New guy and buried in scrap

[akgold]

Hi Guys. New to the group. I live in Alaska and have been in electronics most of my life. Mostly test equipment and two way with some music/audio involvement.

Over the years through buying large lots of telecom gear and cherry picking through it for useable and resellable gear I now find myself with lots of old boards, connectors, and misc pieces of equipment. I had thought all along that I would save it up for retirement and spend my older years staying around the ohmstead dismantling and salvaging all this stuff. I started with one building of the stuff and when that filled up, continued with pallets and tarps in the yard. Eventually I built or aquired more buildings, both large and small, and filled those also. Now, since I have pretty much left the workforce and am spending my time here, I have started the salvage process. Since AL and Cu have been so high, and a lot of the stuff I have is very high content in them, it has been paying well. The PM stuff has been going in crates and bins for a while for processing later as I have the time. I spend the evening and some days just processing the crates for that now. But it had now become PAINFULLY apparent I will never be able to do it all. My hands, arms, and shoulders have been giving me a lot of grief and I am growing very weary of doing this monotonous stuff for hours on end. Even though I know the payoff will be good. And the higher PM (and non-ferrous) prices have helped pushed me a bit along also.

I have been angling for more stuff recently and am now in line for a substantial amount of more scrap to be delivered. Mostly copper and aluminum and that will continue to pay well. But it will have way too much PM scrap to handle by myself if I have to process boards and connectors by hand alone

I have recently purchased a large shredder (2200 lbs and 20 hp) made for destroying harddrives and can be used for other scrap as well. Still the pile will be more than I will probably be able to handle. I am expecting in excess of 200,000 lbs to come in this year. It should generate 6000 to 8000 lbs of gold plated boards and connectors. In addition I already have in excess of 50,000 lbs on hand that all contain good amounts of PM.
That is in addition to several hundred pounds of plated stuff already separated out and several hundred pounds I am separating out now.

OK. Some of you are experienced at handling large lots. I want to maximise my return out of this stuff, but I want to process it efficiently also. I suspect the best way is to shred it all. Separate ferrous and fiberglass/plastics as best I can and ship what is left to a refiner or take it further and burn it down and melt into ingots. But the burning of so much is another problem that I don't think I really want to get in to.

I have read a bit on the forum here about the status of commercial refineries and how they are not to be trusted. Are there bigger outfits that can be trusted and that anyone will recommend? Doing all of this myself is NOT an option!

I am enthused about being in my position with nice propects at hand but they have to be processed to be worth anything. I want to finish this next big lot coming in and be finished with this whole endeavor after this. In time enough to enjoy what life I have left.

As I sit here, my hands hurt so bad from cutting up this stuff I can hardly type.

So. I know I will get comments about how others wish they had my problems but I have now realised that I don't have a lot of stuff, but rather the stuff HAS ME!

I am a long ways from any refiners I have found and shipping from up here is costly so the best solution is one which keeps shipping and processing costs as low as possible.

Any help out there? Suggestions?

Buried in scrap!

BTW: I do have some nice plated stuff I want to process myself and will keep that back just for that purpose. I have several dozen pieces like in the pictures. Plated inside and out. All from microwave gear.
Steve of the North

 

[Harold_V]

Steve,

I'm not much help with the bulk of e scrap you've described, but the pics of plated items may be far better than you suppose. Unless I miss my guess, they're brass, and heavily plated with gold. I dismantled and processed some early micro-wave (defense) pieces years ago. They ran over 3% gold. The stuff was built when gold was only about $35/ounce, with cost no object. They should strip well in a sulfuric cell, so give one some thought.

Harold

 

[akgold]

Harold Yep. You are correct about the stuff in the pictures. Gold over brass and it has an extremely nice feel to it and a very deep color. These pieces I will strip myself due to the fact that they are very heavy otherwise and probably would not be cost effective to ship south and pay to have them done. I have a pile of this stuff.
As to the rest of the stuff it is all generally 60's stuff with some 70's and 80's in the batch. I had processed some back in 1995 from a very large 60's Borroughs computer that took 3 28 ft trucks and a couple of pick-ups to move. I still have some of that stuff also. Including some IBM 360 and 370 parts also. It kinda got out of hand around here. 28 buildings all filled with the stuff. My estimates as to amounts are all probably on the low side. I need to get something done with it before I kick off!
Steve

 

[Froggy]

Strange prediciment your in. Mabey you could hire a few trustworthy souls to help out while you sip on a cold beer, supervising this project is really the only way your going to get this fantastic problem you have solved. Adding more scap is only compounding the problem, just dont do it!!! If all else fails my name is Heath Lewis and I will gladly become heir to this in your will......

 

[Lou]

Heheheh, sounds like us here need to make a special task force to get up there and help this fellow. 8)

He's probably sitting on a couple of those nice 400 oz. bars, just waiting to be made. Oh what I'd give to cast some.



Finally, an excuse to go to Alaska on vacation


In all seriousness though, what this comes down to is concentration. You literally have a small mountain of this, and probably several million in gold and other PMs especially if this stuff is as old as you claim. This is enough scrap to keep one person busy for a quite a while, even if you're smart about it.

Go after the oldest, highest yielding items first. It is better I think to accumulate the plated material til you have several thousand pounds, and then run a large reclamation on it.

If any of the local highschoolers/kids are trustworthy, perhaps pay them the going rate for a summer job. Hire about 20 of them, have them disassemble your items and put all the gold-containing items into one bin. Give incentives to keep them honest and productive.

If you're in the middle of nowhere but have access to lots of electricity and some knowledge on building heavy duty setups, I vote for melting it all with copper, cupola style, casting anodes and going after the copper.
Even better in my option would be to crush everything as fine as possible, and cyanide leach it. Cement with zinc. You can dispose of the cyanide easily with lots of bleach and a little bit of heat: makes cyanate, relatively innocuous. Be smart about using it and there's little to worry about.



Lou

 

[istari9]

You may consider selling off your stock. I may consider traveling to you to pick it up. Or even pay the freight to ship it to me. Lots of choices if you think about it.

Ray

 

[Noxx]

I wanted to travel somewhere this summer. I could go help you lol

 

[Platdigger]

Hahaha.....it looks like you came to the right place for help Steve...

I have a friend that had a similar problem, he seemed to dig his way out ok, and made some good money in the proccess.

He had a bunch of that good older stuff himself.
Randy