You Sir are the Bob Ross of precious metals refining. I will never try the hobby, but I love watching a masterpiece's creation process. Great video, Thanks for sharing!
Well.. called that on the fine gold suspended in solution on the last video. 😅 If you’re precipitating gold from a very dirty solution, you really should use a fine filter to grab all of the precipitated gold, rinse it well and head right back to AR for a second refine. That gold will settle out of solution for days/weeks. Second thing, the reason why you don’t want to leave the fiberboard in for AR isn’t so much that it’s porous (it is) but that many boards have a copper layer sandwiched between the layers and chances are the acid won’t get all of it. What happens then is that the gold can cement out of solution onto that copper. Based on the color of the AR, there was plenty of base metal still in the fiberboard. Happy to see you using ferrous sulfate! I got into refining and learned how thanks to you and your videos, just melted up a 50 gram button from fingers and none of it would have been possible had I not stubbled across your channel a few years ago. Thank you for sharing!
Something that might be of interest to you. You can take a 3 gallon bucket and drill small holes all over the bottom and about 4-6” up the side to make a sieve. Put all your boards in this bucket. Then fill a 5 gallon bucket deep enough to cover the sieve holes in the 3 gallon bucket. Then repeatedly dunk and swish the 3 gallon bucket in the 5 gallon outer bucket. The gold foils will pass through the sieve holes and collect in the outer bucket. You might have to drain and filter the outer bucket a couple of times to collect the foils, but you can use the same water over and over. Don’t make the sieve holes too big or the foils will be able to pass back in as easily as they passed out. 😊
I've done this several years ago. It works great doing large batches of fingers. I purchased two Halloween trick or treat buckets from Walmart, drilled hundreds of 1/8" holes in one bucket. and went to town on it. Only used it about 5 times though, as large batches of fingers are hard to find these days, I normally just rinse out as many fingers as I can from the solution using Water and the dump the fingers into a shallow bowl filled with water and pick out the boards one at a time with tweezers and inspect them. Any sticking gold gets sprayed off and then tossed out. Pretty much guarantees no gold gets left behind.
I’ve tried adding aquaregia strait to the foils with boards after the nitric bath and found that indeed there was quite a bit of gold bearing ions that got absorbed into the wafer bards. Although it’s a pain in the ass, it is worth separating the board pieces before you hit it with the aquaregia for optimal outcome
What ever you do dont throw away those board pieces! Grind them up in a coffee grinder after they dry and run another couple hot hydrochloric rinses and press the liquid out under high pressure and you’ll find that there is indeed gold that was trapped in the boards
Now thats what i love most when whole batch is tackled..... Past video portions were small so whatever dissatisfaction i had is turned into full satisfaction from this full batch video.... Loved it
Just got a job at a bullion exchange. The owner gave me a jar of 80s military electronics connectors . The assay ton shows great results. I think it was 14k plate heavy 3x
Re: What's gonna be in the waste solutions? Copper? Yes, and comparatively speaking, LOTS of it, since the traces that get gold-plated are pure (or close enough) copper. Iron? Not impossible, but *highly* unlikely - Iron doesn't get used in any significant amount on circuit boards unless they include custom mounting hardware. The "cans" that some components are packaged, or transformer or ferrite cores would change that, but since you're working with cut-off edge connectors that have no components or mounting hardware, I doubt there's even enough iron to be detected, never mind measured, in your waste solutions (before you add the ferrous sulfate in the precipitation step, of course - Obviously, that's going to put iron into the "final waste"). Nickel? Even less likely than iron, and for the same reason - There's absolutely no useful reason to put nickel into the construction of a circuit board. About the only way it's going to be present is as an accidental contaminant. Tin? Yep, definitely gonna be some of that if there's even a speck of solder on the boards. Lead? Somewhere between "possibly" and "quite likely", depending on exactly how old the boards are and whether they're supposed to be meeting the relatively recent "lead free" standards. ("normal" solder typically = 37%/63% Sn/Pb, "Lead-free" solder = Sn/Ag/Cu, usually in unpublished, proprietary proportions that vary from source to source, with Sn/Cu nearly always being the largest part of the mix) Assuming you've got "certified lead free" boards (Newer than about 2006, if memory serves), there MAY actually be a trace amount of silver. Sorry to nitpick, but your repeated mention of iron and nickel in the waste solution(s) kicked my autism into high gear. From this refining, I'd expect you're going to have mainly copper, a reasonable chance of a small amount of tin, possibly some lead, an outside chance of a tiny amount of silver, and perhaps trace amounts of titanium. (WHAT??? TItanium? Yep - sourced from titanium dioxide - the usual pigment in any white screen-printing that might be present on the parts of the boards you're working with) (BTW - I use the same sound for my phone alarm - Wakes ya right up, don't it? :) )
I will test the solution to see what’s in it. Copper in solution is blue. Iron in solution is yellow. Blue and yellow make green.
