I currently have but did NOT process anything yet (through manual desoldering)This thread is not for guys who want to chop up the boards and run them on a table or pyrolyze them and smelt them for a copper cell, this is a thread to provide a step by step plan to follow for the hobby refiner or small scale operation that comes across bucket sized lots of circuit boards. This thread is exclusively for using the AP process to release gold foils which can be processed once enough are collected. That will be discussed in another thread so as not to make this thread too confusing.
That said, the starting point is a pile of circuits that have been removed from the computers or phones or whatever and lend themselves to this process.
I guess a listing of what types of material will lend themselves nicely to the AP process will be a good starting point.
One of the problems with reading these things on a forum is we, the moderators, cannot change a position of a post in a thread, at least I don't know how to do it. So a comment made about aqua regia in the middle of a thread about AP is really out of place and leads to confusion. I am proposing here to solicit comments only about the question being posed. When we get enough discussion I will pose the second question on the list so we can move forward on the same thread and in the end have a complete thread involving everything anyone needed to know about processing with AP.
So let's start with a list of scrap types that lend themselves to the AP process. Just list scrap types first, no processing steps, that will come next.
1. IC chips (i just generalize anything square/rectagle, black and flat, is IC chips - i know there are processors etc but i feel they can be processed similarly)
2. Gold Pins
3. Ram fingers /fingers in general
4. A crap ton of wires (look flat but have either silver or gold fingers at the end)
5. A POOP LOAD of gold ribbons
6. MlCCs
7. Weird square/rectangular cubes that are yellow black or blue uniform color.
8. Weird things that are circular bulbs but covered in something (heard silver or palladium for some brown,blue, etc etc)
9. Ton of cleaned boards after lye definitely have gold in them.
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