Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)

[butcher]

Yes we do have some very nice ladies here on the forum as members.

 

[Harold_V]

Not that that negates your official policies, Harold, but... Know your audience. :mrgreen:

My ex wife shared your philosophy. She figured that so long as I was unaware of the ongoing sexual relationships she had throughout our marriage, no harm was done. Do you believe that to be true, too?

Based on your comment, I gather you feel that it's perfectly alright to do something wrong, so long as you're not caught. Very characteristic of those who see themselves as a victim, never taking responsibility for their actions. You might understand that I have little regard (or respect) for such people.

I don't have to "know my audience". I demand proper behavior, and that's not up for debate. Makes no difference to me who is reading. We will not permit this forum to degrade to the level of much of the internet, where one must search for a few sentences not filled with profanity and misinformation. Here, you will observe the rules, without exception, or you can move on. There are no other choices.

You might understand that I don't agree with you--and I'd ban you just as fast as I'd ban anyone else if they (or you) don't adhere to the mandates that have been set forth on this forum. It's one of the ways that we keep the riff-raff to a minimum.

I'm shocked that you feel it's acceptable to be disrespectful of ladies, regardless of the numbers that may or may not be reading. Yet another quality I abhor in people.

Harold

 

[niteliteone]

Yes we do have some very nice ladies here on the forum as members.

I know of 2 active almost daily, female members here.

 

[zoltan]

Hello all,
I have 1kilo of these BGA chips. They are from set top boxes. Have someone try to process them?

 

[g_axelsson]

Hello all,
I have 1kilo of these BGA chips. They are from set top boxes. Have someone try to process them?

Yes, that's really nice material and should contain approximately 5g of gold. (Less if they have an integrated heat spreader, makes them heavier.)

Try https://www.google.com/search?q=site:goldrefiningforum.com+bga+chips

There are even an eBook about it, http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=17967

Göran

 

[zoltan]

I will process them tomorrow and probably say Woohoo :lol: thank you.

 

[bmgold2]

I put off posting here for a while but then couldn't take it any more. It took me a bit over a day to go through this whole thread but this was exactly the information I needed to get me started. The circuit boards I have a lot of have very little visible gold on them and I don't have a garage full of old computers to scrap. My boards do have integrated circuits on them so I ripped a couple off and crushed them up. I didn't bother burning them to ash yet but I did do a real quick test.

What I did was crush a couple chips up. Sift the dust through a fine tea screen. Then, I put a pinch of the powdered chips into a small glass vial along with a couple mL of the SSN leach that I got with a gold testing kit and heated it up a bit. As you would expect, the solution turned green but when I tested it with a drop (one tiny drop) of stannous chloride, the test gave an instant black color. On waiting longer (over night), the test was negative for gold but I expected that since there was so much copper in the dust. I did another quick test where I pre-leached the dust (a new batch) with a little HCl to get rid of some of the copper. That test worked even better but I still didn't get all the copper out.

It doesn't really matter. My goal was to prove that there was gold in these chips and I did it. Now I plan to save up a bunch of them and do it right. This is so much better than my last idea which was crushing up rocks looking for some gold. With that idea, I was getting a questionable light purple test with the stannous and it took a few drops of stannous to get that.

Another reason for posting here was because several people mentioned using a blue bowl to concentrate the ash. My idea is to build a device called a Miller table.http://lmgtfy.com/?q=miller+table+gold It looks like a very easy and cheap to build device that should get you a clean concentrate to process. That's my plan anyway although I am pretty confident in my gold panning due to not having gold in this area but still looking. I can find microscopic specks of gold if they are here.

I hope bumping this thread back up will give others who might not have seen this another place to find gold in your scrap. It was worth the time to read the whole thread even if there was a bit of unneeded content to sort through.

Thanks to Patnor1011 for starting this topic and for the ebook on the process.

bmgold2 - a very happy new refiner

 

[cmiller92]

bmgold2

Would the Miller Table work to separate the all metals from the ash or would it separate your gold from everything?
The reason I ask this is because from what I understand about the blue bowl is to separate the metals from the ash, therefore giving you a less junk to PGMs ratio to process.
Therefore if you were trying to clean ash from your material the blue bowl (along with some agitation) would be more efficient then the Miller table for you could deal in larger proportions at a time.
But this all depends on what exactly the Miller table separates.

CJ

 

[bmgold2]

bmgold2

Would the Miller Table work to separate the all metals from the ash or would it separate your gold from everything?
The reason I ask this is because from what I understand about the blue bowl is to separate the metals from the ash, therefore giving you a less junk to PGMs ratio to process.
Therefore if you were trying to clean ash from your material the blue bowl (along with some agitation) would be more efficient then the Miller table for you could deal in larger proportions at a time.
But this all depends on what exactly the Miller table separates.

CJ

I think it all depends on the water flow and the angle you set it at. It also needs the material classified so it is all the same size much like a blue bowl does (to work best). I haven't tried it yet but I think you should be able to at least separate the metal from the ash. It may be possible to even separate the gold from the copper. From what I seen, I think the larger copper pieces will be easy to separate from the ash by screening but I haven't actually burnt any to ash yet so I'm unsure. I'd still process the copper in case a little gold is on it. I think the main amount of gold in these parts are very fine wires which require a good magnifier or even microscope to see until they are gathered together like in a gold pan.

I'm not sure how fast or slow the blue bowl is but the miller table is not a real fast tool. You feed it material with a spoon and wait for the water to separate the lighter blond and black sands from the fine gold. It is really a clean up or finishing tool. Once I get to work on the chips (which are still in the devices needing ripped apart), I will try to take some pictures of how it works for me. I don't have an actual miller table but plan to use an aluminum sluice box with the riffles removed and a small water pump to improvise one. Like I said, it's really about the water flow and angle of the table as well as the surface that determines how it works. Various surfaces have been used by others including old chalk boards, sand blasted glass, or other flat surfaces with a little grip to the surface. Self-healing cutting mats (especially green ones) seem to be the ones most used in homemade ones (from what I've read).

I'm slow and impatient so I don't know when I'll actually get enough chips together to try this with enough quantity to have a good chance of getting more than a gram of gold in the end but I do plan to try this and will try to take some pictures as I do. Scan through the rest of this thread and you will find lots of pictures and even an idea of how much gold to expect from various types of chips.

Oh yea, the homemade miller table would be a lot cheaper than buying a blue bowl. If you already have a blue bowl or want an excuse to buy one, use it. I'm sure it works good.

bmgold2

 

[niteliteone]

Bmgold2,
We have a well respected member here that made a step-by-step guide on how to build and use a "Miller Table"
Here is the link;
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28318404/How-to-Build-and-Operate-a-Miller-Table
Hope this helps you and others 8)

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

After incineration 2 kg of ICs from varity of boards, crushed them, removed everything magnetite, seive the ashes and leaving the non magnetite metallic part out. So I was thinking using bromoform which is a liquid with dentsity of 2.8 g/cm3 can be used to separate the ash from all the free gold wires. Anyone tried this before?

Regards
Kj

 

[nickvc]

Doesn't sound too clever to me having read the data on it, we have enough hazards on our particular field already.

 

[skippy]

Making a bromoform and ash sludge sounds like a mess to me. You would likely waste more money on bromoform than find gold worth recovering,
I don`t imagine bromoform is cheap. Why not try a water separation technique, like panning or wiffle table.

 

[solar_plasma]

All,

After incineration 2 kg of ICs from varity of boards, crushed them, removed everything magnetite, seive the ashes and leaving the non magnetite metallic part out. So I was thinking using bromoform which is a liquid with dentsity of 2.8 g/cm3 can be used to separate the ash from all the free gold wires. Anyone tried this before?

Regards
Kj

Though I would not like to mess around with anything that starts with "bromo" and ends on "form", the idea behind is nice. I googled heavy liquids and found this website:

http://www.heavyliquids.com/

 

[niteliteone]

I like the water method a lot better than any chemicals.
Though this article could explain why so many seem to be stupid these days :shock:

This from our friendly EPA;
http://www.epa.gov/ttnatw01/hlthef/bromofor.html

Hazard Summary-Created in April 1992; Revised in January 2000

Exposure to bromoform may occur from the consumption of chlorinated drinking water. The acute (short-term) effects from inhalation or ingestion of high levels of bromoform in humans and animals consist of nervous system effects such as the slowing down of brain functions, and injury to the liver and kidney...

 

[solar_plasma]

I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_polytungstate could be the answer.

100g for 155€ and this is used to make a 85% solution...hm...does anybody know how to make sodium polytungstate cheaply?

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

Bromoform is expensive, but I assume it can be used a lot of time for separating, I tried the water method and I am not good at it and there was not enough gold wires at the end of wash, I guess I am going to buy the special pot for doing water washes, the heavy liquid came to mind because usually the amount of ashes is into few kgs and can run through it, but it would assure a very high recovery rate for gold wires.

Thanks and regards,
Kj

 

[patnor1011]

It really depend on amount. I did batches of kilograms in simple pan. Now I work on bigger batches so I had to scale up.
Something like Miller table will be nice to have, I now build sluice for separating ashes from wires. Rubber mat with rivets and small pump for recycling used water.
I am now working on this lot. Almost 14 kilograms of beauty.

 

[bmgold2]

All,

Bromoform is expensive, but I assume it can be used a lot of time for separating, I tried the water method and I am not good at it and there was not enough gold wires at the end of wash, I guess I am going to buy the special pot for doing water washes, the heavy liquid came to mind because usually the amount of ashes is into few kgs and can run through it, but it would assure a very high recovery rate for gold wires.

Thanks and regards,
Kj

Keep in mind that anything (gold pan, blue bowl, sluice box, miller table, etc.) will take a little bit of experimenting and practice to get it to separate your materials. I'd be more inclined to stick with a home made piece of equipment instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a pre-made one but that's just me.

Here's a video of another pretty simple looking fluid bed box that MIGHT work for concentrating the gold wires from the ashes. It's a long video but the idea looks like it would work. Just pre-wet your ashes so they don't just float out of the device. Even if they do, everything is self-contained so you can't lose it and you could always run the material a couple times if needed or try another method to get anything it missed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw25MdZbWh4[/youtube]

Use whatever works for you but my thought is that the more money you spend on equipment, the less profit you get to keep. Of course, if something increases your efficiency or speed things up...Just giving another option to think about.

 

[Anonymous]

Use whatever works for you but my thought is that the more money you spend on equipment, the less profit you get to keep. Of course, if something increases your efficiency or speed things up...Just giving another option to think about.

No you got it the wrong way around. The more you spend on your equipment the more of the profit you get to keep.

In the long term of course and not initially but it pays dividends to have high quality equipment.

I'm assuming here that you're doing this for a profit and therefore you have a replenishing supply to refine.