11 часов назад
I enjoy the work you do in the lab, good video work as well. I worked 47 years in a lab testing water. Only mishap I remember, a small droplet of acid made it past my safety glasses and melted my contact lens. The eyewash was close and no eye damage. AU just another element to me. I have melted a lot of lead to help my fishing addiction.
Senior: that blemish on the top looks almost like one of those mint mark/classification stamps you see on gold bullion. As always, you've put together an amazing presentation from start to finish!
Once you see a saturated solution like that, I’d recommend to decant, rinse, and put new water in and then add nitric. The acid has a harder and harder time working, thus slower reaction times and wasted costly nitric. Think of it like a big parking lot that’s empty at first with clean solution. The cars can all find parking spots easily as the majority are empty. As the solution gets full of base metals( parking spots filling up), less and less parking spots are available and the cars need to use more fuel and takes longer to find empty parking spots, thus slowing down reaction and requiring more nitric.
You are my mentor. I'm still working on getting nitric acid, because I'm not a company, but after several years of being a faithful follower, I do feel confident that I should be somewhat successful when I start.
Might be an idea after first separation and rinsing to pour the fingers into one if the ceramic dishes and remove those that are stripped already, then put everything else back into the beaker and give the solution more room to move, it''ll also reduce the weight a bit making it easier to handle. The main problem with recovery from circuit boards seems to be agitating them enough during the reaction as boiling doesn't seem to be as effective. You are a joy to watch though, I loved chemistry as a kid and this makes my inner scientist happy seeing these reactions.
My favorite part of these is Sreetips being 100% ready to show his mistakes. What if you used a baker’s cooling rack in a Pyrex casserole dish to spread out the fiberboard and let the gold flakes drop down. Maybe have some kid of vibration.
You'd get a nasty mass of glass fibers, a huge cloud of nasty black smoke, and a god-awful-hideous stench - Circuit boards since about the mid 70s are almost all a combination of fiberglass and phenolic resin. Incinerating them would be hideously nasty, and without a *MAJORLY HOT* fire, with LOTS of forced air or oxygen injection, the resulting smoke cloud would likely have the whole neighborhood calling the fire department.
A little less than midway through, i think the beaker of base-metal-dissolved could use some stirring, some physical agitation. In other finger-recovery videos I have seen, the last stubborn gold fingers needed at least a blast of dist water to come loose. I don't think a stirrer bar would work in there. Something like a lapidary tumbler, or something that would rotate the beaker at an inclined angle to tumble the boards. Except (hopefully) I don't think you'd need any added grit, just the boards rubbing on each other for an hour or two. I'm glad you did the straight-nitric dissolve first to isolate the gold. Good plan.
Those 10,000 ml beakers are almost 240.00 each. I think learning to blow borosilicate glass is more profitable Mr. and Mrs. Sreetips! Thanks for the video Sir
SMB could drop other metals, if present, and contaminate the gold. Ferrous sulfate precipitates all the gold and nothing but the gold. Ferrous sulfate is used when there are other metals in solution with the gold.
Been enjoying the finger videos. Question, how about burning the fingers first? Some charcoal and an air source, should be able to melt all the metals, and get rid of the boards.
Also not sure if you’ve ever considered it for a video idea and or money saver; 1: take all your nitric solutions from the waste bins after all pms are recovered and filter. 2: allow the filtrate to evaporate and condense into crystals. 3: take a batch of the copper nitrate crystals and put them into a round bottom flask connected to a condenser and with an addition apparatus, slowly heat and add sulphuric acid. 4: the condensate will be concentrated nitric acid to use on future projects to save costs on low yielding materials, as well as easily recovering the copper sulphate waste and converting to copper metal.
