Non-Chemical Processing boards???????\\\\\\

[rparks3rd]

Hello,
I have process CPU's, pins, eproms, etc sucessfully with a few differnt process. But I cant seem to process boards sucessfully... I am looking for some differnt processes that others use to process mother boards, ram cards, pci cards, ETC... and i am talking about processing these after you take the cpu off, cut all fingers off, etc.. the plain old boards...
Do you break them up in to small peices?
what types of solutions are you exposeing them to?
Is there any processes that are exclusive to processing boards?
what solutions work best and how do you go about it in your process?
ETC.........................................................................

 

[cnbarr]

I will say whole heartedly, from personal experience, after you cut off the fingers and cpu's etc..., sell the boards, in the long run you will lose more money then it's worth to try and recover those values!!!!

 

[patnor1011]

Cut off or un-solder IC chip packages, gold plated pins from connectors and slots, monolithic capacitors, resistors and forget about the rest. Nothing in there for you. Big boys can recover copper and aluminium but that is why they are called big boys. We cant do it, unless you want to spend couple times more than you gain from it.

 

[nickvc]

Good advice from the guys. You will not be able to recover any values profitably, the big boys fragment, crush, sort and then smelt into dore bars which are then shipped to the big copper refiners for final processing, this takes very expensive equipment and very good fume control and the money to wait till settlement is made,3 months plus.

 

[Geo]

im thinking about trying something i have talked about before. run bare boards through old AP solution and then use electrolysis to extract the copper out of solution on a copper sheet. maybe this summer.

 

[Pantherlikher]

im thinking about trying something i have talked about before. run bare boards through old AP solution and then use electrolysis to extract the copper out of solution on a copper sheet. maybe this summer.

I'm guessing everyone with the bug would like to as well. Copper seems the best and most abundent in all "escrap". Good Luck and hopefully you can find a process. AP for collection seems the best start. After that, could you plunk AL in there to drop all copper? From there, you'd have everything dropped above AL in the reactive list...ie. Copper.

My first attempted disasterous mess years ago, I'd slowly put an aluminum piece into the spent Ar and remove to let it cool. It really gets Hot fast but dropped alot of Copper. After this, I put hard drive discs in the waste solution just to see what was left. After an hour of waiting for a reaction, I only saw tiny bubbles pushing through the layers. A week went by and it never reacted like AL would as the AL is inside and takes alot to work through the layers. I ended up with AlCl crystals, and the disc left over skin some say contains Pt.

My assumption being I'd rather have copper then aluminum for scrap.
The discs were just to see if anything else dropped and to see if it'd be feasable to clean the discs up enough to make it worth collecting. It also used the waste for something.

Just food for thought.
Bs.

 

[Geo]

the problem that occurs is everything dissolves in AP. i want to find the correct voltage at the right amperage to selectively remove each metal in turn. i know it will be difficult if not impossible with what i have to work with.i tried the aluminum and it dropped everything. i was thinking it would just be contaminated copper at the most. so i melted a sample and took it to the scrapyard. the melt turned out to be red-yellow. it listed in this order, copper, tin, nickel and trace amounts of lead and other unknown or un-calibrated metals. they said they would pay me red brass prices for a hundred pounds at a time. at first i thought it was a good deal. but it made me feel that i would be ripping myself off. it may be only a couple of hundred dollars a year difference or a couple of thousand depending on scrap flow. this year was a good year and next year may be better. i have thousands of pounds of boards and for right now its not costing me anything just sitting there but its also quite a bit of money tied up in it. i would love to find the right combination to get clean sell-able copper from them.

 

[ericrm]

the problem that occurs is everything dissolves in AP. i want to find the correct voltage at the right amperage to selectively remove each metal in turn. i know it will be difficult if not impossible with what i have to work with.i tried the aluminum and it dropped everything. i was thinking it would just be contaminated copper at the most. so i melted a sample and took it to the scrapyard. the melt turned out to be red-yellow. it listed in this order, copper, tin, nickel and trace amounts of lead and other unknown or un-calibrated metals. they said they would pay me red brass prices for a hundred pounds at a time. at first i thought it was a good deal. but it made me feel that i would be ripping myself off. it may be only a couple of hundred dollars a year difference or a couple of thousand depending on scrap flow. this year was a good year and next year may be better. i have thousands of pounds of boards and for right now its not costing me anything just sitting there but its also quite a bit of money tied up in it. i would love to find the right combination to get clean sell-able copper from them.

simple just sell it with the rest of your copper 2 ....
you can selectively drop your copper with lead ,than tin, that way you recover the tin too (9$lbs)
but geo what you want to do will probably cause more probleme thant solution as your copper under the solder mak will not dissolve very far under that same solder mask... (you can test it with gold plated memory bar ,the copper is etching aroud the tiny hole about 1/8 of an inch than stop)

 

[Geo]

i have no problem incinerating boards. i have a regulation burn pit. im not suppose to burn plastic but if you pile dry brush on top of it, it burns the smoke. it acts kind of like an after burner. i can spread out a piece of roofing tin and pile up a few hundred pounds at a time and cover it in brush and fire it up.theres never any black smoke like you would imagine. simple to scoop up everything and rinse out the wood ash and run everything left in AP.heck, i may even get some gold back out of it.

 

[rparks3rd]

Cut off or un-solder IC chip packages, gold plated pins from connectors and slots, monolithic capacitors, resistors and forget about the rest. Nothing in there for you. Big boys can recover copper and aluminium but that is why they are called big boys. We cant do it, unless you want to spend couple times more than you gain from it.

CHIP PACKAGES???? Explain please...

