My experimental calcs on buying Escrap from online sellers

[Martijn]

Hey there Nevadans Im in vegas! I need advice on buying those pre melted compuer scrap blocks or bars and taking them to Elemetal here in town for refining. Is that worth it? Can you advise on ebay sellers you have used? What is the purity of those melted compouer ram chip prongs, etc?

Don't! it's a scam!
There is no gold.
Elemetal may not even bother to assay it.

Why would anyone sell scrap over internet when almost every scrap dealer knows the value of E-waste?
Look for scrap buyers on the internet and look at what the give for certain e-waste.

Because on the internet you can't see the product and they can present it as something high value, seed the top with shiny items and suckers fall for it.

All molten computer pin "golden bars" are a scam! each and every one them.
Never buy any of it and report each seller as a scammer to the platform they are on.

No e-waste seller on Ebay or any internet site is real! they only sell it there to scam people.
Ebay does not seem to care and keeps facilitating these scams to take place, but obviously, as long as they're making money, they're happy and don't care people get scammed and then start polluting the environment with chemicals as they try to find gold that is not there.

Thanks E-bay for contributing to polluting our beautiful planet!

I hope they will be held responsible one day!
What was their sustainability standpoint again?

 

[Taleeho]

Yes the chips are the main source of Gold, although there are modern chips without.

Thanks - I'm a novice in this forum and will be more focused in my replies. I appreciate your help in moderating.

 

[Yggdrasil]

Hey there Nevadans Im in vegas! I need advice on buying those pre melted compuer scrap blocks or bars and taking them to Elemetal here in town for refining. Is that worth it? Can you advise on ebay sellers you have used? What is the purity of those melted compouer ram chip prongs, etc?

No these pre-melted e-scrap blocks are not worth anything, it will cost way more to process them than there is Gold in them.

 

[Yggdrasil]

Hey there Nevadans Im in vegas! I need advice on buying those pre melted compuer scrap blocks or bars and taking them to Elemetal here in town for refining. Is that worth it? Can you advise on ebay sellers you have used? What is the purity of those melted compouer ram chip prongs, etc?

Sorry, where is my manners.
Welcome to us, but these blocks are as Martijn said almost guaranteed, scam.

 

[Wonka]

I’ll weigh in on this. I bought 40 LBs of processors on eBay and only recovered 4 grams. It turned out the lands had been mixed with tungsten. Good luck with that website!

 

[agmetals2]

Hello, there is a company that provides a waste testing service for gold concentration, you can send them 1 chip for testing before you purchase a large amount

 

[FrugalRefiner]

If you want to advertise for your company, you need to do it in the Vendors - Refiners, Buyers, Assayers section. It's the only place we allow commercial advertising. I've disabled the link in your post.

Dave

 

[4metals]

Hello, there is a company that provides a waste testing service for gold concentration, you can send them 1 chip for testing before you purchase a large amount

There are helpful resources listed on your website, please feel free to post the link where it is appropriate, the Refiners, Buyers and Assayers section.

 

[offtrailhiker]

There are too many dangerous videos out there, follow the recipes here on the forum in stead.

Edit to add:
The process is basically like this: pyrolize, incinerate, grind, magnetic separation, gravity separation, incinerate and smelt or dissolve.

You said incinerate twice. Do I burn it at two separate stages? Also, pyrolysis and incineration produce the same result re remaining metals, right? The burning will oxidize material either way?
While I'm asking, will I have a readily marketable product if I separate the char (gravity separation) and dry the product?
Thank you for all you do.

 

[Yggdrasil]

You said incinerate twice. Do I burn it at two separate stages? Also, pyrolysis and incineration produce the same result re remaining metals, right? The burning will oxidize material either way?
While I'm asking, will I have a readily marketable product if I separate the char (gravity separation) and dry the product?
Thank you for all you do.

Pyrolysis is to remove and safely burn the VOCs not to ash the chips.
When pyrolysisis is done there should be no smoke when ashing/incinerating the chips after.
Due to the compactness if the chips they need to be ground up and incinerated again.
Usually after gravity separating them.
When all that is done there should not be any black specks left.
If you decide to smelt them, pyrolysis is enough.
As the Carbon will combust during the smelting and will not be around during any chemical processing.

 

[blackwolf365]

I'm very new to this whole Escrap refining thing. My calculations may be way off base either way. What I've been doing is watching videos and taking the initial weight and the end result weight to get a percentage. I use the percentage to estimate how much recoverable gold is in each gram of Escrap category.

1. BGA ram chips
2. DDR ram chis
3. Gold "fingers"
4. CPU chips with heatsinks
5. CPU chips without heatsinks
6. whole ram sticks without shields/heatsinks
7. whole ram sticks with shields/heatsinks

I use my average numbers to calculate the value of Escrap being sold. If I can't almost double my money, I won't buy it. There are some very reasonable sellers and some sellers that seem to be using twice the spot price of gold to price what they are offering...it's a huge range!

I would love to read about how others estimate what they are willing to pay for Escrap.

if you're going to move forward, id say don't discount others claims completely, but take them with a HUGE grain of salt. think of it more as a rudimentary guideline for your own work, the success of which of course will depend on, as others here have said, your own success. id further advise trying small test batches until you find a viable source of materials.

 

[Taleeho]

I'm a fellow Nevadan (Carson City) and I admire your systematic approach. Regarding #6 above (Ram sticks), Our community e-waste recycler takes in several hundred sticks (mostly PC2/PC3) per month. We save DDR4 and 8Gb PC3's for refurbish/resale business and sell lots of ~600 sticks periodically.In April Boardsort was offering $23/lb and the total cost (including shipping) for the 326 lb that sold on eBay that month was $7611 --> $23.36/lb. Early July BS offer was $26 and 284# went for average of $26.33/b. BS is currently offering $28.50/lb. I don't know if the Forum supports data sharing on Google Sheets, but I would be willing to post this kind of data if others would be interested (especially if someone would add data such as the actual Au and Pd content of RAM sticks).