Thanks Smack. This is good to know. I have a week or two of vacation I need to use soon, and my chip collection just may make its way onto my to do list.
Good luck with your chips!
Good luck with your chips!
Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)
- Thread starter patnor1011
- Start date
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SapunovDmitry
Well-known member
What do you mean when you say "carbon will absorb some gold" guys? Is it a fact someone faced? How bad can it be? Or it is just plausable ?
Has anyone tried batch leaching of burned and crushed ic chips in nitric and then in AR wth dropping the gold with SMB? What gold concentrations could be removed from AR by this method? I tried 0,2 gr Au/l min. It was the lowest one i had achieved.
Has anyone tried batch leaching of burned and crushed ic chips in nitric and then in AR wth dropping the gold with SMB? What gold concentrations could be removed from AR by this method? I tried 0,2 gr Au/l min. It was the lowest one i had achieved.
maynman1751
Well-known member
SapunovDmitry said:
Carbon has an affinity for gold and will absorb a certain amount during dissolution. I myself have not experienced this but it is a well confirmed fact among the professionals on this forum. It's better to be safe and eliminate the carbon before dissolving the gold wires. 8)
patnor1011
Well-known member
I also cant explain why it is the case but believe me simple leaching of crushed incinerated material will result in significant loss.
When you consider that gold mining operations use carbon to leach the gold from their solutions it would seem logical to remove it from any process where gold is in solution whether acidic or base.
If you do leave carbon in your materials you will have losses that can only be recovered by incineration and as the gold will be in salt form losses are to be expected from that which most members will not be able to collect.
Simple logic says remove all carbon before dissolution.
If you do leave carbon in your materials you will have losses that can only be recovered by incineration and as the gold will be in salt form losses are to be expected from that which most members will not be able to collect.
Simple logic says remove all carbon before dissolution.
Two buttons = 125g, I had some other Au powders that were added into each refining. I got 35g from the chips and 33g out of the larger button was from 12 lbs. of fingers. I have to finish up the palladium recovery, got 2g so far and from the cemented material after recovering Ag as cloride I'm guessing another 2g of Pd, not sure on purity as my recovery method was cementation. I don't plan on refining the Pd, I'll let someone else have that fun. The buttons are scratched up but I'm combining them and some other Au and pouring into a bar so it doesn't matter. I don't have a number on the silver recovered, it's sitting there in AgCl form and cemented form, it can wait, it's not that much anyways.
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maynman1751
Well-known member
Nice haul, beautiful buttons Smack! 8)
jason_recliner
Well-known member
Way to go, Smack! :shock:
clap clap clap
clap clap clap
Very nice sir! Can't wait to see the bar!! :mrgreen:
Good job Smack.
patnor1011
Well-known member
patnor1011
Well-known member
I do have quite a lot of work due to backlog from winter when I could not go outside. Few buckets of incinerated IC chips I need to run. I set up my sluice/pump to wash bucket of BGA powder. After 3 runs I concentrated values to approx 1/3rd of starting volume. Now it is time for pan and slow removing of values and getting rid of the rest.
Anyway here is short vid to show how my closed circuit system looks like. That is first one, I do use my long rain gutter sluice on whatever is washed away just to make sure not a single wire escape my hands.
Sorry for shaky hands and bad cellphone camera but all other devices were uncharged so I grabbed phone and did at least this.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBUiMjCzLuM&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
Anyway here is short vid to show how my closed circuit system looks like. That is first one, I do use my long rain gutter sluice on whatever is washed away just to make sure not a single wire escape my hands.
Sorry for shaky hands and bad cellphone camera but all other devices were uncharged so I grabbed phone and did at least this.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBUiMjCzLuM&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
patnor1011
Well-known member
patnor1011
Well-known member
One picture to see difference.
Material on left side was washed once. Slow careful wash to remove only super fine particles which come off as colored dirty water. After that remainder was dried and crushed again - container on right side.
This first wash reduced starting volume by half. Every following wash/dry/crush removed about half of volume. It goes faster as volume decrease and at the end you are left with few spoon fulls of concentrate majority of which is gold bonding wires (by weight).
I repeat this about 5 times to get to smallest amount of concentrate possible.
All the time washed super fine powder is being collected only to be run in long sluice one/two times. (one time only if no bonding wires detected)
BGA IC feed-stock pictured.
Material on left side was washed once. Slow careful wash to remove only super fine particles which come off as colored dirty water. After that remainder was dried and crushed again - container on right side.
This first wash reduced starting volume by half. Every following wash/dry/crush removed about half of volume. It goes faster as volume decrease and at the end you are left with few spoon fulls of concentrate majority of which is gold bonding wires (by weight).
I repeat this about 5 times to get to smallest amount of concentrate possible.
All the time washed super fine powder is being collected only to be run in long sluice one/two times. (one time only if no bonding wires detected)
BGA IC feed-stock pictured.
patnor1011
Well-known member
I was close to finish last 2 batches when things got complicated :twisted:
First batch with BGA was easy ride I got 85 grams of dried gold sponge - that one is easily recognized on picture.