 

[Buzz]

An example of one of many types of chip packages, as found on most motherboards and some of the plugin cards.

 

[resabed01]

i have no problem incinerating boards. i have a regulation burn pit. im not suppose to burn plastic but if you pile dry brush on top of it, it burns the smoke. it acts kind of like an after burner. i can spread out a piece of roofing tin and pile up a few hundred pounds at a time and cover it in brush and fire it up.theres never any black smoke like you would imagine. simple to scoop up everything and rinse out the wood ash and run everything left in AP.heck, i may even get some gold back out of it.

I have several hundred pounds of boards here I'm processing and I'm interested in what to do with the cleaned boards after. I'm cleaning them of all parts with a air chisel. It leaves the copper and solder mask intact.
Other than throwing them away I don't know what to do with them. And looking at them I'm sure there is value in the bare board. Seems like every time I log in and read here I learn about something of value I've been tossing in the past.
I know there is copper on them but I'm not really interested in trying to reclaim that. I'm more interested in the silver and any possible leftover gold.

Geo, incinerating the boards seems to me a unnecessary step. Wouldn't there be copper, silver and maybe gold losses from doing this? And wouldn't AP work just as effective on a board that wasn't incinerated?

I was thinking of other ways to reclaim any values, I think I read here somebody used a belt sander to strip the boards down to the copper removing the solder and any gold plating that may be there. Might be more effective than trying to digest everything then sorting it out after. I also read here that motherboards have multi-layers of copper traces embedded into the fiberglass board and there was gold in there as well. Not sure why embedded copper traces would be plated with gold, can't see the reasoning why.

Keep us informed if anything comes out of your boards.

 

[patnor1011]

Buzz is correct, they are the most valuable however I do collect all of these as I know there is gold in them

:arrow: http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11827&start=160#p161629

 

[rparks3rd]

An example of one of many types of chip packages, as found on most motherboards and some of the plugin cards.

How do you process these aka extract the precious metals?

 

[patnor1011]

You have a lot of reading ahead of you 8)
For start try thread in my signature line.
:arrow: http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11827

 

[bobby1999]

Going to follow this thread .You are right some off us on here have access to alot of boards/Material even thou we are not to sure how to process everything ,I to would like to know ,I was selling off my boards and all other parts but now I am down to a clean board and will be keeping all parts for myself :lol: . I know people keep saying give it to the big boys , But why they are big because people like us are noy sure on how to do this ..
My thoughts only ........
If someone on this thread has a good idea would love to try and follow this thread ..
PS I have only started on stage one LOL
Burning of chips first :lol: :lol: :lol:
Was going to try the AP stage two of my plan
Then move to the pins and then stage three
But will take my time and make sure stage one is done properly before moving on ......

MY THOUGHTS ONLY

And thank you guys on here for all the reading

 

[NoIdea]

Evening all, i have for a very long time worked on the complete recovery of metal with value, basically most of them.

Geo: your on the right track, me thinkith. Some of the PM's are still in the boards, gold will defuse into the solder upon soldering, and if you chisle the components like i do, then some of the gold platted pins are left behind.

My current work involves reducing the metals contained within the boards, pyrolysis followed by grinding followed by ashing, washing in water, followed by placing in a shallow tray, moisten with left over AP an leave out to dry, keep moist with water or more old AP.

Over time the tray will start to get a thick mud develop, at this stage you wash with water, pour off the mud, continue three to four times, let the mud settle and decant. Put more AP into the tray and start the process over

With the mud dry it, ash it, wash with water settle and decant, while wet remove the magnetic fraction with a magnet, wash/boil with battery acid, each time let it settle after each wash and decant, now your ready for PM refining which ever way you want.

keep each water wash and evapourate, i leave it out in the sun to dry, i do the same with the battery acid wash though electrolysis is for later.

I want to do a "how i do ..." series with pictures as this process is what i plan to use for most of my e-waste waste.

Hope it helps

Deano

 

[Geo]

deano, i would love to see a "how to" from you. what ive done before is what i described above with a few hundred pounds of boards. i made sure the ash stayed on the roofing metal. i washed the ash out gently because some of the copper foils wanted to float.at the time, i wasnt worried about PM's thinking i had everything from the components. i melted everything together and came out with the same red-yellow metal i described before from from dropping copper from AP with aluminum. im thinking that the XRF readings from the sample i took to the scrapyard would have shown the PM values if it had been calibrated for them.from the boards i incinerated, there was almost 40 pounds of metal. if its a good mix of different types of boards, im thinking it should be about 400 pounds of metal from a US standard ton (2,000 pounds) of boards. if this is close to actual, then 2 tons may yield 800 pounds of mostly copper. i have over 2 tons of boards. just for the sake of dreaming, that may well be and ounce of gold in left over pins and maybe a pound or more in silver. i know it could be vastly less or even more but im not willing to send it to the landfill when it only cost me time and the benefit of clearing brush from my land.

 

[Smack]

Figure on real close to 120 to 140 pounds of copper per thousand pounds of PCB's, unless you have some special boards with an extraordinary amount of copper in them.

 

[Geo]

thats about right for PC boards and low grade brown boards. half of mine are military, though not all, but most have very little bare space thats not covered front and back. not only that but this stuff is multi layered.i incinerated boards that may have had like 15 layers is what it looked like. very thick and heavy with copper foils inside the board. ill get some samples and try to get a clear shot of the side.i know the scrapper or collector may not run across this type of material often. i live about 25 mile from redstone arsenal and marshal space flight center. theres alot of military and aeronautics scrap around and get some ever so often. thats why im seriously considering some kind of recovery.