hammerdown
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2019
- Messages
- 77
Hello all!
For the past 5-ish years, I've been fascinated by the HOBBY of "urban mining" and I have read a lot where & when I could and I've been stashing & sorting the various material as I get it from circuit boards. I didn't get into this for the delusions grandeurness of high profit or thinking of "getting rich quick"... like I said, just for the hobby and coolness factor of the aspect of mining for PMs from electronics... with intension of maybe "cashing-in" any recovered & refined PMs by retirement for extra Golden Years play money or to just leave to my children. To date, I have only been comfortable enough to use acetone to remove glue off PCBs, hot lye bath soft scrub for solder mask removal (works for me with no bad consequences despite some who claim it to be hazardous to the extreme) and mostly to run gold fingered material through HCL soaks and/or with a bubbler to aide, with just a smidgen of CuCl2 added to each batch to get the process started each time, and collecting foils (nearly 600ml worth of recovered foils in a beaker at present with more coming from batches still recovering and yet to run) afterwards to store for eventual AR or HCL/CL method to refine when I feel I'm ready to attempt. Yes, I have tried to read through Hoke's numerous times, but I get mind-numbed after a while since it seems more geared for dentists & jewelers for me to feel like I'm getting anything out of it, therefore I lose retention. So, hopefully I won't be dogged too harshly by my lack of chemistry knowledge when I post questions. And yes, I try and try to pan through the plethora of threads on here, which does at times help with whatever I am looking for at any given search, but not always clear & concise to my actual search inquiry... like what I'm about to ask about later.
That all being said, with my busy life of work, e-scrapping, family and other life-events, plus lack of proper ability for a separate secluded closed-in work shop with a fume hood and other proper ventilation (my current shop is where I work repairing computers and tear down scrap), I'm in a realization of that more than likely I won't proceed much further into this recovery & refining hobby than gold fingered material and clean cut-offs of other PCBs with just gold plating (if I suspect ENIG, I separate and have that stored separately since that'll create powders more so than foils from what I understand... which will lead into another question later of how to best process if I don't just sell as is), and will probably just sell off collected other sorted material I accumulate once or twice a year on eBay. I'm a bit turned off by tolling out given some horror stories I've come across over the past couple of years. At present, I have a decent bit of stashed up material (for what all I've been able to get as a part-timer at this)... 4 lbs of IDE pins, 4 lbs of MLCCs, ~5 lbs of RAM BGA chips, ~12 lbs of IC chips, ~4lbs of black top BGA chips, ~2 lbs EPROM chips, 3-5 lbs of mostly/fully gold plated various other metal material, ~3 lbs of somewhat gold plated various metal material, ~3 lbs CPU pins, ~3 lbs of fully gold plated various RF connector bits... to name some, plus much more of other types.
Another stash I have that I would like to process, rather than just sell as-is is... I have 8+ lbs of trimmed various fingers where there's still quite a bit of solder up to, or damn near close to, the gold (I didn't trim these myself) and it would be very difficult & manually time consuming to attempt to trim cleaner, and I'm wanting to go ahead and try to recover the foils from this material over the next few weeks before it gets too cold here (NC) if possible. My question for this post is this... what would be the best step to proceed with these? Diluted HCL bath for however long to remove the solder in hopes of no gold foils coming off?... if so, what dilution ratio and how much heat from a hotplate if heat is advised? HCL+bubbler soak aided by direct sunlight to the covered bucket and deal with the hodge podge mix of gold and tin/silver (plus whatever else may precipitate into the mix) in another step? Would a HCL/Cl method be viable with little-to-no complications? Or is there no real viable way without major headaches in the end?... aside from attempting the daunting task of trying to trim these one by one closer to the gold? By the way, my HCL is from Lowe's in the blue label (JASCO Muriatic Acid) with the MSDS indicating 31%-35% HCL concentration... the "safer" green label is <30% according to the MSDS, but I don't buy that flavor. I did purchase some nitric acid from The Science Company a couple of years ago in the hopes of soon (as of then) being ready to use it, but I have yet to attempt to try it... mostly in fear of my lack of a fume hood and still feeling very "green" (no pun intended) at this hobby beyond accumulating material, research when possible and recovering foils off of clean trimmed fingers & PCB pieces. I'm sure this is a easy "problem" for most of you who are more experienced, but with me, I'm just wanting to minimize any possible headaches by going properly... not necessarily the fastest or corner-cutting way, which in turn could cause me more headaches. Once done with these, and other fingered material I have to process, I intend on attempting to recover copper from all my spent CuCl2 buckets and hope that no other PMs are in the solution. And although I know that stannous chloride is pretty much a necessity in this hobby, making stannous hasn't been a friend to me after many attempts, and I have heard a lot that it isn't wise to try and buy pre-made stannous due to shelf life. Anyways, any helpful direction would be appreciated on how to run these fingers with solder on them that I have. The science behind how & why on steps/methods (and the whynots of some other steps/methods) is nice & interesting and possibly useful, but direct directions helps me a lot too.
Thanks.
If this question has actually been addressed in other threads, I so do apologize for I have not been able to locate them.