Second batch, mixed legged IC but mostly from laptops so thin better variety was one horror story. I am running out of nitric so when I got to about 10 spoons of concentrate I could not wash it in hot nitric as I used to do in past. I used warm HCl which in fact did not do much in a sense of dissolving metals present in there. I moved on to AR got more greener than yellow color which was practically impossible to filter. I left it to settle and filtered like 95+% of it with exception of paste which was on the bottom.
I used SMB which produced huge amount of precipitate - I mean much more than I expected. I did wash it with boiling water and used HCl but still got a lot of ugly swamp mud looking stuff on bottom. I played with torch on that material as I wanted to reduce it to metallic tin. And that is what you can see in second cup - globules of tin/gold mixture over 60 grams of it. I will get to it next week as I do not have time right now. Anyone want to guess how much of gold will be there? *
*edited - answer is: 25g of gold
First batch with BGA was easy ride I got 85 grams of dried gold sponge - that one is easily recognized on picture.
Second batch, mixed legged IC but mostly from laptops so thin better variety was one horror story. I am running out of nitric so when I got to about 10 spoons of concentrate I could not wash it in hot nitric as I used to do in past. I used warm HCl which in fact did not do much in a sense of dissolving metals present in there. I moved on to AR got more greener than yellow color which was practically impossible to filter. I left it to settle and filtered like 95+% of it with exception of paste which was on the bottom.
I used SMB which produced huge amount of precipitate - I mean much more than I expected. I did wash it with boiling water and used HCl but still got a lot of ugly swamp mud looking stuff on bottom. I played with torch on that material as I wanted to reduce it to metallic tin. And that is what you can see in second cup - globules of tin/gold mixture over 60 grams of it. I will get to it next week as I do not have time right now. Anyone want to guess how much of gold will be there? *
*edited - answer is: 25g of gold
clearsteam
Member
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2016
- Messages
- 19
I am in awe of all the great advice and information so freely given. I am a newbie to this hobby but have been eagerly reading, watching and absorbing all that I can in deciding how to process the 100 kilos or so of high end boards everything pre 2006. it has been a few weeks since I discovered this forum, I tip my hat and have much to learn.
I was lucky enough to acquire an ex NHS lab ashing furnace as a punt on ebay for £60 in my quest to get the right gear, I have HCL,NaOH peroxide and iodine, furnace gloves , acid gauntlets, eye protectors, but I have not started refining yet, until I know I am doing it safely for the best possible yield. prior to finding this forum I was researching ways to use the furnace to harvest gold (it does go up to 1200 but its currently set at 650), and looking at different patents and so I thought I would try and bring one to your attention which is part of a patent for removing pgms from incinerated trash.
The waste was milled, incinerated and electro-magnets remove ferrous material.
THEN- the dry powdery results passed along a conveyor belt with a wheel of n/s arranged magnets spinning a small distance above where the conveyor dumped into a bucket.
the spinning magnets induce a current into anything conductive (should be just precious metal) which are then repelled by the megnets causing them to fall into a bucket further away. Any engineers out there might want to try as a method for panning the finest particles maybe. Or has anyone tried this already?
Thanks for the forum, I look forward to making a donation when I have some emoney to spend...
I was lucky enough to acquire an ex NHS lab ashing furnace as a punt on ebay for £60 in my quest to get the right gear, I have HCL,NaOH peroxide and iodine, furnace gloves , acid gauntlets, eye protectors, but I have not started refining yet, until I know I am doing it safely for the best possible yield. prior to finding this forum I was researching ways to use the furnace to harvest gold (it does go up to 1200 but its currently set at 650), and looking at different patents and so I thought I would try and bring one to your attention which is part of a patent for removing pgms from incinerated trash.
The waste was milled, incinerated and electro-magnets remove ferrous material.
THEN- the dry powdery results passed along a conveyor belt with a wheel of n/s arranged magnets spinning a small distance above where the conveyor dumped into a bucket.
the spinning magnets induce a current into anything conductive (should be just precious metal) which are then repelled by the megnets causing them to fall into a bucket further away. Any engineers out there might want to try as a method for panning the finest particles maybe. Or has anyone tried this already?
Thanks for the forum, I look forward to making a donation when I have some emoney to spend...
Have you incinerated your boards or was it a process you were thinking of? Sorry but I struggled to make that out in your post.
clearsteam
Member
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2016
- Messages
- 19
I havent done any incineration yet, I don't know enough yet. It was on a research paper about processing municipal waste for precious metals, and I thought inducing eddy currents in the non magnetic metals to make them magnetic so they could be separated easily from the incinerated and sieved waste was ingenious.
I suggested it as it seemed novel, doesnt appear to have been tried yet by any of the masters on this forum, should work and applicable to back yard operations to help concentrate the concentrate further. I will be panning my first lot and might have a play with the hundreds of hard drive magnets and a bike wheel later if I can master the basic processes.
I suggested it as it seemed novel, doesnt appear to have been tried yet by any of the masters on this forum, should work and applicable to back yard operations to help concentrate the concentrate further. I will be panning my first lot and might have a play with the hundreds of hard drive magnets and a bike wheel later if I can master the basic processes.
