Processing pins for a newbie

[yetiface09]

Hello everyone. First time post here. I've been reading a ton and checked out Lazersteve's site + vids. Excellent work I must say. This forum seems like an invaluable source of knowledge and I'm glad to be a part of it. Here's my issue. I have 8.5 oz of plated pins from all sorts of motherboards, PCI/PCIe cards, procs, hard drive connectors (SATA/SAS/SCSI).. . you get the drift. I started them with nitric/water 50/50 bath and soaked them for 9 days... The solution turned green and probably exhausted all the acid out (saturated the solution?) according to my research with the search tool. So I decided to use the AP method. (Yes I know... wrong move I'm sure) I must say the solution reacted much faster (ie: turned green then black) within a minute of starting. So I let that soak for a few days. I agitated it a couple of times a day. I would notice the pins kind of solidifying at the bottom of the beaker so I carefully decanted a bit of the solution and added more hydrochloric. I left for the holiday weekend and came back to check on it. It's doing much better now but when can I expect this to be done? Seriously this is taking way longer than I expected and I know it has to be something I'm doing/not doing. I have a bubbler somewhere but if I go out into the garage to find it, my wife will have to send out a search party to find me. Needless to say my garage is a black hole. Would the bubbler help? Or am I just way off base? Thanks in advance.

 

[patnor1011]

Hello everyone. First time post here. I've been reading a ton and checked out Lazersteve's site + vids. Excellent work I must say. This forum seems like an invaluable source of knowledge and I'm glad to be a part of it. Here's my issue. I have 8.5 oz of plated pins from all sorts of motherboards, PCI/PCIe cards, procs, hard drive connectors (SATA/SAS/SCSI).. . you get the drift. I started them with nitric/water 50/50 bath and soaked them for 9 days... The solution turned green and probably exhausted all the acid out (saturated the solution?) according to my research with the search tool. So I decided to use the AP method. (Yes I know... wrong move I'm sure) I must say the solution reacted much faster (ie: turned green then black) within a minute of starting. So I let that soak for a few days. I agitated it a couple of times a day. I would notice the pins kind of solidifying at the bottom of the beaker so I carefully decanted a bit of the solution and added more hydrochloric. I left for the holiday weekend and came back to check on it. It's doing much better now but when can I expect this to be done? Seriously this is taking way longer than I expected and I know it has to be something I'm doing/not doing. I have a bubbler somewhere but if I go out into the garage to find it, my wife will have to send out a search party to find me. Needless to say my garage is a black hole. Would the bubbler help? Or am I just way off base? Thanks in advance.

All 8.5oz in what amount of Nitric?

Did you incinerate them red hot between Nitric and AP?

Pins in AP will take weeks/months and you will need considerable amounts of acid.

 

[yetiface09]

Hello everyone. First time post here. I've been reading a ton and checked out Lazersteve's site + vids. Excellent work I must say. This forum seems like an invaluable source of knowledge and I'm glad to be a part of it. Here's my issue. I have 8.5 oz of plated pins from all sorts of motherboards, PCI/PCIe cards, procs, hard drive connectors (SATA/SAS/SCSI).. . you get the drift. I started them with nitric/water 50/50 bath and soaked them for 9 days... The solution turned green and probably exhausted all the acid out (saturated the solution?) according to my research with the search tool. So I decided to use the AP method. (Yes I know... wrong move I'm sure) I must say the solution reacted much faster (ie: turned green then black) within a minute of starting. So I let that soak for a few days. I agitated it a couple of times a day. I would notice the pins kind of solidifying at the bottom of the beaker so I carefully decanted a bit of the solution and added more hydrochloric. I left for the holiday weekend and came back to check on it. It's doing much better now but when can I expect this to be done? Seriously this is taking way longer than I expected and I know it has to be something I'm doing/not doing. I have a bubbler somewhere but if I go out into the garage to find it, my wife will have to send out a search party to find me. Needless to say my garage is a black hole. Would the bubbler help? Or am I just way off base? Thanks in advance.

All 8.5oz in what amount of Nitric?

Did you incinerate them red hot between Nitric and AP?

