How to refine that stuff

[Harry63]

Dear members. This is my first Posting. I whoud like to say hello. I am from Germany and collecting stuff for a few years. Because i did feel bad seeing gold plated stuff throwing away.
So i have my first question in this forum.
First picture. RF driver transistors. MOSFET. Base with berylium ceramic. Quite a good amount of gold bond wires on them. I have a few tausend of them.
Second picture. Gold plated copper coil. I have a few kilos of them.
I was thinking a lot how to work on that stuff. Please feel free to give me feed back how to refine that stuff the best way.
Thank you and best regards
Harry

 

[Yggdrasil]

Dear members. This is my first Posting. I whoud like to say hello. I am from Germany and collecting stuff for a few years. Because i did feel bad seeing gold plated stuff throwing away.
So i have my first question in this forum.
First picture. RF driver transistors. MOSFET. Base with berylium ceramic. Quite a good amount of gold bond wires on them. I have a few tausend of them.
Second picture. Gold plated copper coil. I have a few kilos of them.
I was thinking a lot how to work on that stuff. Please feel free to give me feed back how to refine that stuff the best way.
Thank you and best regards
Harry

Welcome to us.
Be aware that none of these are easy to process.
Especially the Beryllium oxide needs special attention, Beryllium salts is extremely toxic.
Very Carcinogenic.

We ask our new members to do 3 things.
Read C.M. Hokes book on refining jewelers scrap, it gives an easy introduction to the most important chemistry regarding refining.
It is free here on the forum:
https://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=19798Then read the safety section of the forum
And then read about "Dealing with waste" in the forum

So then to your question:
I have not refined any Beryllium based scrap yet but I hope someone with experience will chime in.

The Gold plated springs can be treated many ways, but two stand out with their own dangers.
The Sulfuric stripping cell using highly concentrated Sulfuric acid 90% + and a DC current.
Sulfuric can burn the skin of your body if spilled.
A Cyanide stripping bath, it is safe when done correctly but deadly if done wrong so not recommended for inexperienced persons.

And then there is the slow "safe" route, Copper Chloride etch.
Find some corroded Copper and put it in HCl, add your springs and add enough HCl to cover it.
Add an aquarium air-bubbler, and let it sit bubbling through the solution until enough Copper has dissolved to let the plating fall off.
Shake it well from time to time. When the plating has fallen off, siphon off the Copper solution and collect the Gold foils from the bottom.
Voila you are ready to refine your Gold.

PS! Make sure you do not do this inside since the HCl vapors will destroy any metal in the vicinity, Screws, Nails, Saws, Cars what ever.
Make yourself a fume-hood or an air tight box with a vent outside if you have to do it inside a shed or garage.
Do ABSOLUTELY NO acid work inside a house.

 

[Harry63]

Dear Yggdrasil,
thank you for your replay. For the MOSFETS i also was thinking about a sulfuric stripping. I couldnt find out jet, does the concentrated sulfuric disolve the berylium ceramic?
For the Gold plated Chopper coils i did use sodium peroxodisulphate. You disolve the whole Part and end up with Gold foils and a lot of coppersulphate. I was thinking about an easyer way of getting to the Gold .
Yes i did read the book of this wonderful Lady and i did learn a lot from streetips Videos about treating waist.

 

[Yggdrasil]

Dear Yggdrasil,
thank you for your replay. For the MOSFETS i also was thinking about a sulfuric stripping. I couldnt find out jet, does the concentrated sulfuric disolve the berylium ceramic?
For the Gold plated Chopper coils i did use sodium peroxodisulphate. You disolve the whole Part and end up with Gold foils and a lot of coppersulphate. I was thinking about an easyer way of getting to the Gold .
Yes i did read the book of this wonderful Lady and i did learn a lot from streetips Videos about treating waist.