I would love to see Aquaregia strait to the foils with boards and see how it works out...for shts and giggles.. Happy 4th from your biggest fan to the North (our holiday was a few days ago) Cheers eh
You can wash off most gold foil from fiber boadr cuts by rinsing them in a large pan of water through a coarse mesh sieve (about 5 to 10 mesh per inch). Then, for control washing of the fiber boards, you will need a solution of aqua regia of a much lower concentration. And the foils washed in the pan can be collected in the same filter for rinsing water.
Yes that's probably what's going on. Boiling down the solution to expel any last nitrate ions may force the solution to become fully saturated or slightly supersaturated when boiling depending on all sorts of variables, not limited to concentration, pressure and temperature. When the solution cools the change in enthalpy of the system may force some atomic Au to crash out, which in turn encourages the formation of microscopic crystals. That's the theory of thermodynamics anyway, but in practise it could be something else, but it''s a very good guess.
@@AndyGraceMedia oh nice! glad you think the same. I wasn't sure how all that worked, I just figured a solution can only hold so much solute, and it can hold a lot more when hot. So if you start cooling it down if it's at/near that max occupancy, it's gotta go somewhere right? :-P
@@sreetips Yeah did some rough calculations and looked up the molar concentration of gold chloride per mL of acid but it all hurt my brain too much. Think it's an order of magnitude too dilute.
Do u think maybe the reason some gold fell out of solution during filtering because of the production of some ferrous sulphate from iron contamination and sulphuric acid maybe ?
I use this stuff to treat leftover acid from Karat refining. Coat the surface with acid, and leave it exposed to Air. In about a week it all flakes off. It can be rinsed with acid in between. It is better to coat the surface with acid, and let Air get to it, than to leave it submerged in acid.
I'm curious. Is there a reason you get rid of all except some traces of nitric acid before dissolving the gold? Does the chemistry have to be really precise?
Hiya professor Tips hope you and yours are well and another great film boss but I notice or didn't see you use sulfuric acid for lead removal is that because of the sulphate? And how you get on with the heat blocks for electric furnace I'm totally hooked on theses films very very good keep it up please
I'd like to see some consumer electronic scrap run through a ball mill until it's all a fine powder and then add hno3 until all base metals are dissolved then let that percolate out via iron. You can try to get gold from the scrap if you think it's worth it. Im mainly considering the copper from within multi layer boards and inside ics
Great video as always. I use the Karter beakers at home here, but where do you buy those cool convex/concave? beaker cover glasses? I bought a set from Amazon but the heat of just boiling water shattered them. Thx!
Maybe a dumb question, but is the iron in solution at all magnetic? I don't have any to play with here. And another dumb question (maybe) - can you electrolitize the copper, maybe mag the irons, (and maybe other sh*t) before you go for the yummies?
In the batch were you used pure aqua regia on everything, couldn't you possibly start the recovery method the same way you treat your waste but in a smaller scale? Like use copper to precipitate out the silver, then iron for the copper, then try for the gold (If I'm remembering those steps correctly)? If it's all the extra ions interfering with the precipitation then couldn't you remove them first before going after the gold? Obviously the method in this video is the better one but just to make sure you have all the gold out of the other solution. You could run a small experiment to see if this theory is correct by redissolving the gold in that smaller beaker then try removing the other base metals then use SMB and see if the gold comes out much easier. If you already know the answer tho I would love to know myself because if it's not too bad this method could be a very slow but a automatic process and for future refining's could be used to make sure you have all the gold if you think there is too many ions interfering. I know you basically already do this with the waste treatment stockpots lol but would be neat to see if it would work in a smaller scale if you didn't wanna wait till it came time to recover from the stockpot and would only be worth it if you knew there was a good bit of gold still in solution for these special cases such as this.
@@sreetips Would all the gold cement out? Because if so then you could remove the gold and silver powder mix and then it would function like if you mixed silver and gold and use acid to melt only the sliver powder. If not all the gold then maybe enough ions will be removed for the remaining gold to be taken out with SMB? Edit: Sorry ment silver not copper lol, If putting copper in it will cement out the silver and gold then that makes it so much easier.
Gold is money. Gold is wealth. Paper dollars are a money substitute. If I immediately sold the recovered gold would I gain more paper dollars than I gave in trade for the fingers? No! I did convert the failing paper into highly valuable gold. But I should get back ten times what I paid. Which I will promptly convert into, you guessed it: GOLD!
Hello Kevin another awsome treatment of gold foils, I was wondering if it would be beneficial to treat the gold foils with hydrogen peroxide, instead of nitric acid. Also would it be easier to clean it up that way. Please don't think I am anyway trained, but it was purely out of curiosity and again thank you for another great video
Hello Professor, I thank you very much for all the valuable information you provide. I am one of your followers. I ask you to provide a detailed explanation of reffining the metal iridium. think you sir.
