Hi guys, my name is Bill and I'm a Gold-a-holic, I'm a geologist and my first job out of school was doing Nuclear Activation trace element analysis on geobotanical and rock samples for gold and pathfinder elements. My hobby is gold dredging, I have a 4 inch Keene w/ triple sluice and an old 4 inch that I built back in the 80s. Ive been prospecting and messing around with gold most of my life (I'm 51). We have placer gold here in Michigan and some of it is pretty good, most is rather low grade (concentration), but I've managed to find some nice stuff. I first began scrapping computers back in 1992 or there about (the first Gulf war was on), I used to go to UofM and trash pick all manner of advanced electronic junk, from old computers to experimental devices, I would get "mainframes" (thats what we called them). Those were nice, they were like a cabinet full of thin drawers, each drawer being a circut board loaded up with gold smothered microchips and eproms, pounds of em, and I sold them all for $35 a pound, I wish I had access to this forum then, all we had was cyanide (tech nic), and I felt AR was a waste of expensive acid (have you seen the price of lab grade nitric?), so I just scrapped stuff and sold the parts to a guy in LA. I did electrostrip the copper off of peeled gold fingers (edges of boards) and pins leaving foils behind that had an underplating of nickel which I stripped off using "the works" toilet bowl cleaner, it contains an oxide solvent which works on nickel (boiling). Any way I lost the gold fever for about ten years, opened a jewelry store (where I am now) and mostly cut and set stones (no I dont do that for the public, Ive got far too many of my own), now I'm kind of repeating things, got back into placer and underwater mining, then computers, only back then we didnt see too many 386 0r 486 they were too new, we had the 1970s stuff. I'm starting to ramble on too much, anyway, this is a great forum and I'm very pleased to be here.
