Non-Chemical FIRST TIME!

[joubjonn]

first time refine!
it worked! i have a very small gold ball in my hands!

61 grams of small fully gold plated pins
123 grams of small IC's with gold plated pins and i now have a 2cm round ball. i'll weigh it tomorrow and know exactly

i also have access to an electron microscope tomorrow, i'm going to use the x-ray back-scatter option and see what elements show up!

i dissolved the pins and broken IC's in diluted (trace metal) nitric over night outside (it started to rain last night and i didn't realize it, after it rained for a good 20 min or so i ran outside and moved the bottle under the porch! thought maybe that could screw it up, didn't get a whole lot of rain water in it but it still pissed me off! filtered, added small amounts of nitric to muratic until only a bit of gold was showing, filtered into a bottle with an ice cube and then filtered again into a small glass container and then dropped it, washed many times. melted with borax and got my little bit of gold!
i didn't do the double drop as i was just so excited to see it work so well for me! going to get the silver out of the filtered nitric tomorrow also!

thanks to everyone that contributes to this site. i spent a good 3 days solid researching everything. i have a pretty good chemistry background and i'm a mech engineer for the oil and gas business, i'm in lab's alot so once i understood the principles from Hoke's book and all the tips i found on here i figured i should give it a go!

 

[AndyWilliams]

Hey! You have to show pics of your button or it didn't happen!

 

[joubjonn]

here they are.

before and after pics

 

[butcher]

It may be small, but it is a very big achievement, it shows the reflection of hard work and the gain of knowledge, that beautiful piece of gold, has more value than its weight in gold.

Great job

 

[macfixer01]

first time refine!
it worked! i have a very small gold ball in my hands!

61 grams of small fully gold plated pins
123 grams of small IC's with gold plated pins and i now have a 2cm round ball. i'll weigh it tomorrow and know exactly

i also have access to an electron microscope tomorrow, i'm going to use the x-ray back-scatter option and see what elements show up!

i dissolved the pins and broken IC's in diluted (trace metal) nitric over night outside (it started to rain last night and i didn't realize it, after it rained for a good 20 min or so i ran outside and moved the bottle under the porch! thought maybe that could screw it up, didn't get a whole lot of rain water in it but it still pissed me off! filtered, added small amounts of nitric to muratic until only a bit of gold was showing, filtered into a bottle with an ice cube and then filtered again into a small glass container and then dropped it, washed many times. melted with borax and got my little bit of gold!
i didn't do the double drop as i was just so excited to see it work so well for me! going to get the silver out of the filtered nitric tomorrow also!

thanks to everyone that contributes to this site. i spent a good 3 days solid researching everything. i have a pretty good chemistry background and i'm a mech engineer for the oil and gas business, i'm in lab's alot so once i understood the principles from Hoke's book and all the tips i found on here i figured i should give it a go!

Joubjonn,
Congratulations on that nice looking bead! Just a minor correction though, I think you meant 2 mm, not cm? 2 centimeters is about 4/5 of an inch. That would be quite a chunk of gold to get out of the starting material you used.

 

[goldsilverpro]

I've run tons on those exact 14 lead IC's, but it's been a long time. If all the lids were gold plated, I would guess they should run in the order of $400/pound. It and the sister all-gold side-braze packages in 8, 12, 16, 18, 24, 28, and 40 lead are the best IC's you can find. The smaller they are, the more valuable. Those are medium size. Those 123g you ran should contain in the ballpark of 2.5g (edited) of gold at a $1250 gold market, probably about 10 times more that the pins. It's not that easy to get all the gold out of those IC's. When you get a weight on that bead, let us know.

EDITED: The original values I put for your 123g of IC's were way too high. I apologize.

 

[macfixer01]

I'll defer to GSP's expertise regarding how much gold he can potentially get from those chips. Looking at the photo though it's obvious joubjonn did mean 2mm not 2cm, so the bead really can't be more than a couple grams? I'm hoping for his sake he hasn't thrown anything out yet, since there must still be some gold left behind and waiting to be extracted?

 

[goldsilverpro]

If the silicon chip is still stuck, there is still thick gold braze underneath. It can be removed with hot AR. When you can slide the chip around on the base, the gold is all dissolved. The other main point of value on these is the gray colored gunky looking ring of solder underneath the lid and around the perimeter of the lid. It's 80% gold that must be dissolved in AR. Like Max said, I hope you didn't throw anything away. Probably, 60-70% of the value on these are in the solder or braze in these 2 areas. In AR, the gold underneath the chip will be the last thing to dissolve.

 

[joubjonn]

WOW i had no idea those were that filled up with gold

what i did is smash them all to get the lids out and then put all of it in nitric/water let that dissolve then i filtered and rinsed. i kept the nitric/water solution and im using copper to cement whatever was in that. the ceramic bits were then removed. i put only the gold pieces that were left and made some AR and got that little bit of gold in the pic above.

i still have everything. should i smash the ceramics up some more? before i knew about all this i probably threw away a couple pounds of those at work. it was from an old project that happened like 15 years ago and we tossed so much good stuff, not just those IC's. i have bad dreams about it.

i also have these mosfet transistors. they look real nice with gold. IRFM460, however the data sheet mentions they have beryllium in them and should not be placed in acid. so those are out

 

[goldsilverpro]

joubjonn,

Note my edit in my first post above. You should get 2.5g from the IC's instead of 10g. Sorry. I have no idea where my head was when I wrote it.

 

[necromancer]

Great job for your first go, I have 177grams of those ics will wait till summer weather to cook them up.

Nice to see that your doing so well on your first try