I'm very knew here. I have been selling scrap for years. Usual stuff scrap iron copper lead batteries and etc. As of about a year ago started saving things like cell phones and computers and what not. My question is really this. I have lots of ram chips and fingers saved up. I have just started depopulating them and cutting the fingers. How much gold are in the actual chips on the ram fingers? I can just simply burn those and pan the materials. No need for chemicals. The only chemicals I've messed with so far is just AP solution. I've collected gold fingers from a few 5 gallon buckets of cell phone cards. Just saving the foils for now. Thinking of doing same with the fingers. Any ways felt like this was a good way to introduce myself I have been reading here for a long time now and just joined the other day now. I will say most scrap I get is just the simple copper pipes and wires and scrap iron. People local here know they can call me and I come clean up and dispose of the stuff for them the dumps charge for most of what I get but have been lucky enough to be known for collecting electronics as well. I would like to be able to process some of this stuff though
Hello Doug! I'm pretty new as well. I've been reading and studying the forum for a couple years now, but I am very much a noob when it comes to using acids and chemical processes. I
can tell you that most, if not all, of the e-waste questions (and certainly gold refining) questions that we may have, are probably already conveniently answered for us. The search bar here will help a great deal. If you see two search bars, I recommend you use the one that searches this site, instead of the one that searches google.
There are a lot of helpful people here who do this professionally and are often quite generous with their time and knowledge. I try to always be gracious and respectful here because these people give this important & valuable information freely, and they usually only ask that you proactively help yourself learn (by reading and researching) and that you observe the safety and waste treatment guidelines set up & easily found on this forum. You may be advised by them to read through the forum, searching your questions first, as they have probably been asked and answered years ago in the existing threads here. Then, seek help with any remaining questions you may have. If you are serious about learning to use acids to process e-waste & recovering/refining precious metals, let me be the
first to officially recommend the book by C.M. Hoke. It seems almost like a Bible here for recovery & refining pm's. Good news: it's free on pdf here in a lot of places... just use that search bar!
As for your question, there is no completely accurate answer. Doing research will reveal that depending what ram sticks you have, there might be more gold inside the chips than in the gold finger foils. The ic chips are usually attached to the circuit board with either metal legs on the sides, or by a grid of tiny solder balls underneath the chip (bga chips). That may be the biggest indicator of gold content of the chips. I have a bookmark saved that has yields of all different kinds of chips. I'll try to find and send it.
I have read that there is a lot of places to find gold in all different electronic waste, especially in older electronics, military spec equipment, and telecom equipment. I think modern electronics use gold more sparingly, so I try to target items that were made somewhere around 2009-2011 and before. I'm getting an eye for it, and I now remove all circuit boards from any shred scrap, like washing machines and microwaves too. Heck, I even just scrapped an old electric piano style organ and got like two dozen circuit bords and hopefully some palladium too!
I am just stockpiling my goodies now. I'm cleaning and separating all my different components into cans, jars, and boxes for recovery. Plucking and cleaning gold plated pins is getting tedious, especially as I'm finding out the yield will be little & perhaps not worth the time. I'll find out. I do all this while I continue learning. I scrap what I can, removing and keeping all circuit boards for processing. The scrapyard I take my base metals to also buys circuit boards. I pluck everything I want to keep for recovery and sell the rest as low grade(brown/power) boards and mid-grade (green) boards. They pay more for mother boards, but sense I pick off chips, I just put them in with my mid-grades.
I'm a bit long winded, but anyway, welcome to the forum! Keep learning and report back!
Merry Christmas to all!