I have never heard about Sodium Persulfate for refining, but if you absolutely want to dissolve everything you can use hot diluted Sulfuric or even Nitric. But that will create a lot of waste and of course cost more.
The AP/ Copper Chloride etch is cheap and needs no attention, but takes more time.
The Sulfuric stripping cell is perfect for this, since concentrated Sulfuric don't touch Copper.

BeO will dissolve in Sulfuric, HCl and Nitric.

 

[BShan]

I did want to mention that copper is sometimes alloyed with beryllium to make it springy. As in, copper wire will eventually bend with enough force, but beryllium copper will be more springy, and return to its original shape. Your springs may just be coils, or they may be springs.

I do not yet know what, if any, method is safest for BeCu alloy plated with gold. I'm still in collecting and learning phase

 

[Yggdrasil]

I try to avoid Be in my testing, and sort it in my collecting. I did want to mention that copper is sometimes alloyed with beryllium to make it springy. As in, copper wire will eventually bend with enough force, but beryllium copper will be more springy, and return to its original shape. Your springs may just be coils, or they may be springs.

I do not yet know what, if any, method is safest for BeCu alloy plated with gold.

I think that is called Beryllium Bronze.
It is used as replacment for steel in tools when sparks can not be tolerated.

 

[Alondro]

Dear members. This is my first Posting. I whoud like to say hello. I am from Germany and collecting stuff for a few years. Because i did feel bad seeing gold plated stuff throwing away.
So i have my first question in this forum.
First picture. RF driver transistors. MOSFET. Base with berylium ceramic. Quite a good amount of gold bond wires on them. I have a few tausend of them.
Second picture. Gold plated copper coil. I have a few kilos of them.
I was thinking a lot how to work on that stuff. Please feel free to give me feed back how to refine that stuff the best way.
Thank you and best regards
Harry

Ah, so those things I have are RF transistors. I have a few of them and was wondering what they are.

 

[eaglekeeper]

The Gold plated springs can be treated many ways, but two stand out with their own dangers.
The Sulfuric stripping cell using highly concentrated Sulfuric acid 90% + and a DC current.
Sulfuric can burn the skin of your body if spilled.
A Cyanide stripping bath, it is safe when done correctly but deadly if done wrong so not recommended for inexperienced persons.

I agree,
Soak transistors in Hcl to remove the solder. Then use a Sulfuric stripping cell for both the transistors and springs...just my 2 cents.

Do not crush up the white sub straight unless you're positive it's not Beryllium. I have no idea how to identify it so I always treat it as if it is.

 

[Yggdrasil]

I agree,
Soak transistors in Hcl to remove the solder. Then use a Sulfuric stripping cell for both the transistors and springs...just my 2 cents.

Do not crush up the white sub straight unless you're positive it's not Beryllium. I have no idea how to identify it so I always treat it as if it is.

Sulfuric will dissolve BeO

 

[orvi]

Ceramics are many times complex stuff, where BeO is just as an additive, it does not add up to total content of the ceramics. And with high frequency appliances, chances of getting BeO in that rise quite sharply.
I had processed similar RF transistors from old soviet boards. I had only few dozens of them, so it gone with the batch of various plated pins, top-hat transistors and other stuff directly to AR. From my research about these old soviet pieces, ceramics are Al2O3 without Be. All in all, maybe some surface layers of cerams were attacked to some extent, but ceramic parts of transistors came out whole after metal dissolution. Can´t guarantee that they did not loose some weight.

As for conducting coils, there is little chance that these are beryllium bronze. Most of the times, you want best performance and for that copper should be as clean as possible. Any alloying with any elements reduce the conductivity, which is undesired. Altough, if they served as some kind of springs - as mentioned - not coils, there is possibility that it could be it.

Trained eye can recognize CuBe from regular copper - CuBe is more pale in colour. And obviously, has more strength and is somewhat resistant to bending, and more prone to crack upon bending.

