mbn
Member
Hi you there, dear people of Gold Refining Forum,
Thanks to Patnor101 and other kind members who shared their precious information, I tried to recover and refine gold from nearly 1.3 kilogram of IC chips. It was from 40 grams of n/s bridges (only black top), 850 grams of ram chips and the rest, other black IC chips from motherboard/cards (no eproms or thick eprom-likes).
After hours of proper incinerating and then, using mortar-and-pestle to dust the white chips and magnet to separate the pins, I washed the dust carefully (with drops of liquid soap) and let it dry. I then crushed the sands and washed it again, but my pan was not black or blue so I couldn't see any gold wires there; I transferred the dust/sand to my beaker and when washing the product one more time, I saw the beauty just beneath the beaker on the bottom.
I soaked the fine sands in 50/50 diluted Nitric acid (250ml D-Water and 250ml Nitric), which created a mess with all the brown fumes and a little leakage, but anyway, that was an educational experiment to know next time I'll add the acid a little at a time in several pours.
After about an hour and a half, when the copper pins dissolved (most of them), I soaked the concentrate on Aqua Regia and dissolved everything (it was yellowish brown) - I've begun evaporating the excess of nitric and then, participated the brownish black mud with SMB. The recovered gold mud goes to second AR with a very careful additions of nitric, drop by drop - I also used three drops of Sulfuric to the AR. After filtration and diluting the AR four times with D-water, I participated the gold with SMB and then, washed the gold mud first with boiling distilled-water (3x), and again with near-boiling HCL (3x) and then, final three washes with boiling distilled-water.
Here are the photographs:
Thanks to Patnor101 and other kind members who shared their precious information, I tried to recover and refine gold from nearly 1.3 kilogram of IC chips. It was from 40 grams of n/s bridges (only black top), 850 grams of ram chips and the rest, other black IC chips from motherboard/cards (no eproms or thick eprom-likes).
After hours of proper incinerating and then, using mortar-and-pestle to dust the white chips and magnet to separate the pins, I washed the dust carefully (with drops of liquid soap) and let it dry. I then crushed the sands and washed it again, but my pan was not black or blue so I couldn't see any gold wires there; I transferred the dust/sand to my beaker and when washing the product one more time, I saw the beauty just beneath the beaker on the bottom.
I soaked the fine sands in 50/50 diluted Nitric acid (250ml D-Water and 250ml Nitric), which created a mess with all the brown fumes and a little leakage, but anyway, that was an educational experiment to know next time I'll add the acid a little at a time in several pours.
After about an hour and a half, when the copper pins dissolved (most of them), I soaked the concentrate on Aqua Regia and dissolved everything (it was yellowish brown) - I've begun evaporating the excess of nitric and then, participated the brownish black mud with SMB. The recovered gold mud goes to second AR with a very careful additions of nitric, drop by drop - I also used three drops of Sulfuric to the AR. After filtration and diluting the AR four times with D-water, I participated the gold with SMB and then, washed the gold mud first with boiling distilled-water (3x), and again with near-boiling HCL (3x) and then, final three washes with boiling distilled-water.
Here are the photographs: