Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)

[MarcoP]

Manuel, if you don't see any gold from the window it's highly possible there is not gold at all otherwise break them apart. If you get a glass sandwich put them in nitric and the glass will fall as white insoluble sludge ready to be filtered off, gold will be still stuck in the middle layer for aqua regia. If you don't get any glass layers it's possible that you may have silver as well.

I've been saving those and waited to read a little about it [stt], your unanswered question made that happen[/stt] and looks like all I've saved is plain scrap, in fact my ceramic eproms have no gold visible! However, ceramic ones with no window should be broken in half to reveal what they hide inside.

Marco

 

[patnor1011]

There was post recently somewhere which caught my attention however I cant locate it and I decided to post my findings here. It will perhaps reach more people when posted here. It was post where Dan was looking for some answers about potential yield from RAM and there was link to some seller selling some sort of guide for buying RAM. That came when I was half way done with my RAM stash, I went through 8109 grams/591pcs of mixed RAM taking as much notes as possible - funnily enough I was thinking of creating guide with the same purpose.
I decided to share some of my data with you so here it goes:

I sorted RAM in 4 categories. (Idealy I wanted to divide each one to two more DDR2 and DDR3 but decided not to due to time constraints, I just needed to have this done as soon as possible) All of them were gold fingered RAM. I will add some pictures later on.

1. Long RAM stick with regular legged IC
Average weight of one RAM stick: 17.82 gram
Average weight for 1 RAM stick of:
MLCC: 0.35 gram
IC: 4.31 gram
Fingers: 1.23 gram

2. Long RAM stick with BGA IC (servers)
Average weight of one RAM stick: 18.47 gram
Average weight for 1 RAM stick of:
MLCC: 0.40 gram
IC: 5.52 gram
Fingers: 1.32 gram

3. Short laptop RAM stick with regular legged IC
Average weight of one RAM stick: 9.48 gram
Average weight for 1 RAM stick of:
MLCC: 0.12 gram
IC: 3.70 gram
Fingers: 0.55 gram

4. Short laptop RAM stick with BGA IC
Average weight of one RAM stick: 7.67 gram
Average weight for 1 RAM stick of:
MLCC: 0.19 gram
IC: 1.79 gram
Fingers: 0.62 gram


Average weight of paper stickers on RAM stick is 0,1gram per stick. While it looks like small number it should be taken in consideration when buying large amounts of RAM - you do not want to pay for paper (63.5g in just this lot) :mrgreen:

 

[Grelko]

My first time processing chips was alot of fun. I used Matchlight charcoal, let it burn about halfway, then made a spot in the middle for my stainless bowl. I put in 200 grams of chips, some were ram, some others, to see how this process actually works.

I placed a bigger stainless bowl upside down over top to try and reburn the fumes as they were produced by the chips. That sort of worked. There wasn't any black smoke, just the light grey smoke from the charcoal that was still burning. There was the smell of burning plastic though (it was actually more of crushed circuit board smell than burning plastic), but it dissipated within 10 feet or so because of the wind.

Apparently the charcoal only burned between 300 F- 700 F according to the "heat colors" on the stainless bowl. The chips barely cooked at all. I got out my heat gun "1200 F on high" and flame/heat resistant gloves, turned it on and got a couple inches from the charcoal, so that I could force more heat and flames against the bowl. That finally got things cooking :lol: I got the bowl glowing red along with most of the chips. After using the heat gun about 15 minutes, I shut it off and let the charcoal slowly work.

I let it sit there burning for a few hours and came back when everything was nice and cool again. I took what was left of the chips and put it into a mason jar for now. I shook up the jar very well for a couple minutes and it looks like I have a good amount of powder at the bottom. There is quite a bit of unburnt pieces of chips left also, but it's not bad for a first try.

I'll be sifting the material, rinsing off the larger pieces, putting the powder and rinse water together into another container until I get a blue bowl "henry" or small shaker table, etc. I know I have something around here that'll work.

It should also work if I take a small container, place it into a larger container, turn the water on low and let it slowly rinse the powder from small to large, and out into a 5 gallon bucket, seeing that the material should stay at the bottom of 1 of the containers because of the weight while letting the powder rinse out.