Pins in AP will take weeks/months and you will need considerable amounts of acid.

That's not what I wanted to hear but it looks like I'm stuck with that option. I started with 400ml of nitric. No I did not incinerate them prior to switching methods.

 

[ovidiuanghel]

That's not what I wanted to hear but it looks like I'm stuck with that option. I started with 400ml of nitric. No I did not incinerate them prior to switching methods.

Way to small quantity of nitric for that amount of pins. You need to incinerate before going to AP because some of your gold may dissolve.

 

[yetiface09]

I weighed the solution prior to switching to AP. It weighed 7.5 oz at that time. I saved that solution. As of right now, the solution seems to have dissolved a great deal of the base metal and probably quite a bit of the gold due to the amount of H2O2 I have added periodically. I have also added a bit of HCl if it crusts up too badly or gets coated with copper or silver chloride. I can't tell which. When will I know it's time to move on to the next phase of HCl and bleach?

 

[patnor1011]

When you put them in AP residual nitric helped to dissolve some if not most of plating. That then redeposited again on pins as superfine powder. If you decanted without filtering some of your gold may be lost already.

I would like to point out that pins are not good source of gold and amount you process is very small. Generally do not expect more than 1/4-1/2% from mixed pins but I would stick with smaller estimate - 0.25% so you can get about half a gram from your pins if you will be lucky.

 

[yetiface09]

That's all bad news for me but very good info nonetheless. Thank you for that. I still would like to know what to look for before going on to the next step? In Lazersteve's video, he was processing gold fingers. Those are slightly different than pins in my opinion but I took what I could from those videos anyway. What I noticed was that in his batch, the base metal dissolved leaving behind a gold "foil". That's what I expected here and have seen similar results on youtube but obviously it's not what I'm seeing. Right now, most of the pins are completely gone (dissolved) in the solution. Do I need to wait until it is ALL gone? Or can I go ahead into the acid/clorox method? Thanks for the help.

 

[patnor1011]

They are very different type of material.
While AP is proper choice for fingers it is poor choice for pins. Yes you will need to wait till everything is dissolved. As I said you can expect about half a gram of gold at max in there so if you will see about half a gram of powder on bottom you are good to go to go ahead. That will take couple more of liters of HCl, and couple more days/weeks - do not add more peroxide.
I always recommend sulfuric cell for mixed computer pins.

 

[yetiface09]

So I finally got it all dissolved! I ran it through a HCl/Clorox mix, filtered, and dropped the gold with SMB solution. The problem now lies in the fact that basically all the powder is trapped in my filter. So you were right when you said that I should only expect about .5 grams of gold. But how do I recover that now that it's trapped in the filter? I've read about incinerating the filters and processing the ash for the trace amounts of gold. That's a bummer man that I worked for weeks with no pretty shiny thing to show for it. But oh well, I learned a lot!

 

[TommyA]

You really should have done some final washes of the powder to get high purity and should never filter the powder. I am still a newbie but I think you might be satisfied with an impure button. You could rinse the powder to center of the filter then ball the powder at the bottom of the filter by twisting the filter around the gold. You should cut off excess of the filter and allow it to dry. I hope you have researched a bit about melting. My first button turned out to be 18 k before learning about the extra washes.

 

[chlaurite]

Wait - what??? In three weeks, you managed to dissolve 8.5oz of pins in HCL?

I want details. In three MONTHS, I have yet to completely dissolve 100g (~3oz) of pins, and I've used heat, peroxide, regular stirring, and a bubbler (WOW what a mess that made!).

It looks almost ready (perhaps another month), but you did it in a quarter the time? Curious...

 

[Geo]

ive been processing around a half pound of pins a day in AP for the last couple of weeks. i just dissolved the foils today. i have been using an oxygen concentrator ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_concentrator ) with diluted AP solution. i started one morning with a half pound. the next morning, almost all the base metal was dissolved with beautiful foils swirling around. i filtered the solution leaving the heavy, undissolved pins in the bottom and added another half pound. i repeated it the next morning and so on adding a little hcl along. i was careful not to add any phosphor bronze pins into the solution. i did have around four ounces of large, gold plated lug type connectors that just would not dissolve. i removed these and ran them in AR. the gold went into solution but the base metal remained unchanged. turns out that they were silver. if you can source one of these machines, they are the cats meow when doing AP.