Typical Cu based materials (aside from kovar-like alloys - magnetic) for pins and springs are bronze/phosphor bronze, brass and CuBe. Brass will smoke upon melting and evolving ZnO - and this is very easily recognizable. Bronze would form metastannic upon dissolution in diluted nitric acid. And if it does not smoke upon melting and does not form metastannic in nitric, very very high chance you indeed have CuBe in hands. Generally, springs and pins aren´t made from pure copper. Coils, of course they are Origin of these will be probably good clue of what they are. If you aren´t sure, test them as suggested above, and perform melting somewhere out in open area with respirator on. Melt only few pieces.

 

[eaglekeeper]

All in all, maybe some surface layers of cerams were attacked to some extent, but ceramic parts of transistors came out whole after metal dissolution. Can´t guarantee that they did not loose some weight.

So far, that's been my experience with this type of material as well. But since I'm not 100% sure I still treat them with a bit more caution.

According to Google BeO will dissolve in both acids and bases, which would make waste treatment by PH adjustment complicated. Beryllium being higher in the reactivity scale, would that require a a non-standard method to cement it out during waste treatment?

 

[Yggdrasil]

So far, that's been my experience with this type of material as well. But since I'm not 100% sure I still treat them with a bit more caution.

According to Google BeO will dissolve in both acids and bases, which would make waste treatment by PH adjustment complicated. Beryllium being higher in the reactivity scale, would that require a a non-standard method to cement it out during waste treatment?

I fear it all becomes toxic waste the moment there is suspicion of Beryllium.
But I might be wrong.

 

[FrugalRefiner]

It's all toxic waste as soon as we add acids to metals.

Dave

 

[orvi]

So far, that's been my experience with this type of material as well. But since I'm not 100% sure I still treat them with a bit more caution.

According to Google BeO will dissolve in both acids and bases, which would make waste treatment by PH adjustment complicated. Beryllium being higher in the reactivity scale, would that require a a non-standard method to cement it out during waste treatment?

Cannot remove it that easy, as copper or iron for example. You need to balance pH precisely. This is also how beryllium is extracted from the ores. And even then not all will precipitate out. Around 6 or 7 it should be done according to wikipedia. Since I never focused nor had any reliable method of analyzing Be, I trusted my skills to reclaim all possible Be from waste by regular treatment.

Cementing is impossible given the nature of the metal and it´s reactivity.

 

[Yggdrasil]

It's all toxic waste as soon as we add acids to metals.

Dave

It came out a bit wrong
Permanently Toxic waste was what I meant.

 

[Harry63]

I did want to mention that copper is sometimes alloyed with beryllium to make it springy. As in, copper wire will eventually bend with enough force, but beryllium copper will be more springy, and return to its original shape. Your springs may just be coils, or they may be springs.

I do not yet know what, if any, method is safest for BeCu alloy plated with gold. I'm still in collecting and learning phase

Hi Bhan,
you are wright the spring is a coil. Copper plated with Gold. Used as an RF componet in RF resonator. No BeO at all.
The second pic is a RF MOSFET made of a copper base with a BeO ceramic on top and then the Silicon Chips with good gold bond wires.
Right now im a afraid to get the berylium in solution. Maybe i will only scratch away the bond wires.

 

[BShan]

Hi Harry,

That's good news on the coils, they should be fairly easy to process, and not as messy to clean up after! Yggdrasil's post is a good one!

If you do go that route with the transistors, I think it's still worth while to take precautions for just in case you accidentally scrape at the ceramic while scraping the bondwires. Besides solutions containing beryllium, dust from broken BeO comes with its own dangers. One thing that Yggdrasil mentioned, he has not refined scrap known to contain BeO. This could be because he's not come across any, but I take it as a warning that the potential risk is too high for him, then it is definitely too high for me.

Lastly, I'll mention that everybody else in this thread is way more experienced than I am; I just wanted to make sure you could rule out spring copper before using chemistry on the coils.

