80 Kilos of Gold Plated Pins  

I would be interested in seeing reverse electroplating using salt water rather than sulfuric acid. I have pounds of pins that I'm not sure how to process yet, and I would prefer to NOT deal with sulfuric acid, so if salt water works, I would be ecstatic! Looking forward to seeing the upcoming videos!!!

I'm definitely going to be watching, I am collecting gold components. I have circuit boards, plugs, chips and pins. I'm going to wait until I have a few pounds of each and then get the chemicals to process. I need to look back and see if you have a video on extracting gold from circuit boards. I have around 10 pounds of boards now. Take care and stay dry 😂😂😂. See you on the next video.

I would go with reverse gold electrolysis using salt water. Get a large SS pot, attach an electrode to the pot, the second electrode isolated from the pot, add all the pin directly into the pot, cover with salt water, turn on power supply, stir frequently to make sure pins are in electrical contact with the pot and each other. Gold will strip off the pins. Keep it up until all gold has been removed and turn off power supply. Now in solution you have gold, and traces of base metals (nickel, copper, solder?, steel). Pour off liquid, and process with HCL to get rid of base metals, then process for the gold. :) I like this process because during the recovery process, no hazardous chemicals are used.

I have been just using ap solutions for pins and such. Stir it up, filter loose foils. Then a few times, I let some corrosive salts form and soak it again the next day. I tested on a few lbs of the "barely plated" pins from ribbon connectors, and the foils are all off before the coppers all gone. Seems alot easier for my "too many things going on" approach. 😂 I don't use a bubbler for ap solutions though, once it turns to a "hockey puck" I just drain most, add water, then alittle more hcl. This breaks up the concreting that happens as the ap solution becomes saturated. Seems most cost-effective while allowing other projects to be worked on simultaneously.

Mike, if you choose reverse-electroplating on some of the pins, I wonder whether you could use a basket plating set-up to keep the pins tumbling around while being stripped? When I started my career at a military aircraft overhaul facility, the Plating Shop still had a Cad-plating line that used a rotating basket for cad-plating large quantities of nuts, bolts, screws, washers, etc., that were used (I guess) in the radial engine (R-1820-something -- I don't know which variant) that we were still overhauling at the time. The basket was set-up like a drum spinning horizontally around its long axis. It was made of plates of a plastic that easily withstood all of the chemicals in the cad-plating line. If I remember correctly, an electric motor above the basket away from the chemicals drove the basket with a chain similar to what a bicycle or motorcycle use, but it must have been made of stainless or similar to avoid having to replace it due to corrosion. I think the basket had a large plastic sprocket attached to its end. Of course, a basket might not be a good idea if the perforations in the basket allow the pins to slip out of the basket? Just an idea....

jeje I bet most of us have OCD issues. I find it relaxing to process the e-waste I have :)

Looking forward to the future videos. I love watching the e-waste videos.

Johnny and I are a lot a like. Hope his scrapping is not a way of hiding from his wife as mine is. But it's effective she hates coming to the scrap shed

Id rather salvage the tin than the copper from boards like that. This has the making of very interesting vids

Those plastic oscilators i found in a new old stock batch. About 200g of thin ones and 170g of the larger. I was thinking they were octocouplers... but after i found the thin ones that looked similar i put them in baggies and left them with the onsorted new old stock. Got some gold rimmed ones too even some still in the roll

I have a good amount of those contacts too(old telecom boards) and can’t wait to see what you do with them. Thank you for sharing your knowledge

I would melt about a Kilo of those gold pins into an ingot and put the ingot into a electro-lytic copper cell. Use used Copper nitrate as the electrolyte and hook it up with about 3-4 volts at 4 amps. that way you would recover 100% of the copper and you will have the gold in a form which is very easy to process, essentially a gold sludge or slime. It only uses a bit of electricity to do, it would run about a week, but it's fun to watch the copper crystals grow. I don't have the ECO gold-x, so This would be the safest option. No Sulfuric acid to worry about and recycling of old copper nitrate is also a plus. I've tried using copper sulfate crystals and Distilled water, but I find the copper concentrate decreases over a short period of time and you have to keep replenishing the solution with new crystals to keep the concentration up. I always have extra copper nitrate laying around. Better to use it this way than to dump it into my iron bucket.

Definitely worth looking at electrowinning, or straight into cu2cl.

I would personally go with the sulphuric stripping cell. Eco goldex doesn't really hold a great deal of gold per litre of solution, you would end up with gallons of waste.

