Fever
Well-known member
All,
It is well known that modern hard drive discs contain a thin alloy of Platinum. As scrappers, many of us have lots of these discs in our "collections"
I'm told it is quite easy to retrieve this Platinum by gently bending the discs to fracture this surface layer, then use HCL to digest the base metals underneath, allowing the Platinum alloy to flake off for collection. You can then further refine the Platinum from the alloy.
My questions is: With these discs being rather readily available as scrap, and with the price of Platinum quite substantial these days, why isn't this more of a priority to most PC scrappers? I know the amount of Pt is minimal, but for such an easy recovery process such as this, I would think everyone would be jumping on this bigtime. Am I missing something about the process that I haven't mentioned above? Is there a trick to this process, or is it as simple as it looks?
I have viewed the information from the post further down, but I don't see any major stumbling blocks in the process. Maybe it is just that easy? I would probably refrain from taking the Platinum to the crucible, as I don't have that level of ability yet, but I would like to collect the purified metal after acid refinement for future processing.
Thanks in advance for any info or progress regarding this process.....
Fever
It is well known that modern hard drive discs contain a thin alloy of Platinum. As scrappers, many of us have lots of these discs in our "collections"
I'm told it is quite easy to retrieve this Platinum by gently bending the discs to fracture this surface layer, then use HCL to digest the base metals underneath, allowing the Platinum alloy to flake off for collection. You can then further refine the Platinum from the alloy.
My questions is: With these discs being rather readily available as scrap, and with the price of Platinum quite substantial these days, why isn't this more of a priority to most PC scrappers? I know the amount of Pt is minimal, but for such an easy recovery process such as this, I would think everyone would be jumping on this bigtime. Am I missing something about the process that I haven't mentioned above? Is there a trick to this process, or is it as simple as it looks?
I have viewed the information from the post further down, but I don't see any major stumbling blocks in the process. Maybe it is just that easy? I would probably refrain from taking the Platinum to the crucible, as I don't have that level of ability yet, but I would like to collect the purified metal after acid refinement for future processing.
Thanks in advance for any info or progress regarding this process.....
Fever
