Today's pickup-- The motherload!!

[silversaddle1]

The last three days have been very busy for us as we are in the process of removing over 200 rack mounted servers from a data center. Not only are there servers, but a lot of switch gear too. So on the way home from the job, we get a call from another customer that wants a store room cleaned out. Well we always like those jobs, it's more like a treasure hunt! Sure enough, BONANZA!!! 1000's of cards, boards, wire wrapped pin boards, memory, parts, etc.
Most of this stuff is mid 70's vintage! Except the servers/switchgear, ect!

Photos attached, enjoy.

Also a pic of the first batch of servers/switches.

 

[silversaddle1]

#2

 

[silversaddle1]

#3

 

[silversaddle1]

#4

 

[silversaddle1]

#5 All these boards are date stamped 1975, 76, or 77.

 

[silversaddle1]

#6

A backplane that I pulled the plastic off of.

 

[silversaddle1]

#7

 

[silversaddle1]

Last one

 

[lazersteve]

Very nice score!

Steve

 

[silversaddle1]

Thanks Steve!

I do have a question for you.

The wire on the pin boards looks to be silver plated copper. How would you refine the gold from these boards with all the wire and silver there?

 

[lazersteve]

That's a tough one. The wire is coated with Teflon or some other plastic usually that is resistant to acid. It's best to melt or burn it off with the proper setup.

Secondly, the silver plating is so thin it doesn't warrant the use of expensive nitric to recover.

The best answer I can come up with is to use the stripped wire to inquart karat gold and recover the silver that way. Another solution may be to melt the wire together and use the resulting copper/silver alloy bar to cement silver from nitrate solutions. The copper would cement the silver as normal from the solution and the silver in the alloy would join the cemented silver in the bottom of the beaker.

Steve

 

[gold4mike]

Congratulations on a very nice score!

I'm jealous :mrgreen:

 

[Anonymous]

Hopefully you got to double dip and got paid to hull the stuff away :lol:

jim

 

[Irons]

That's a tough one. The wire is coated with Teflon or some other plastic usually that is resistant to acid. It's best to melt or burn it off with the proper setup.

Secondly, the silver plating is so thin it doesn't warrant the use of expensive nitric to recover.

The best answer I can come up with is to use the stripped wire to inquart karat gold and recover the silver that way. Another solution may be to melt the wire together and use the resulting copper/silver alloy bar to cement silver from nitrate solutions. The copper would cement the silver as normal from the solution and the silver in the alloy would join the cemented silver in the bottom of the beaker.

Steve

Like Steve said, the wire-wrap 30 guage wire insulation is usually KYNAR (PolyvinylFluoride) or TEFZEL a DuPont Fluorpolymer.

Be careful not to breath the fumes when trying to incinerate. It's a pain in the butt.

 

[ander]

I would not incinerate any fluoropolymer, it's extreamally hazardous to just anyone in 100 yards radius. I processed 200g of very nice looking wires from polish computer, It wass supposed to be milspec grade. It seemed all silver, I incinerated insulation- some kind of polyolefin, then I dissolved in acid and processed as usual. So after all I got so tiny amount of silver that I did not melt it- waste of time and money.

 

[rfd298]

That is a beautiful score! Have fun with it.

 

[silversaddle1]

I've noticed that the pin boards have push in type IC's. It looks like the legs are silver plated. Anyone seen them like that before? Also, if you crack one of the older Texas Insturments IC open, there is gold in them.

I know, I know, Pics, but the camera batteries are recharging!

 

[leavemealone]

Those are just incredible bud.I'm happy to see you got an excellent load.If you want to sell any let us know :mrgreen: <---green with envy
Johnny

 

[silversaddle1]

Those are just incredible bud.I'm happy to see you got an excellent load.If you want to sell any let us know :mrgreen: <---green with envy
Johnny

Well it's all for sale!

As some of you know, I do not refine anything myself. I do not have any time to start a new hobby

We are going to have goldsilverpro assay some batches of the pins to see just what is here.

All those cards in the boxes have finger edges on them. The plating is thick enough that you can feel it with a fingernail going along the trace onto the gold plating.

We went back today to get more of the stuff, but it was mostly motors, power supplies, etc. While talking to the guy who used to run this department he told me that this equipment was used to read the old paper credit card recipts back in the day. It could read 1200 slips per minute and they had three of these machines running a day. He said the machines were so well built and so very expensive when new that even though newer, smaller versions became avaliable, they still kept these. They are built to milspec standards he claimed. As he was cleaning out his file cabinet he was showing records of purchase for some of the larger boards. $20,000.00 each back in the late 70's! Holy cow!!!

I think I saw a tear in his eye as we hauled the last of it out today. You could really tell this old guy loved that equipment.

 

[leavemealone]

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