Can't wait to see the revovery - it's very interesting. Keep the videos coming 👌🌟 Done some research based of 1 yield for pins like this and for 4.8kg of pins they managed to get a yield of 3.1g. To get an estimate for how much gold you would get I done bit of maths- ratio. Yield of gold in g : per scrap pins in g To get an accurate answer I converted everything to g. 4.8kg = 4800g 3.1 : 4800 To get the amount of gold yield for 1kg aka 1000g 3.1 : 4800 4800÷4.8 = 1000 3.1÷4.8= 0.64 Meaning for every 1kg of pins, you get 0.64g of gold (possibly these might be higher or lower quality so it may vary) So with the 80kg 0.64x80=51.2g 51.2g of gold with a gold price of $79 as of today: 51.2 x 79 = $4044.80 $4k is very, very good, I hope he gets at least this much if he processed all 80kg of pins

There is silver in magnetic mlccs but little by way of palladium as far as I know

Love your refining videos Mike !

Shipping 80 kilo to the US will be expensive, shipping and probably duties. Better find someone in the EU. I would go for the sulfuric cell, beside the magnetic pins U can sell the copper pins as scrap. Dissolving them costs a lot of acid and no returns on the copper.

Can anyone pop round brother I can visit project shop fl sure Derek would not mind lol. Omg 80kg I thought 20 kilo of gold baring components was a lot. You may need to make a nitric scrubber refining that lot brother. Easy to make worth the effort. Catch up with you in the next episode brother stay safe

I usually do reverse electroplating for pins. But it is difficult to do large batches without equipment. I have read that if you run it at 3 volts then you will get fairly pure gold. I was going to change from 12 to 3 volts this year, But instead, I just threw all the pins and in a 5 gal bucket and dumped in some HCL. After 2 days, I removed acid and now am letting the pins corrode. Next, I will reintroduce the acid and add a couple handfuls of KN03. The point is not to dissolve the pins but to deplate them. Then, I will Filter the acid and remove the scum left on the bottom of the bucket and process that.

Definitely I would do a sulphuric stripping cell for those gold plated pins!!!!

it looks like you have enough of a sample to test a few methods... inquartation, pulverizing, etc

would a copper cell be an effective option??? could save a lot of acid.

On reverse electroplating I wondered what the electrochemical potential if the various metals is , as if it's different you could theoretically remove only the base metals leaving the value or vice versa by using very precise voltage control , the raw metallic pile of pins make it easier , agitation or rolling could help remove stratification

Also Mike regarding the MLCCs I have a Xrf I can test a sample of MLCCs and send you the xrf results

Hi Mike, Johnny reminds me - of me! Take everything apart and save it! I've done the reverse electroplating - it's time consuming but it works! 80 kilos....holy gold bricks batman! :) Thumbs up! Stay dry! Jim

It look like a pogo pins, submerge them in HCL would work to remove the tin because im sure it had little amount of tin, then doing 30% nitric acid boil to remove the base metal. Btw can you tell your friend Jhonny to send it to me in Indonesia because we can get concentrated acid for cheap in here, so it would not be a problem. Btw he wiuld get 8kg of gold from those material but this is the worst skenario, if he had a old stuff i bet he got more. Im also currious why you recovery gold from electronic scrap im the US because you actually can get a scrap jewelry for 1 dollar a gram or more i think from the property sell or some kind of like that, i love US because the people didn't know the value of the gold, they believe paper dollar and forget gold. You could make a lot of fortune by that.

I know this goes against everything that we believe in, but he would honestly make more money selling the pins on Ebay.

Small suggestion.Lets see the finish of your previous vids.

This is really nice pins. I think I know where it comes from. My assay is 4 grams a kilo or a bit more, at least for the Ericsson switch backplane.

Wow! I wish I accidentally found 80 kgs of gold pins in my coat pocket......

How about cupel the copper away in a furnace

Hi Mike have you used hydrazine hydrate to reduce PGMs and silver chloride

Goldex for the pins

I wouldn't process the pins, id find somebody who wanted to or would do. Then u wiuld sell them at a discount and save my time for tim is the most precious commodity and um not wasting mine anymore than i have to...😁

electroplating plz 🙏

Never heard of green tantalum capacitors before! Now that's the interesting part for me 😊. Spelling mistake sorry guys 😅

Just be careful if he asks for "good faith" money on gold painted steel Just kidding, it would be an interesting video to see if there is any value in all of that.

Clickbait Samples from 80kg of pins.

A lot of talking

Talk is not practical