Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)

[patnor1011]

I have no data on this type and I do not consider them as good source of precious metals but I collect them and will do few experiments.

Pat, that is called a "flip chip". if i understand right, the only gold content is in the legs if its a plug in type. i dont know about any other PM inside. i incinerated 5 pounds of flip chip bases and never could recover any amount of gold from them.

The ones I do have are BGA type, I save them but I am in the dark if somebody ask me if they do have something inside. Rather not but I will try to experiment with couple to be sure.

 

[samuel-a]

Thanks g_axelsson

I kinda figured there won't be much difference in what we did to the chips.
I've tried that with fully incinerated and with only pyrolyzed RAM memory chips... suspended them in the bath with plastic mesh...
And nothing happend with both....

I suppose it has everything to do with the frequency... and I suspect when I tried that, it was too high.
Problem is, I don't have an ultrasonic to play with whenever I want to...

 

[mjgraham]

I was wondering how long it takes to get them completely incinerated? I have been working with a bunch of RAM chips there in a furnace burning charcoal with a blower, I can get them to a nice orange color for about 20-30 min then after it starts tapering off I pull the pan and they hit the water. What I notice is a lot of them are not incinerated much at all. I know if they're stacked up that can cause a problem and it acts to me like once the white layer has formed it is an effective insulation but I am wondering if there needs to be more oxygen in there. I did a batch tonight single layer was in there almost an hour they look like chalk they hit the water there is still a chip there, most of the time it blows the die out but still a lot of the package is left. I am fairly sure heat should be good enough. I know I might have to repeat the process a time more but at this rate I am going to spend more money in charcoal than I get back. Just thinking about it, I don't think I have just let them cool down on their own from a glowing state, just read about putting them in water about the same time I was cranking up the furnace.. humm

 

[Geo]

Try letting the charcoal burn completely out and keep the air on until the chips cool. The carbon is still converting to carbon dioxide and when you quench them, it stops the process. Crush the black ones and run them through in a thin steel pan or a large food can.

 

[mjgraham]

Geo you were right, did much better. I measured the temperature for fun, for 3 min it was over 1800°F, stayed over 1000°F for 30 min then dropped pretty good, I pulled the lid off at around 500 and let to cool down, still had a few that didn't get all the way done but far less. First thing that comes to my mind is a can with the parts and some kind of slow turning (1 RPM) mixer but that makes things a little more complicated. Anyway that helped a lot and thanks.

 

[xALmoN]

What do you use as a blower to supply the fuel with O₂?

Would a computer fan mounted to a pipe provide enough flow to the charcoal to keep it hot enough?

 

[mjgraham]

I would say any would help, what I found I have a good blower, has a 2" outlet supplied tons of air, but I had to basically restrict it back to nearly nothing, I guess there can be too much air flow, sure the fire burns hot but you blow all the heat out the top. I think from what I saw in a video of Geo's he had a hair dryer adapted to a pipe, if you could get some of those high RPM server blowers that go in a 1U or something rack mount case, but I'd say just give it a try with what ever you got. After some tinkering I would say staying at temp for a longer time would be better than a really high temp for a short time but that may not be true.

 

[mjgraham]

OK I got all 5 pounds of memory chips incinerated, I just have a few questions, I have read the wonderful documentation by patnor1011, I am still curious about a few things. First I have separated the big from the medium and the dust in different buckets. In the dust bucket I removed all the magnetic pieces and tried to pan like in the documentation, first off I have no idea what I am doing plus I would imagine I would see something that looked like gold but not really. I decided to try to put a spoonful in a beaker and make some AR for it, put on HCl and dripped nitric until there is little reaction, filtered it off and tested and it was positive for gold. I guess my question, is this still what everyone is doing is panning the powder? Next what is a plan for dealing with the legs, other pieces I would imagine it is going to take a lot of acid to deal with pounds of material but I am young at this and advice would be helpful.
Thanks,

 

[patnor1011]

Well.
What I do is this. It will take a lot of time but this is just my way. It saves me couple of problems later. When I incinerate I do not crush with too much force. If properly incinerated water and fingers (use rubber gloves) is sufficient enough to break chips down. They are just like wet cookies and I try to remove as much of centre wafers as possible. They are like glass and when broken it is hard to pan them out without losing some of your gold. When you do more chips like 5 pounds all you will see in bucket is black muddy water it is hard to spot gold initially. Not to mention that gold will sink to bottom - just like in river, you need to get to bedrock which is bottom of your bucket in this case. Let's say that you have one third of bucket full of ashes and non magnetic pins. Just fill bucket with water and use something to stir content. Wait 10-20 seconds and carefully pour off black water. Do this several times until you see that poured water is less and less black. In this way you will get rid of finest ash. What will remain in bucket will be more coarse pieces of incinerated ash and pins and gold. Fill with some water again and use spoon to mash this coarse powder a little bit. Fill with water, stir, pour off... After while you will see that probably half of content is gone and you can start using pan. I do have several pans so I just take say 2-3 hand full from bucket and start panning. Pins will tend to group together so you can take them out pinch by pinch and place to another pan, you will easier separate pins from gold.
Main thing is to do everything slow to prevent gold escaping. Most of gold or a lot of it are very fine specks and you will see them only when some if it accumulate on some spot in pan.
I would start using nitric when I get to about 5-10% (5 is better) of initial incinerated mass and even before that I try to remove as much of pins as possible.
I do save all pins in extra container, they will go to stock pot (there is small very small amount of gold plating on tip where bonding wire was attached and some of them may be silver or AgPd plated)