I need to read more and find a work around for the rest of the material because, I don't have any nitric. AP will take out the base metals, I know how to get the gold out, and the work around for silver using ferric chloride, but I'm not sure about the rest "PT, PD etc." So that means I get to re-read Hokes again, yay I'll keep saving up the material that I can't process for now.

I should use coal next time instead of charcoal because it burns alot hotter. I'm definately looking up information about making my own incinerator seeing that I still have around 10 pounds of chips to go, and I slowly get more while picking up scrap metal.

 

[Nickperl]

"So if I can say I processed about 470g of mixed chips (regular various chips as I mentioned) and I have on that picture 1.7g of mostly gold." Patnor1011 from back in 2011)


This is very close to what I recovered using your process from 139.5g of northbridge ceramic tops only recovering ,77g gold. I pyrolized, crushed, panned, separated magnetized and treated both batches with nitric. Then rinsed, combined, AR, rinsed, used Butyl Diglyme, dropped with Oxylic and rinsed with water, HCL, water and melted.
I posted pictures on the post from member Tzoax titled "My results of specific types of IC chips, flatpacks and BGA" under Data. His results seem double though and I wonder if I missed something as he received almost .011 percent to my .0055 to your .0036 (1.7g Au to 470g chips).

 

[patnor1011]

But I did not do just BGA tops, it was mix of different IC and some tops.

 

[gfine]

I know this is an older thread, but as I'm very new thought I might suggest the use of a sluice box with a catch bowl for your liquid so I might be run through two or three times as a faster, easier way of separating out the gold as vs. panning.

 

[Pantherlikher]

greetings gfine...
We found it rather fun learning to pan... I did a nice pile of ram chips this spring and then placed in a metal coffee type can with steel balls... Then we took turns rolling it around under our feet... Crushed up pretty good. Then panning magnet to get the steel balls and anything magnetic out.
Then panned away...

My wife got me a nice panning kit for...my Birthday I think. Has several sieves, 3 panning bowls and a bunch of accessories to go with. We sit on the back deck with a nice fire burning when it's nice out so made a fun evening or 5...playing around with it.

Grelko...Just read your last post here... Wood burning got the pyrolizer plenty hot enough so no need to go coal...

B.S.

 

[Grelko]

Grelko...Just read your last post here... Wood burning got the pyrolizer plenty hot enough so no need to go coal...

Ill have to try actual wood/branches next time I work on my chips, since I can get that for free, which saves me a bit of money. I figured that coal might have burned hot enough to stop the smell.

I believe that some of the chips didn't completely turn white, because I didn't have anything on top of them burning, or I didn't let them go long enough.

I did get a bag of coal one day to use, except I got it too hot and think I melted some wires to the bottom of my "non magnetic" stainless steel bowl. Unless the orange/rust color is how stainless breaks down "because of the iron", when it gets white hot? (I now use a cookie sheet, or piece of steel plate)

The last couple times I've worked on chips, it still the has smell to it, but my neighbors haven't said anything, so I guess it isn't travelling far.

Edit - added the part about iron

 

[jason_recliner]

Grelko,
If you have a bad smell, you may have missed something during all your extensive reading.

The idea is to first pyrolyze without oxygen, and then later incinerate with oxygen. They are different processes for different purposes. Yes, you ultimately want complete combustion, but you don't want to release all the plastic nasties onto your neighbours' organic herb garden. Just because they haven't complained, doesn't mean they haven't noticed.

Check out Deano's (NoIdea) posts on Pyro. Maybe start with this one, it's a bit of a gem.
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=22376

 

[Grelko]

Grelko,
If you have a bad smell, you may have missed something during all your extensive reading.

The idea is to first pyrolyze without oxygen, and then later incinerate with oxygen. They are different processes for different purposes. Yes, you ultimately want complete combustion, but you don't want to release all the plastic nasties onto your neighbours' organic herb garden. Just because they haven't complained, doesn't mean they haven't noticed.