For the past 5-ish years, I've been fascinated by the HOBBY of "urban mining" and I have read a lot where & when I could and I've been stashing & sorting the various material as I get it from circuit boards. I didn't get into this for the delusions grandeurness of high profit or thinking of "getting rich quick"... like I said, just for the hobby and coolness factor of the aspect of mining for PMs from electronics... with intension of maybe "cashing-in" any recovered & refined PMs by retirement for extra Golden Years play money or to just leave to my children. To date, I have only been comfortable enough to use acetone to remove glue off PCBs, hot lye bath soft scrub for solder mask removal (works for me with no bad consequences despite some who claim it to be hazardous to the extreme) and mostly to run gold fingered material through HCL soaks and/or with a bubbler to aide, with just a smidgen of CuCl2 added to each batch to get the process started each time, and collecting foils (nearly 600ml worth of recovered foils in a beaker at present with more coming from batches still recovering and yet to run) afterwards to store for eventual AR or HCL/CL method to refine when I feel I'm ready to attempt. Yes, I have tried to read through Hoke's numerous times, but I get mind-numbed after a while since it seems more geared for dentists & jewelers for me to feel like I'm getting anything out of it, therefore I lose retention. So, hopefully I won't be dogged too harshly by my lack of chemistry knowledge when I post questions. And yes, I try and try to pan through the plethora of threads on here, which does at times help with whatever I am looking for at any given search, but not always clear & concise to my actual search inquiry... like what I'm about to ask about later.
That all being said, with my busy life of work, e-scrapping, family and other life-events, plus lack of proper ability for a separate secluded closed-in work shop with a fume hood and other proper ventilation (my current shop is where I work repairing computers and tear down scrap), I'm in a realization of that more than likely I won't proceed much further into this recovery & refining hobby than gold fingered material and clean cut-offs of other PCBs with just gold plating (if I suspect ENIG, I separate and have that stored separately since that'll create powders more so than foils from what I understand... which will lead into another question later of how to best process if I don't just sell as is), and will probably just sell off collected other sorted material I accumulate once or twice a year on eBay. I'm a bit turned off by tolling out given some horror stories I've come across over the past couple of years. At present, I have a decent bit of stashed up material (for what all I've been able to get as a part-timer at this)... 4 lbs of IDE pins, 4 lbs of MLCCs, ~5 lbs of RAM BGA chips, ~12 lbs of IC chips, ~4lbs of black top BGA chips, ~2 lbs EPROM chips, 3-5 lbs of mostly/fully gold plated various other metal material, ~3 lbs of somewhat gold plated various metal material, ~3 lbs CPU pins, ~3 lbs of fully gold plated various RF connector bits... to name some, plus much more of other types.
Another stash I have that I would like to process, rather than just sell as-is is... I have 8+ lbs of trimmed various fingers where there's still quite a bit of solder up to, or damn near close to, the gold (I didn't trim these myself) and it would be very difficult & manually time consuming to attempt to trim cleaner, and I'm wanting to go ahead and try to recover the foils from this material over the next few weeks before it gets too cold here (NC) if possible. My question for this post is this... what would be the best step to proceed with these? Diluted HCL bath for however long to remove the solder in hopes of no gold foils coming off?... if so, what dilution ratio and how much heat from a hotplate if heat is advised? HCL+bubbler soak aided by direct sunlight to the covered bucket and deal with the hodge podge mix of gold and tin/silver (plus whatever else may precipitate into the mix) in another step? Would a HCL/Cl method be viable with little-to-no complications? Or is there no real viable way without major headaches in the end?... aside from attempting the daunting task of trying to trim these one by one closer to the gold? By the way, my HCL is from Lowe's in the blue label (JASCO Muriatic Acid) with the MSDS indicating 31%-35% HCL concentration... the "safer" green label is <30% according to the MSDS, but I don't buy that flavor. I did purchase some nitric acid from The Science Company a couple of years ago in the hopes of soon (as of then) being ready to use it, but I have yet to attempt to try it... mostly in fear of my lack of a fume hood and still feeling very "green" (no pun intended) at this hobby beyond accumulating material, research when possible and recovering foils off of clean trimmed fingers & PCB pieces. I'm sure this is a easy "problem" for most of you who are more experienced, but with me, I'm just wanting to minimize any possible headaches by going properly... not necessarily the fastest or corner-cutting way, which in turn could cause me more headaches. Once done with these, and other fingered material I have to process, I intend on attempting to recover copper from all my spent CuCl2 buckets and hope that no other PMs are in the solution. And although I know that stannous chloride is pretty much a necessity in this hobby, making stannous hasn't been a friend to me after many attempts, and I have heard a lot that it isn't wise to try and buy pre-made stannous due to shelf life. Anyways, any helpful direction would be appreciated on how to run these fingers with solder on them that I have. The science behind how & why on steps/methods (and the whynots of some other steps/methods) is nice & interesting and possibly useful, but direct directions helps me a lot too.
Thanks.
If this question has actually been addressed in other threads, I so do apologize for I have not been able to locate them.
