Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)

[samuel-a]

Uneducated? :mrgreen: You know what you are talking about Sir
Everything you said is correct except that carbon being a reducing agent, in its elemental state it absorb metals ions, but not reducing them. As far as I know.
Of course there are organic reducing agents (like oxalic acid... ascorbic acid etc...).

Though, just to clarify, I did not claim my setup will incinerate (combust) the material, by the contrary, it pyrolyse the material.

 

[Geo]

After you bake the oils and resins from the plastic the metals are free to be reacted upon by whatever method of your choice to separate the base metal from the gold. The reason you can't just toss the plastic IC packages into a mill is it will gum up after the friction causes heat to rise to the point of melting plastic. Once the resins have been baked out you can simply dry shake them in a bucket and the fiberglass will fall apart, after that just put a garden hose in the bucket and allow it to overflow (gently) stir with a suitable utensil (wooden board) and the lighter material like fibers will wash over the top leaving metal in the bottom.

 

[rusty]

Geo you'll find that finely divided metals will float so don't forget to add the soap.

 

[patnor1011]

Yes, you have to first make all material wet - to sink it in bottom. It is good to stir properly as it tend to form balls where dry powder is in middle. When everything is wet then you can start to get rid of junk.
I just prepared 1200g of chips from RAM sticks to try to get some numbers for you guys. Then about 1000g of bigger square chips and about 3 kilos of different types.
I do not use charcoal, regular hard black coal, well I will do some pictures. I plan to use bottom from floppy drive - it is flat with sides and metal is not thick so it will get red hot quicker.

 

[samuel-a]

Yes, I've been using charcoal, not coal, sorry for the confusion.

 

[patnor1011]

I hope I will finish all my material this week but I do have some numbers. I did 1 kilogram of chips from RAM sticks only and I have managed to pan out let's say concentrate. It was then put in HNO₃ and resulting weight is 1.1g. It is mostly gold but I can see small amount of dark powder there too - very fine crushed ceramic powder. My subjective estimate is that this represent less than 10% of total weight but I will know for sure when I purify and process that in AR.
Right now I am somehow convinced that yield from all sort of black square flatpacks or chips (all which have more than 16 legs) will be in region of 1g for kilogram and slightly more in top black part of green BGA chips with gold corner called south and north bridge. I am trying to put together some kind of handbook with plenty of pictures for download for members as I have a lot of pictures and don't want to increase costs of running this forum by uploading them all here.

 

[Claudie]

Are you just measuring what you were able to pan out? Wouldn't there still be some Gold left in the ground powder from the packages that you would miss?

 

[Geo]

One question? If my understanding is right there is gold inside the ceramic substrate itself. Doesn't the entire piece have to be turned into fine powder to get all the gold out?

 

[Palladium]

Could you not just use an AP process, then HCl/clorox, and filter out the ceramic. I do this with SMDs. Sure would save all that panning.

 

[Barren Realms 007]

One question? If my understanding is right there is gold inside the ceramic substrate itself. Doesn't the entire piece have to be turned into fine powder to get all the gold out?

Yes it does.

 

[samuel-a]

Are you just measuring what you were able to pan out? Wouldn't there still be some Gold left in the ground powder from the packages that you would miss?

I was thinking the same thing.

Though, about 1 gram of 1 Kg of chips sounds about right, maybe bit on the lower end of possible yields. but that's a guesstimate...
I ran some black IC chips (not RAM) before that produced 0.001% (by mass).

Pat, did you try leaching the panned left over material of the RAM batch with dilute nitric?
I suspect that you will find silver and palladium as well...
Maybe later you could leach with dilute AR to recover when ever gold that slipped the panning.

 

[patnor1011]

Well, all plastic/ceramic was reduced to powder. Like Rusty said baby powder like. That was pretty much washed away. All what I did - panning was basically separating small gold wires from bigger non magnetic pins.
When I crushed material and washed that with water all fine plastic/ceramic powder was washed away. Bigger pieces were dried out, crushed and washed again. I repeated this process about 5-6 times to get rid of all plastic, ceramics and glass. Magnetic pins were taken out with magnet, non magnetic separated from gold in pan. I have over kilogram of pins and inside metallic parts. A lot of them are gold plated say about 30% and some appears to be silver plated. Some chips were the same where I had written on box that they (contacts) are Au/Pd plated. I would say that there will be some bits of gold in form of tiny wires still trapped or soldered on ends of pins.
All this material will be processed later.
It is questionable which process is more or less time or resources consuming. Washing all that powdered material in acids or getting rid of junk first. I am well aware that some of gold may be lost while washing but let's say I was very careful when doing so and actually wash-dry-crush material several times. I was taking care to wash it so no gold will be lost.
Right now I have all gold wires I was able to take out in nitric - there was some amount of broken tiny copper pins mixed with gold and small bit of ceramics/glass.
Day or two and I will have some numbers for you. I did processed 7 kg of mixed chips. I will decide later for the best process of how to try to extract Au/Ag/Pd from metallic parts from inside of chips.
First two pictures on this page represent sample of what I processed, note that all or let's say 99% of chips were cut from boards therefore without outside pins/legs, not just desoldered and weight was 7 kilograms.