Have you thought of removing the fibreglass circuit board by using an alkali solution, then correcting the pH and then dissolving the gold from the other metals? It may increase you yield.
hi sreetips, great video. do you think the ferrous sulfate caused some of the problems of redissolving the gold. maybe different results than the SMB? I'm sure that question doesn't make any sense 🤪
that plastic stand for the nitric is sketchy af, i'd be nervous using that, a triangular gusset at the front to support the weight would make me a lot less nervous
I'd be curious what the cost breakdown is for all the recovery materials to get to 3 9s fine gold for these fingers. I hear conflicting stories that they arent worth the selling price in most cases, and cost in excess to recover.
That's why I do 2 hot works ( smelting / cupellation w/lead ) to get 99.5% of base metals and organics/ inorganics out of the gold (.9950 22-23kt ) before I inquart it with copper down to 10kt Rose gold. Then I do the wet work with AR , because it is the most expensive to do to get the gold final purity of 24kt. , I just chemical burn out the copper ( the red nitric vapor cloud ) then sulfuric acid out any lead that remains.
It depends on what you’re trying to do. If your goal is to immediately resell the gold for a “profit” then forget about it. I bought this scrap to make my videos because computer scrap is popular. I spent twenty four hundred on the scrap. I’ll get most of that back by selling the bits of gold that I recover. Or, I could add those to my savings. But I should make back ten times what I paid for the scrap from ad revenue from my RU-vid channel. Either way, you can’t go wrong by converting paper dollars, that are failing, into highly valuable GOLD.
Been meaning to ask... I notice you use Transchem HCl, and it's virtually clear. Do you happen to know what kinda junk is in cheap hardware store HCl that makes it yellowish? I assume you use a more expensive product because its more pure.
have I already written that such material needs to be processed with the Chinese reagent Jin Chan" half an hour and gold in solution, nothing but gold.the reagent can be purchased on market places
Cut open a Cereal box and make yourself a big funnel ( duct tape to size) easy pour into big container. Leave the hole on the bottom big enough so they don't pile up and tip over 😮
34:37 what’s the difference in appearance in the undissolved gold and the lead that might drop out from the sulphuric acid? Wouldn’t computer scrap have a little lead and silver from solder?
Quick question for ya. The plates on top of the beakers are they simply for preventing stuff from possibly getting into the solutions or catching liquid popping and flying out? 🤔
hi there, friend, as always, absolutely loved you vid do you by any chance have a think about doing an experiment on modern day mlcc to see if they still contain platinum group metals
Hi Sreetips - I had a few things I was wondering about that you can probably answer. First, at 21:01 - how were you sure that all the gold pins in the left side baker were all in aqua regia? It looked like a lot of nitrous oxide was still being produced. Next, at 25:03 - it it possible that you end up with some gold precipitates because the solution is very concentrated (saturated) before it cools down? It seems like that would happen naturally for any hot saturated solution as it cools - but I'm no chemist 😂 Lastly, I think you've answered this before, but does you time, effort, the costs of materials and the cost of the gold pins make this recovery financially viable or is this really only something you would do as a demonstration of the recovery process and yield? Thank you and outstanding video!!! The button was amazing looking! 👍
I wasn’t sure the pins were in Aqua Regia. I reasoned that any of the pins that weren’t in contact would get dissolved by the fumes - and they did. Gold dropping out due to over concentration can’t happen with that tiny amount of gold n solution.
Converting paper dollars to GOLD in any case is always a good idea. Gold is wealth. Paper dollars are a wealth substitute. Once you understand this then it will make sense. Holding stacks of paper that can be printed out of thin air “without limit” is insanity. Holding savings in gold, that can’t be printed, is a much better idea.
You said in an earlier video that the cement copper from the waste was basically trash. Is it worth refining/cleaning to use in to cement your silver on?
@@sreetips ROTFL!!! How fitting that SWMBO gets that tone! On mine, It's the ringtone/text message sound for my boss, and the "Hey, stupid! Something important needs doing!" timers/alarms on mine. :)
@@sreetips Similar - For me "The boss" I spoke of is 85 years old, has been through multiple heart surgeries, and is *NEARLY* frail enough to qualify as a full-blown invalid.