Hi,
No stop! - the silvery particles themselves are ALL magnetically sensitive.
I wouldn't extract them with a magnet. It is just an interesting anomaly I write about.
I would probably find out what they are, and if they resist aqua regia, try hot aqua regia, platinum is suppost to dissolve in it then, and I guess if you have enough, it might test positive! I am still a bit suspicious though, as there is quite alot of this silvery dust compared to the amount of original coating, and surely too much to be solely platinum. At least "I" don't think there is this much platinum from what I've read, it is only a small addition.
As far as the rest of the process goes, I'm no further than where I've written about. I am in need of more nitric, and hydrochloric, not to mention some SMB and some urea, and while I'm on the subject, I've still got to find some tin powder from somewhere.
Things are progressing slow, so slow, that I've resorted to using ferric chloride to strip some pins, and after trying to dilute and rid the ferric chloride, I'm left with the gold mixed in with some light brown powdery muck at the bottom of the beaker. Bagghh it all
I now have two beakers of gold flakes in powdery muck!
I've also manually sliced the small chip wires from 50 486's, and compressed the bits into a nice little block of gold 3mm x 3mm x 2mm high.. quite impressive for just the wires. (UPDATE: I pressed them even smaller, but regretted this later as when trying to dissolve solid block in HCl/chlorox, proved time consuming!) Now to figure how to get the rest off the ceramics, and do a tally up. BTW, there is a gold plated panel under the wafer chip, looks like some form of silver solder/epoxy holds the wafer on, heat removes the wafer, unless the acid can get under it.
BTW, if you can remove the silicon wafer chips cleanly, they are of great interest to students studying microscopic things. sold quite a few now for $5 each! waste not want not.
[UPDATE: See my unusual sulphuric cell post for exp of how I ended up doing the cpu's! plus a tally up in weight of gold content for the 50 cpu's only. very interesting]
Ohh yes, also must mention in case someone misses them. In some brands of hard drives, there is a gold interconnector, the (20?) pins are 4 times the length of the IDE edge connector ones, it is located out of sight, under the PCB, joining the PCB to the internals of the drive. Well worth it. Also noted that its best to try and pull any connector pins completely out, as quite often I found, the gold goes into the plastic, and sometimes even right out the back and to the PCB. What a waste to simply clip or break it off!
Q: If complete pins and plastic are thrown into acid, as I've read some ppl do, does the acid get down inside the plastic, and does all the gold come out ok?
Regards
SK