 

[Alondro]

Ceramics are many times complex stuff, where BeO is just as an additive, it does not add up to total content of the ceramics. And with high frequency appliances, chances of getting BeO in that rise quite sharply.
I had processed similar RF transistors from old soviet boards. I had only few dozens of them, so it gone with the batch of various plated pins, top-hat transistors and other stuff directly to AR. From my research about these old soviet pieces, ceramics are Al2O3 without Be. All in all, maybe some surface layers of cerams were attacked to some extent, but ceramic parts of transistors came out whole after metal dissolution. Can´t guarantee that they did not loose some weight.

As for conducting coils, there is little chance that these are beryllium bronze. Most of the times, you want best performance and for that copper should be as clean as possible. Any alloying with any elements reduce the conductivity, which is undesired. Altough, if they served as some kind of springs - as mentioned - not coils, there is possibility that it could be it.

Trained eye can recognize CuBe from regular copper - CuBe is more pale in colour. And obviously, has more strength and is somewhat resistant to bending, and more prone to crack upon bending.

Typical Cu based materials (aside from kovar-like alloys - magnetic) for pins and springs are bronze/phosphor bronze, brass and CuBe. Brass will smoke upon melting and evolving ZnO - and this is very easily recognizable. Bronze would form metastannic upon dissolution in diluted nitric acid. And if it does not smoke upon melting and does not form metastannic in nitric, very very high chance you indeed have CuBe in hands. Generally, springs and pins aren´t made from pure copper. Coils, of course they are Origin of these will be probably good clue of what they are. If you aren´t sure, test them as suggested above, and perform melting somewhere out in open area with respirator on. Melt only few pieces.

The pins I got from the nuclear launch control boards all have Be-Cu cores. I'm puzzling over how to process them. The plating on them is so incredibly thick, nearly as thick as a sheet of notebook paper. But the Be... it's so nasty.

 

[orvi]

The pins I got from the nuclear launch control boards all have Be-Cu cores. I'm puzzling over how to process them. The plating on them is so incredibly thick, nearly as thick as a sheet of notebook paper. But the Be... it's so nasty.

Unless you don´t spill it all over the place and have good fume control (not letting too much aerosols out), I see no problem in processing them as regular stuff. Once the refining is done, gold separated, you can treat the liquid as usual with base, to precipitate all hydroxides and dispose them as regular toxic waste. I won´t undergo another hassle in recovering copper by cementation.

Only way how to relatively safely contain Be compounds is to convert them into something really stable and insoluble. In the nature, it is beryl mineral - good Be content, yet not harmful in any way to humans. I will simply smelt the hydroxide cake as is in some reducing enviroment (flour, carbon powder...) with flux like silica (to make things stable) and contain it in the slag/"rock". Silicates are very very durable, and basically if you bin them as regular waste, nothing will ever happen to them in natural conditions.

PS: how you figured out it is CuBe and not bronze or brass ?

 

[Alondro]

Unless you don´t spill it all over the place and have good fume control (not letting too much aerosols out), I see no problem in processing them as regular stuff. Once the refining is done, gold separated, you can treat the liquid as usual with base, to precipitate all hydroxides and dispose them as regular toxic waste. I won´t undergo another hassle in recovering copper by cementation.

Only way how to relatively safely contain Be compounds is to convert them into something really stable and insoluble. In the nature, it is beryl mineral - good Be content, yet not harmful in any way to humans. I will simply smelt the hydroxide cake as is in some reducing enviroment (flour, carbon powder...) with flux like silica (to make things stable) and contain it in the slag/"rock". Silicates are very very durable, and basically if you bin them as regular waste, nothing will ever happen to them in natural conditions.

PS: how you figured out it is CuBe and not bronze or brass ?

It's a firm copper that breaks when bent quickly rather than bending, and dissolves away completely when a small piece is put in nitric, rather than making the metastannic goo.