You are the world's leading authority on small scale refining and your dedication to educating in that area is beyond measure. Your willingness to demonstrate processes like this and prove that they aren't worth the trouble has likely prevented untold numbers of less than well informed individuals from rushing into action and hurting themselves or others or the environment. You deserve an award, I think one of the George H W Bush "Thousand Points Of Light" would be fitting, I wonder if there's any of those left?
It sure helped me. All these guys making videos collecting tons of computer pins think they'll are striking it rich, when its really just costing them more money than its worth. I had about the same amount of bars this guy had and here I'm thinking i struck it huge. I watched this and my stomach dropped. I'm just going to give them away now.
I came to see a video because I was thinking of buying some bars and found your wonderfully clear video. I am so very glad! Thank you! You preform a great service! Thank you also to Chris who donated the bars!
I would imagine that if they are able to process all those computer metals, they’d be able to process all the gold out before they send you an ingot of a gold colored alloy.
Your results are exactly what I expected. I feel bad for the people that are stacking these up thinking that they are getting a good deal on recoverable Gold...Ebay scammers suck.
@@woonsockettruthseeker9009 That is not what is happening. What the venders are saying these are (which, at least in this case, is clearly not what is happening) is that this is bars made of melted gold foil pins from e-waste. The people stacking up these bars know that they aren't pure gold, they are thinking they are like 1% gold that they will have to put a lot of time into extracting, but if they can spend $35 on 300 grams of this and get even a gram of gold (currently $65 per gram) it would be worth it. Only the scammers are stright up lying about what the bars are made of.
As long as there are dumb people, there will be scammers preying on them. Everywhere! This is just one of the more obvious examples. Apple users are the same, but they are so naive still thinking they were the ones getting the better end of it. ;)
Thank you both. These videos are worth more than the time it takes to watch them. So I watch some multiple times. You're the Micheal Jordan of RU-vid garage-lab refinery. I could watch gold turn to powder all day, Alchemist.
Thanks for this video brother. I almost bought some of these to test out my self. Sooooooo glad I didn’t. You are the man. 💪👍🏻keep up the great content, it’s very much appreciated
I got one, had it tested it came back "unknown, likely brass." I sent it back for a refund and reported my findings on the review. I lost $15, for potage and curiosity 8/.
Unfortunately, these bars are still being sold on Ebay almost 5 years later. I seen some on Ebay and thought to myself that something about them didn't seem right. Mainly the price. Glad your video is still up.
Dude! You are not just a metal refiner you are also a philanthropist! Because this information is that valuable. I really appreciate it! Thank you again.
You inspired me to start my own at-home, small scale refinery last winter. I spent hours and hours to get my first gram of gold from gold-filled jewelry, but then it got stuck in my melting dish due to an improper borax glazing or lack of heat. I'm excited to try again this winter and just wanted to say thank you for all your education videos. I've watched them for hours and hours to troubleshoot my process and learn what to do.
I think if you process them in a copper sulfate cell at 1-1.5 volts you will have a cheaper method of collecting the copper in those bars. Then the residue ( a bit of Cu, Zn, Ni, Fe, Pb) is easier to dissolve. You then can use H2SO4 or HCl to remove the remainder of the contaminates. Kind of electrowinning the pure copper that you can throw into your waste bucket. I have a Buck converter that takes 5 volts from my computer power supply and drops it to 1 volt. Works well. The big issue you had was brute forcing the dissolution of the major components with Nitric acid. Like you proved to us in the video where you added too much silver, the gold was very finely divided. Some may even passed through the filter paper. All in all an excellent demonstration. Thank you!
Solid snake oil, gotta give it to them sellers they are making money of scrap recovery by processing the precious metals themselves and selling the dregs to others ingenious (ofc its disingenuous).
You'll notice they're almost exclusively from 1srael, the same people have multiple accounts with feedback under 1k, and they all have 100% positive feedback scores. Do they have 100% happy customers? Is this more likely some kind of money laundering operation?
I have to admit I was excited with your ebay purchase and then it was a lunchbox let down. I can't put a price on the knowledge I'm gaining from watching your videos. Thank you so much for all the education. I am nowhere near ready to start refining but I'm gaining the knowledge to start. My biggest concern is safety and then it's finding the scrap at the cheapest possible price so that my only expense will be the overhead and the acids. Nitric is so expensive (in the range of $100 PER LITER). I need to find a cheaper source for acids. Thank you for taking the time to shows us all.
