How to recover gold from pinless fiber processors?

[todd_58]

Hi everyone.. First of all I would like to thank the forum members for sharing lots of useful information on how to recover precious metals from various types of electronic wastes (and copper.. yet to see anyone come up with methods to recover the iron from kovar pins though.. haha..) It really shorten my learning curve..

I usually use the search function to look up for information.. However, my search on how to process those pinless fiber processors is fruitless to say the least.. I have collected around 50kg of them.. My suppliers mix them up with the other fiber processors (albeit I have told them not to do so countless times).. Sheesh.. :roll:

Furthermore, I assume all of them are already damaged to certain extent hence I intend to recover whatever amount of gold from them.. After all, we will have to deal with this stuff sooner or later since they are replacing those older processors in the market.. :wink:

Back to the topic, I wonder if anyone has ever done this before? Can I leach them in AP solution to remove the thin gold foils (of course after removing the metal lid and the silicon chip)? Or is there another method to do so?

I will be very grateful for any lead on this.. Thank you very much..

 

[joekbit]

I suspect, given you searched and found nothing that its not worth the trouble.
Since that you have so many, experiment. Cant hurt to bust a few up throw them in a 50ml jar with a bit of AP, and look for gold particles. You could even use (AR or HCL/CL let it digest a while and do a stannous test) My guess is, not worth the effort.

Let us know how it works out.

 

[g_axelsson]

I don't have any yield numbers, but if you check http://boardsort.com/payout.php you'll get a hint of the value of those CPU:s. At $3.5 per pound I suspect most of the value is in the copper heat spreader.

Göran

 

[joekbit]

I don't have any yield numbers, but if you check http://boardsort.com/payout.php you'll get a hint of the value of those CPU:s. At $3.5 per pound I suspect most of the value is in the copper heat spreader.

Göran

Agreed. I did 5 pounds of pinned fiber CPU's (AMD 2). I broke even, only due to the gold on the pins, 280 grams of pins. Looking at my log I notice that I never wrote down the gold powder weight, but I think it was just above 1 gram. I may be wrong, so please don't use my yield as a reference. monolithic capacitors removed weighed 44 grams, still in a jar. I still have the boards in a small box with the chips on them. If I can find something on the forum I may do something with them in the future.

Edited to add

So in short what I have left is pinless fiber CPU's.