be a GREAT yield for gold! :D

View attachment 58568View attachment 58569
hello friend

these pins have very low yield gold

you can recover 1 grams from 1 kilo grams of these pins
 
hello friend

these pins have very low yield gold

you can recover 1 grams from 1 kilo grams of these pins
I would question that, as the plating is so thick it holds its shape after the brass core (which appears to be aluminum brass) is dissolved in HCl. It's as thick as the old, heavily-plated gold fingers.

Probably depends greatly on when and where the board was manufactured.
 
I would question that, as the plating is so thick it holds its shape after the brass core (which appears to be aluminum brass) is dissolved in HCl. It's as thick as the old, heavily-plated gold fingers.

Probably depends greatly on when and where the board was manufactured.
yes also depend on plating thickness
 
Some unusual types of chips found on another board in this lot. This board was the one I mentioned with 8 BGA cards. It also had these, very flat chips with a copper heat sink attached to a very thin fiber board base. Some gold can be seen in the one I was able to pry the heatsink off.

IMG_3005.JPGIMG_3006.JPGIMG_3007.JPGIMG_3008.JPG
 
You may find gold bond wires in that black epoxy. Here's hoping you don't get skunked by aluminum! The board itself is not very "high grade", as a board sorting company would grade it. But it does have some potentially nice chips!

rj45 round pins are better than the partially-plated flat ones I find in most consumer rj45, but only your testing can tell you for sure, and you can only compare against other items you've also tested. I've found similar type of pins, from an old ethernet patch panel made back in teh 80s and installed by a telecom service provider, and testing did result in little empty tubes of gold that were much nicer than anything else I've gotten from test dissolving pins. I could still stir a toothpick at it and bend it in half, but it stays in one piece. But it's also the only thing I've gotten from that market segment; everything else is consumer or business market.

From what I've read, it seems that ICs have the highest potential for yielding the most gold, but pins are much easier to process even though they yield much less gold. I like to joke that ICs contain SOLID gold, instead of the plated gold on everything else. If you can consider that a gold wire is solid gold no matter how thin.

But I do sometimes look at my sorted pins and think "how pretty!"
 
I know some of ethernet slot pins are plated 50 micron. It says so on a sticker but im not sure how much you will need for a gram of gold.
 
Got some unexpectedly good pins from an array of jacks on the other surprisingly rich board. Strange jack construction with the little internal circuit board loose and the two arrays of pins only touching via sliding the board into a slot between them, where the pins made contact with gold-plated rectangular points on it. The pins themselves are plated all the way down, and close up inspection reveals the contact surfaces are especially heavily plated. Very interesting. Out of hundreds of jacks I've taken apart, I've never seen one constructed this way.
IMG_3009.JPGIMG_3010.JPGIMG_3011.JPGIMG_3012.JPGIMG_3013.JPGIMG_3014.JPG
 

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