Main thing is to do it very slow and very carefully. I did lost some gold when I started doing this year ago - I was in a hurry to see gold.

 

[Geo]

I processed a lot of memory chips a short time ago and thought I washed the ash pretty good. I ran quite a bit of the ash mixture through boiling AR. I retrieved a lot less gold than was expected. After reading through Pat's post on it many times trying to figure out where I went wrong, I took the ash that I saved from the AR and put it in a large cast iron pot. I placed that on my turkey fryer and covered it with a 5 gallon metal bucket with the bottom cut out to funnel the heat. The ash was black, after firing it for about thirty minutes on the propane burner, it was all white. I ran it through a blender with a little water. I ran it through AR again like it was without washing it afraid I would wash out the gold. After letting it settle for a few days in a tall slender glass container, the solution was deep yellow and heavy with gold.

The epoxy has to be incinerated completely. Any black material will trap the tiny gold wires.

 

[patnor1011]

the epoxy has to be incinerated completely. any black material will trap the tiny gold wires.

And that is the key to success. If properly incinerated it will go off with water, well most of it. Here is picture with how my concentrate looks like, in pan and in pyrex dish. Mostly fine gold wires and particles and rest is mostly remains from crushed center piece - that glass like silicon wafer.

 

[goldbug66]

Hi All,

This is my first attempt to ask a question on this site. What do you do with the metal from inside the chips? What is the later process you talked about?
Can anyone fill me in?

Thank you

Goldbug66

 

[Buzz]

Pat,

I know you mentioned earlier in the thread about maybe using a "Blue Bowl" for panning out the debris.

Did you get round to trying one?
Can anyone see any problems using one?

Those not familiar with Blue Bowls, there are lots of videos on youtube showing them in action.

Regards

 

[Geo]

This is my opinion. I find it's not necessary to remove all the ash to recover the gold. If you try to clean all the ash, I'm afraid you will lose some gold. If you remove at least half the ash and process as you would sweeps, you should get the gold. It may take more time to complete the whole process but at least you will get all the gold.

 

[patnor1011]

Hi All,

This is my first attempt to ask a question on this site. What do you do with the metal from inside the chips? What is the later process you talked about?
Can anyone fill me in?

Thank you

Goldbug66

I do separate them to magnetic and non magnetic. You can choose process which suit you for processing low grade plated pins. There will be significant amount of Ag and nice amount of Pd too. Choose process which will suit you the best to recover all three of them - Au, Ag, Pd.

 

[patnor1011]

Pat,

I know you mentioned earlier in the thread about maybe using a "Blue Bowl" for panning out the debris.

Did you get round to trying one?
Can anyone see any problems using one?

Those not familiar with Blue Bowls, there are lots of videos on youtube showing them in action.

Regards

Yeah, I still want to try that one but I may as well leave that to some of US members to try to do it. It is fairly expensive to try to import one to Ireland, government is after every package from outside EU to squeeze you for VAT and import tax. :mrgreen:

 

[Marcel]

You can build your own, it is very easy. I did one myself. Bought a plastic bowl (2€) + a plastic funnel (1€) + a DC water pump(12€), drilled a hole in the middle of the bowl with a holedriller, cut the funnel off at half and glued it to the center just above that hole in the bowl. Then you start the pump and you are ready to go! DC pump is nice because you can control the water stream directly with a potentiometer, but you can even use your gardenhose and take the water from there to create a stream.

Marcel

 

[nickvc]

I don't know if this will help with catching those fine wires but if you take a cheap plastic sieve and put it into boiling water it causes the mesh to contract, my thoughts are that if you poured the wash water carefully through it it should catch the majority of the wires so long as the material is finely ground.

 

[butcher]

What about trying static electricity separation, it was used to help separate ore, on belts and a plate that held a static charge, maybe you could use an old printer drum for the static charge they have a drum that collects toner, I wonder what it would do with this ash?

Could try it with a balloon rub it on your hair, and see if it collects ash from the fine wires.

 

[Auful]

This little concentrator works really well as an alternative to the Blue Bowl. I set it up with a recirculating pump in a concrete mixing tub for my dredge and sluicing concentrates. I suppose it might also work to concentrate the pyrolized chips as well. I have just acquired some chips and after pyrolysis will try this concentrator to see how it does.