Check out Deano's (NoIdea) posts on Pyro. Maybe start with this one, it's a bit of a gem.
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=22376

Thank you very much for this link. This is exactly what I was looking for. I read it back when I first joined here, but couldn't seem to find it, when I was working on my chips. I tried the (put chips into a bowl, and cover it with a larger upside down bowl) to try and re-burn the smoke, but I guess it doesn't quite work that way.

I'm definately going to see if I can make 1 of these, now that I know where to buy fire bricks at.

 

[mbn]

Hi you there, dear people of GRF
I know most of you have already seen this, but I was eager to see the gold wires in detail.
I had 40 pieces of s/n bridge chips (only the black tops), which was nearly 60 grams. After incineration and washing the ash with water, I scanned my Bécher where the deep yellow was seen at the bottom.

I posted these images here just to say Thank You in my way for all the good things I learned here.

 

[maynman1751]

mbn, are you sure that you got total incineration? It appears that there is a lot of black material mixed with the wires. If you were to dissolve the wires, with what I believe to be carbon, you could lose some gold by the carbon absorbing the gold. If it is indeed unburned carbon you need to re-incinerate or somehow separate the carbon from the wires. You could also have some wires still trapped in these carbon particles. Everything, but the gold, has to be burned to grey ash.

 

[Smack]

I would guess that's mostly silicon bits, if it's not you should incinerate again. Also noticed foreign components in the mix such as the smd's, not sure why you would want that type of material in the lot.

 

[UncleBenBen]

I read back through Mohsen's posts earlier, just after he posted these photos. He did really well on his first attempt at chips. I got the feeling that he knew he wasn't done with this run yet, but got excited and snapped the pics part way through.

I believe it was Patnor himself that said full incineration wasn't needed until you have your concentrate. From what I read of 'mbn', I would bet that he knows this and will do much better on this run. Can't wait to see the button on this one.

 

[patnor1011]

I am a fan of total incineration. Sample like this which does not contain metallic pins can be simply dried and crushed again in small mortar and washed again. I repeat this till there is not much of black particles left. I however remove all Silicone dies before I proceed with crushing and washing. I just do not like to deal with them as they behave like broken glass. It is fairly easy to remove them right after initial incineration while classifying material in sieve.
It is also fairly easy to incinerate that black particles, few seconds with mapp torch with thin layer on steel pan will sort them out before that heat start affecting bonding wires.

 

[mbn]

maynman1751, Smack, UncleBenBen, patnor1011,

Thanks for the kind advises. I wasn't done with the sample batch and as UncleBenBen said above, it was only excitement to see the yellow this soon! Last time I incinerated a mixture of chips and that was a long journey to the see the sign of the gold!
While you were kindly commenting, I dried and crushed the debris again and the sample is in a better mood.
Smack,
I'm in shock that there are foreign components like the SMD in the batch. It was all 60 grams of s/n bridge chips. I only guess they were in my sieve and it was my bad not to clean it. I'll dry the batch and sort them out if I can.

 

[maynman1751]

You're doing great. I just wanted to caution you just in case the material may be carbon. Can't really tell from pics. Good luck and let us see the button!!!!!! 8)

 

[mbn]

You're doing great. I just wanted to caution you just in case the material may be carbon. Can't really tell from pics. Good luck and let us see the button!!!!!! 8)

Thanks for the useful reminding caution and your attention.

 

[UncleBenBen]

I believe it was Patnor himself that said full incineration wasn't needed until you have your concentrate.

Doh. Sorry Patnor, in reading through the thread again I saw that Kurtak was who I was thinking of.

Smack, in an earlier post you had mentioned doing a preroast of chips in a friend's wood burner then finishing incinerating as in this photo...


I was recently given a pottery kiln that looks very similar and was curious, did you have much smoke and/or smell when completing the incineration?

 

[Smack]

No, there wasn't much at all but (and this was late last summer) I still had the exhaust fan going and the overhead door open and tore stuff apart while it cooked. I may have over did the incineration as I incinerated again after I milled the chips, sticking the powder in and stirring periodically. It was a real lite color and fluffy when it was done. I put the work in the lab on hold until it warms back up this weekend or first of next week, so I'll have a preliminary result on those chips soon.