 

[yetiface09]

You really should have done some final washes of the powder to get high purity and should never filter the powder. I am still a newbie but I think you might be satisfied with an impure button. You could rinse the powder to center of the filter then ball the powder at the bottom of the filter by twisting the filter around the gold. You should cut off excess of the filter and allow it to dry. I hope you have researched a bit about melting. My first button turned out to be 18 k before learning about the extra washes.

I have read about the washes in a few of Harold's posts. Basically boil, boil, boil, and then when that's done, boil some more! Just kidding. I understand the importance of this and it is evident in the purity that Harold achieves. I'll try rinsing in the filter to get that little bit of gold out.

On that note, I'm supposed to simply decant as much as possible of the excess water/acid and dry the powder right?

 

[yetiface09]

Wait - what??? In three weeks, you managed to dissolve 8.5oz of pins in HCL?

I want details. In three MONTHS, I have yet to completely dissolve 100g (~3oz) of pins, and I've used heat, peroxide, regular stirring, and a bubbler (WOW what a mess that made!).

It looks almost ready (perhaps another month), but you did it in a quarter the time? Curious...

Yeah I totally hosed this process up. Typical noob mistakes. The name of the game is patience and diligence. I ended up decanting the solution that I had been using and then adding 2:1 acid/peroxide AND my air bubbler. That made a huge difference. I'm no chemist by any means. As a matter of fact, I dropped out of chemistry. (BTW this is way more fun and interesting that Chem class) The trick is adding Oxygen as Geo mentioned. Correct me if I'm wrong here guys but the way I see it, H2O2 adds a little O2, Bubbler adds more, and Geo's technique adds a butt load. But won't that dissolve gold? I read that over using H2O2 will cause some Gold to dissolve. Will this do that as well?

 

[Geo]

if it were just hcl, it may dissolve some gold but i always start out with copper chloride from previous processes. too, as long as there is base metal remaining there shouldn't be any dissolved gold. one of our chemist would have to explain the process but i can tell you why. higher reactive metal will dissolve first even if the base metal is hard to get to (as in gold plated pins). if base metal is present, gold does not dissolve easily. this is why the dissolution of CPU's in AR fails. the gold will only go into and stay in solution once all the base metal is dissolved.

 

[solar_plasma]

Geo

ive been processing around a half pound of pins a day in AP for the last couple of weeks. i just dissolved the foils today. i have been using an oxygen concentrator ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_concentrator ) with diluted AP solution. i started one morning with a half pound. the next morning, almost all the base metal was dissolved with beautiful foils swirling around. i filtered the solution leaving the heavy, undissolved pins in the bottom and added another half pound. i repeated it the next morning and so on adding a little hcl along. i was careful not to add any phosphor bronze pins into the solution. i did have around four ounces of large, gold plated lug type connectors that just would not dissolve. i removed these and ran them in AR. the gold went into solution but the base metal remained unchanged. turns out that they were silver. if you can source one of these machines, they are the cats meow when doing AP.

Thanks for sharing this ingenious gold nugget of information. Do you just let it bubble into the solution through a glaspipe or do you use some type of diffusor?

 

[Geo]

actually, im using a standard piece of medical tubing that has the large fittings on the ends. i cut the fitting off one end. i located a small pcb that had already been through AP and was just bare board, i then drilled a hole the same size as the tubing. i then passed the tubing through the hole and placed a small bubble stone for a fish tank i bought at walmart on the tubing. then i pulled the tubing back through the hold until the stone is against the board. this works as a clamp of sorts and as an anchor to hold the stone on the bottom without contaminating the solution. the stone has held up without deteriorating (its the small blue stone). i did notice some type of crusty build up accumulating on the stone after a couple of days. after rinsing, i used a stainless steel wire brush to brush it off. rinsed it with water and placed it back in the bucket. i have the machine set on 4 LPM. as stated in another post, i received two of these machines in scrap and lucky for me, one of them worked fine.