Ribbon Cable

[Never_Evil]

My appologies for misinterpretting, I thought you said one pair of mylars AND one keyboard. If we need to redo the math, double it to about 125 keyboards for one troy ounce. That sounds like even more of a waste of time and materials, unless you have other people do it.

single pair of keyboard mylars should produce approximately 1/2 gram of silver per keyboard

dennis[/quote]

 

[banjags]

BUMP...

This is quite interesting. Steve have you pursued this any further.
Would the newer keyboards still use silver? Say 2003 and up?

 

[Anonymous]

If you ran the mylars through a shredder you could pack them into a smaller container and dissolve quite a few at one time, without having to seperate the sheets.

Jim

 

[Gotrek]

Similar to the silver traces in the keyboards I routinely use a silver contact/trace repair pen which is nothing more then silver particles in a glue. It yields traces that look exactly like the keyboard pictures posted. I probably go through one or two a month. I'd imagine you could recover the silver from the caked innards of the pen.

I throw them out but it looks like I'll keep them for one of you guys...

 

[Anonymous]

Hey guys..new to this forum and have already found a lot of useful information. My father owns a recycling bussiness and I can recall one of the customers saying that he used to burn the mylar sheet into an ash. After all the mylar sheets were burnt he would place the ash in a large crucible and heat them for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes the silver would pool in the bottom of the crucible and the slag would stay at the top. I would assume that burning the mylar sheets would not be to safe though. Maybe someone could give this a try.

 

[ThePierCer]

I got a load of 300 keyboards the other day. I dismantled them all and now have a very nice pile of sheets. I'm thinking about using a shallow glass baking pan as a nitric bath to remove all the silver. Thena second one as a clean water bath.

Has anyone had any more progress with these?

 

[ThePierCer]

anyone know about the content of the IDE ribbon cables? Is there anything worth while in them? I've seen prices of .30-.70 / lb at the scrap yards, but i wasn't fire if that was because of the copper content or if there was othere metals in there.

 

[Gotrek]

anyone know about the content of the IDE ribbon cables? Is there anything worth while in them? I've seen prices of .30-.70 / lb at the scrap yards, but i wasn't fire if that was because of the copper content or if there was othere metals in there.

As far as I know they don't have copper in them all the ones I've seen have aluminium wire

 

[Anonymous]

I just found this thread, and it excites me, as well I've been getting computers from small local schools and wasn't sure what to do with the keyboards besides us them as practice for the local annual keyboard toss competition.

Now I know that I can do more with them.

In fact just today we cracked a keyboard open to see what was inside and I brought the mylars home to toy around with.

 

[Rag and Bone]

The scrapyard where I cash in most of my base metals has recently dropped the price on ribbon cable (connectors removed) to $0.20 from ~$0.60, Anybody else experience this lately? They said that their buyer did a recovery test on ribbon cable and they might not accept it in the future.

 

[Anonymous]

I think that copper has gone down, I was getting between 2.80 and 3.20 a pound for it. The last time I went, I only got 2.10 and 2.40.

Jim

 

[flankdrive04]

Any further details on the whole Mylar thing? Would Acetone dissolve Mylar? maybe try some natural products? I know that Eucalyptus oil disolves alot of tings, but yet to try.

Would love to further this topic!

Cheers! :lol:

 

[Gotrek]

Ribbon cables are usually aluminum not copper. so .20 a lbs sounds fair. Maybe they thought it was copper and someone clued them in. Most PC wiring is aluminum and not copper.

 

[Rag and Bone]

It was passing as #2 insulated, then #3. Now its down to 20 cents, which is actaully fine because I can get more for it elswhere and I don't need to clip the connectors. I had the neighbor clipping the wires for me then we would split the money from the wire. He just finished two coffee bags full when the price shot down unexpectadly

 

[Anonymous]

Consult kitco base metals before selling your copper. http://www.kitcometals.com/

Copper June 16,11:08
Bid/Ask 3.7314 - 3.7359

 

[Gotrek]

And aluminum is about 1.30 right now. So 20 cents a lbs for ribbon cable is more then fair since it's aluminum

 

[agpodt77339]

Are you sure that they are aluminum and not tin plated copper? I once tested a silver colored wire from a computer (not IDE though) by rubbing it on my testing stone. It made a copper colored streak.

 

[Rag and Bone]

I doubt it's aluminum. I cashed in #2 insulated last week that was silver colored. They threw it all in together with the copper colored stuff.

 

[istari9]

I bundle all mine with the copper wire and get #1 common for it. If its wire they buy it no questions except my drivers lic. To make sure its not stolen.

Ray

 

[Rag and Bone]

Dang, Ray. How do you get away with that? If thats the case I might need to run a truck down to K.C.