Hmmmm, I'm not sure where panning entered the picture, although I did buy a pan (haven't learned how to
use it yet).
Here's my game plan:
I've got a 15" chain flail mill on the way, because the DIP IC's keep getting tangled up
in the 1/2" feed hole of the small hammer mill, so I'm going to do a preliminary grind with the flail mill just
to get the chips down to the size of sand; I'll use neodymium magnets from hard drives I've scrapped out
to pull out any Ferrous material out of DIP IC's [I'm not real sure how to get the metal plates from the quad chips out, though---I busted up some of them with a hammer, and the metal plates in the center of those chips definitely do not
respond to my magnet, so I suspect they're Aluminum] and then I'll run that "chip-sand" through the small hammer mill
to get it down to around 200 mesh.
At that point, I'll centrifuge the +-200 mesh material (a big thanks, Rusty, I had zero frame of reference as
to which would be better for running in a centrifuge, dry chip-sand or wet chip-sand------------wet it will be!)
to get whatever Gold has been liberated from the plastic (knowing that it won't be all the Gold, and that there
will still be clean-up and refining to be done).
Another question I simply don't have a frame of reference/experience to answer---------after centrifuging the
+-200 mesh material, how do you get the end result out of the centrifuge tubes? Does the wet material act like
a solid, and come out of the centrifuge tube somewhat like a column, that can then be cut into sections? I have
no idea.
Also, I was thinking about buying plastic 50ml centrifuge tubes. Is plastic better than glass for what I'm doing?
I have a wee bit of lead time here, because the flail mill and the centrifuge won't be here for about another 2 weeks.
I did buy a cyclonic dust control system to use with my shop vac, on the flail mill; the hammer mill is from Action Mining,
and runs apparently enough air through itself to get the ground-up material into a 2 gallon plastic bucket that has a Type C
vacuum bag filter on the exhaust port of the bucket. I researched Type C bags (they're paper), and found that they
only filter down to 30 microns, so I'm looking at buying a 1 micron polypropylene bag filter, because I sure don't want
any 200 mesh silica dust zooming around my garage.
I did take a preliminary shot at incinerating, and screwed it up several ways (I should probably post the 1 picture
I took of the end result), and then it got extremely cold here, so I haven't been able to give it another shot. I
can tell you, however, that I had a rather dense plume of acrid black smoke for about 4-5 minutes, but no ash.
And, spending the last of my 2012 summer and fall returns from computer scrapping (and a bit beyond that), I also
bought a Cyclonic Incinerator from Elastec, as a kind of fail-safe--------------I figure if I royally mess things up, I
can pop them into the cyclonic incinerator and reduce them to ashes that way [some concerns there, though: it
runs pretty close to 1000F if you're using oak as fuel, and I'm intending to take GSP's advice and use oak pellets,
so there appears to be some danger of overcooking the chips----I'm still planning out a series of timed test burns
that could be done, with the burn duration regulated by the quantity of fuel that would be put in].
I'll probably get thrashed for running long and putting 3 posts worth of stuff into 1; somebody let me know if I
should break this up into a couple of other posts, please.
Well, as usual, I'm just thrilled to hear from you guys that have been there, done that!
I've been asking many, varied questions for a long time now, and it feels pretty good to know I stand a pretty
good chance of reclaiming some Au from escrap, most likely in March '13, with most of the credit going to
all the help I've gotten from the GRF.
Cheers,
Mike
