Help with motherboard pieces

[nivrnb]

To all,

What would be the best way to recover the gold off of these HP boards? Would placing them in plain hcl to remove the solder be first, then after that place them in AP? Do you treat these the same as you would say a cell phone board. Thanks for your help.

nivrnb

 

[Geo]

process in AP as is. i process whole boards all the time, it adds quite a bit of tin to the solution but as long as you dont add water until the rinse you shouldnt have any problems. when you precipitate the first time you will get some crystals of tin chloride but on the second dissolution you will leave this behind.

 

[nivrnb]

process in AP as is. i process whole boards all the time, it adds quite a bit of tin to the solution but as long as you dont add water until the rinse you shouldnt have any problems. when you precipitate the first time you will get some crystals of tin chloride but on the second dissolution you will leave this behind.

Geo,
Thank you for all you help!! This time I will use the bucket method a one time shot. The reason I am asking about this is because I placed one piece of this in the AP solution and I believe that the gold dissolved in the AP. Should this come off as fingers do, or will it disolve into the solution? I know that while using the AP it should not dissolve the gold, I don't know if the gold on these boards have copper behind them.

nivrnb

 

[Geo]

ive never seen gold plated electronics that didnt have copper under the gold. its layered in this fashion, copper layer, nickle layer, gold layer. the only reason for gold to go into an AP solution is in the first second or two of adding peroxide. gold will only go into AP solution in the presence of extra oxygen or added heat. the action of boiling AP with gold puts air bubbles in the AP solution and can dissolve some gold, but as soon as copper starts going into solution it will push the gold back out.

 

[macfixer01]

ive never seen gold plated electronics that didnt have copper under the gold. its layered in this fashion, copper layer, nickle layer, gold layer. the only reason for gold to go into an AP solution is in the first second or two of adding peroxide. gold will only go into AP solution in the presence of extra oxygen or added heat. the action of boiling AP with gold puts air bubbles in the AP solution and can dissolve some gold, but as soon as copper starts going into solution it will push the gold back out.

Early on I had a couple batches of HP boards with all gold traces, and they all sure looked nice. At the time I was just peeling off the traces and saving them to process later. Some of them have traces that can be easily peeled off with the gold intact. On other HP boards the gold must be an ultra-thin wash. It just goes to fine dust when you try to peel them off, leaving behind what looks like an equally poor layer of nickel on the surface over the copper.

macfixer01