 

[patnor1011]

I have created some handbook or my story but as I am not really skilled in using word processors I have little problems to scale size of that thing down. In .doc it has well over 100MB and when converted to .pdf it has 41MB - still bit too much. I put a lot of pictures inside but 41MB for 10 pages is bit too much. I guess I will have to resize pictures prior to inserting them in document and scaling them down.

*edited
got 2.36MB from 41

 

[patnor1011]

Feel free to tell me about any mistakes as English is not my first language.
Hope it is not that bad. I have intention to give all this info free to all forum members and I will put that document on ebay for some small amount to generate some money from which (if I manage to sell some) I will donate to this great forum, and I may get some prize to some contest on forum in future.

*edited spelling and uploaded again

Fellow members, I decided to discontinue free download of my guide upon learning that one forum member stole content and start selling my guide on ebay claiming it is his work. This makes me sick and sad that he is stealing money which were mostly destined to end up as donation for running this forum and to various cases which were brought here by some other members.

*edited again.
Thief will be thief and one day will pay for his deeds. I am not going to take away knowledge which I shared with all of you so here is my guide back where it belong on this forum. Thank you for patience with me today. 6th of August 2012

*edited 10/04/2013
I do have second eBook. This one will not be offered for free, as I try to get as much funds as possible to help Noxx cover cost associated with running this forum. Price is very small, and I think it is worth to pay. Many thousand people benefited from what I gave to community for free already, and I feel great for doing that. It was my way of giving back what I got from here.
Link to more details about how to get my second eBook here:
https://goldrefiningforum.com/threads/processing-s-n-bridge-bga-chips-ebook.17967/

DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT SELLING MY eBOOKS FOR PROFIT. I DO HAVE THEM COPYRIGHTED AND WILL PURSUE EVERY LEGAL OPTION AVAILABLE IF I WILL FIND SOMEBODY TRY TO GET RICH QUICK SELLING SOMETHING HE DO NOT CREATED OR OWN. I WILL ALSO PURSUE ANY DERIVATIVE WORK IF THIS WILL CONTAIN A SINGLE IMAGE OF MY OWN OR THE SAME LAYOUT. THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING.

 

[hfywc]

Excellent! Thanks for sharing... alan.

The only thing that I would like to suggest (if I may), is to seperate the the gold legged ICs from the start so that we don't have to sort it out later on. Other than that-- everything is perfect!

 

[recycleordie]

Hi patnor, that was great reading your process. I have seen it done in a similar way. I quite fancy pulverising the flat packs myself. I think you still have more gold to find. I would love to know exactly how much gold you eventually recovered? I think the guy who recycled USSR computers is talking about me with the 250kg ram. I have actually got more than this and I am receiving around 200kg per month. My point is it doesn't really matter what you get out, it is what it is, hope you agree. :lol: ]

 

[patnor1011]

Yes, there must be more than I got still there. I mean - my button was made only from wires which become loose after pulverizing chips. There must be still enough small pieces attached to metallic parts from inside like pieces of that wire, plating.... Well I did not finished them yet.

 

[recycleordie]

I would like to see you smelt your left overs and make a small doré bar, just to keep things all tidy for now.

I plan on milling my complete ram sticks.

 

[khaosodensland]

patnor, excellent process! can you make a video, step by step procedure, it woukld really help us who have never experimented wit this suff and would like to mess around. that would be awesome!

 

[philddreamer]

Pat, I finally got a chance yesterday to give incinerating a chance. I read the information that you've shared & also Samuel's & Kuma's.

I'll be posting the steps & also some pics, thus sharing what I experienced thru the process.
I used one of the B-B-Q's we don't use, (we have 2 more), fired up the charcoal & also a propane torch. After close to an hour they were ready for the mortar.

The pic is from 1.4# of ram chips.

Thank you & take care!

Phil