Hello, a long story here. Big thanks to GRF to make this possible.
Been interested about refining e-scrap gold since middle school (4 years ago), so started to hoard some e-scrap that I could get my hands on.
No commercial buys, just receiving donated broken motherboards, RAM's, HDD's, and dead phones from friends, got 85 grams of IC chips. Omitted some of the low-yield chips, so maybe actually used around 60-65 grams of the better ones.
I incinerated the chips, took the pins off, broke them into chunks, took the silicon out and kept the goldwire-bearing chunks for recovery. Those were done individually (that's why I chose to omit bad chips until I can efficiently process them lol).
Then the chunks were then ground down. I have a mortar and pestle but worried about the porosity, so I used a cut test tube and small steel rod (from CD-ROM's). That took me more than 12 hours as I did it a few chips at once... A long process indeed.
After getting rid of the ash/burnt plastic, I poured some household cleaner (14.5% HCl) and heated it up a bit to make sure there's no copper left, if any. Had spent may be an hour to take all copper wires, pins and pads with tweezers.
So there's no chemicals involved except the HCl at the end. That's why I choose this method though, just pure labor and patience :lol:
Final results: a tiny, 0.15 gram gold bead. There are still a few tiny gold globules left behind, but just too lazy to melt them together into a single bead, perhaps next batch. Maybe 0.16-0.17 grams total if they're all put together.
Overall, laborious but fun, I didn't expect to get more than 0.1 gram so I'm quite happy with what I got. Is it a good yield?
Been interested about refining e-scrap gold since middle school (4 years ago), so started to hoard some e-scrap that I could get my hands on.
No commercial buys, just receiving donated broken motherboards, RAM's, HDD's, and dead phones from friends, got 85 grams of IC chips. Omitted some of the low-yield chips, so maybe actually used around 60-65 grams of the better ones.
I incinerated the chips, took the pins off, broke them into chunks, took the silicon out and kept the goldwire-bearing chunks for recovery. Those were done individually (that's why I chose to omit bad chips until I can efficiently process them lol).
Then the chunks were then ground down. I have a mortar and pestle but worried about the porosity, so I used a cut test tube and small steel rod (from CD-ROM's). That took me more than 12 hours as I did it a few chips at once... A long process indeed.
After getting rid of the ash/burnt plastic, I poured some household cleaner (14.5% HCl) and heated it up a bit to make sure there's no copper left, if any. Had spent may be an hour to take all copper wires, pins and pads with tweezers.
So there's no chemicals involved except the HCl at the end. That's why I choose this method though, just pure labor and patience :lol:
Final results: a tiny, 0.15 gram gold bead. There are still a few tiny gold globules left behind, but just too lazy to melt them together into a single bead, perhaps next batch. Maybe 0.16-0.17 grams total if they're all put together.
Overall, laborious but fun, I didn't expect to get more than 0.1 gram so I'm quite happy with what I got. Is it a good yield?