patnor1011
Well-known member
I just had an amazing week of fun doing some refining with Jon (anachronism on the forum). We did some classic like ceramic CPU's, fingers...
What I am going to share will probably make some people quite sad. I personally was quite disappointed, to be honest. As you may know, I spent some time dismantling and recovering refining material from laptops. We processed my laptop pins - 14 kilograms of them. They come from over 2000 laptops, generally, there are about 6-8 grams of pins in one motherboard. (I did not count battery connector pads as I sold them separately)
This could be considered much better feedstock than pc motherboard pins as laptop pins are generally much smaller and thinner.
All 14 kilograms stripped and the sad part, yield from 14kilogram of laptop pins is 23 grams of gold. 1.6g per kilo.
Post-2000 laptops and consumer electronics generally do have very thin flash gold plating. Nothing even remotely comparable to old electronics or telecom/military stuff. For me personally, that means it is simply not worth the time to harvest material like pins from them and selling whole motherboards is a probably better idea. I am inclined to think that there is much more gold in IC and BGA chips than in plated pins or visible plating on any laptop motherboard.
On another note, I observed a beautiful reaction when your gold AR solution is so saturated with gold that you will see it in metallic form after applying a drop of stannous chloride. Enjoy some pictures.
What I am going to share will probably make some people quite sad. I personally was quite disappointed, to be honest. As you may know, I spent some time dismantling and recovering refining material from laptops. We processed my laptop pins - 14 kilograms of them. They come from over 2000 laptops, generally, there are about 6-8 grams of pins in one motherboard. (I did not count battery connector pads as I sold them separately)
This could be considered much better feedstock than pc motherboard pins as laptop pins are generally much smaller and thinner.
All 14 kilograms stripped and the sad part, yield from 14kilogram of laptop pins is 23 grams of gold. 1.6g per kilo.
Post-2000 laptops and consumer electronics generally do have very thin flash gold plating. Nothing even remotely comparable to old electronics or telecom/military stuff. For me personally, that means it is simply not worth the time to harvest material like pins from them and selling whole motherboards is a probably better idea. I am inclined to think that there is much more gold in IC and BGA chips than in plated pins or visible plating on any laptop motherboard.
On another note, I observed a beautiful reaction when your gold AR solution is so saturated with gold that you will see it in metallic form after applying a drop of stannous chloride. Enjoy some pictures.