This is the reason why i study metal refining and recovery. I usually doubt those gold looking for sale to be gold. I never bought any gold yet aside from our wedding rings. instead of buying i started doing small scale processing to get real gold. I am learning from your videos Sir. Thank you! as always stay safe! 😊
Great video. Your whole video collection is excellent. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise! I wish I had watched this video before buying 250g of that stuff. It just disappeared completely in nitric acid (lots of acid and many hours). Beautiful blue solution with some white residue (titanium?). Looking at the low price and their free shipping to New Zealand, I didn't expect much gold. But I did hope to get a gram or two. After all, they call it "scrap gold bar for gold recovery". There were a few milligrams of gold particles mixed with that white residue. Very difficult to filter. I ran a fraction of the filtrate through a 0.45 micron filter. I though perhaps the gold is suspended in very fine particles. The filter turned slightly yellow, but it can't have been more than a few micrograms. There wasn't any silver either. They do have a disclaimer "it is not solid gold". But it certainly isn't fit "for gold recovery" either. Isn't that a scam?? You can only use it to impress or fool your friends.
The white residue is likely tin. These bars are probably melted plumbing fittings, and the plumbing solder contains tin. Tin reacts with nitric acid to produce a white sediment that is insoluble in nitric, water, nor pretty much anything else. The yellow on your filter was likely traces of iron that were in the fittings or ingot mold.
Judging by all the reactions and your findings you got a lot of Nordic Gold. 89% copper, 5% aluminium, 5% zinc, 1% tin. Has gold in the name as it was and still in use with Euro currency but is just a copper alloy mix that gives it the appearance of Gold
BigstackD has made a lot of Nordic Gold videos to where anyone can identify it. Plus, the way those bars rang out when clanked together said 'not gold'.
@@sreetips I was already suspicious about the scrap gold, some ppl do sell high yield scrap gold 80 percent yield or more bt I know not common. Obviously the ones on Ebay deserve more scrutiny.
I've been considering this for a while. So a quick search for videos brought me to yours. I figured there wasn't a LOT of gold in them, but I expected SOME. I'd be annoyed if I PAID for those bars, spent $20 on gas and $100 on Nitric Acid to melt a brass coated lump of iron. Thanks to you I'll steer clear of these! Cheers.
I think he used about $20 worth of nitric to dissolve the bars plus a lot of time! I checked those eBay "melt drop" listings sometime ago and passed. I purchased some silver grain listed as, "Sterling Silver" casting grain 8 years ago from an eBay seller. I processed it and it was not %92.5 silver. It was %80 silver.
ALWAYS be careful, this is why I approve of hallmarking. Not a publicity statement, but all my silver and gold are hallmarked 999 by the Edinburgh assay office
The reaction tells me those bars are aluminum bronze made from refiner waste by cementing out copper from acid with aluminum and then smelting. The small amount you found was because the copper aluminum mess was thrown in The crucible wet. Good work love your videos
I was just looking at these bars and contemplating buying a few then I decided to search for some videos on it. Saved me some money, frustration and chemicals. Thanks sreetips.
Bummer, I thought there was going to be a lot more then that in those bars. I remember you showing these bars in a previous video and I was so anxious for you to make this video. Oh well... thank you for doing this experiment, at least now we all know what to expect if we decide to buy these bars.
I don't understand the processes, so it's very helpful when you do the voiceover explanations in your video. It's also appreciated that you speed up some of the processes in order to keep the videos at a manageable length. Thanks for the vids and I hope that you pass 70K subs soon.
Hello Sreetips, very amusing clip, thanks for that.The best gold yield is from the ground,only elbow grease expended,and I am sure it's around 90% fine,regards George
All I know is I'm very thankful for guys like you to look out for the rest of us that are learning and developing our skills can't believe the capacity of some people nowadays and what they try to get away with thank you for your research and good looking out brother
I was thinking the same thing. Wonder if he had already judged that it probably had very little silver in it and it wouldn't be worth it. But damn, what a waste of HNO3! It's getting costly to come by nitric acid these days.
Sir you have no idea how thanful i am you made this video. I have about the same amount of gold bars you did but i have no idea how to perform the whole refining process. Now I know not to even bother, ill just hand them out to the kids to play treasure hunt games or something. You saved me a whole mess of time. Here I thought I had something big but nope.😂😂
cool very decent info tho too bad 500ml of nitric get wasted tho we all learn somethings thanks for your time you put into making those vids sir and have a good one👍👍👍😀👍👍👍
"What that tells me is...." ... I need to start selling gold recovered from computers... on ebay! There is a sucker born every minute! Glad you got that stuff for free!
@@sreetips Hmm. I just found this video in your past video playlists, the day AFTER I bought a $49 380gram bar from israel... Ah well, I'll be able to play around and have fun. What I REALLY started watching gold recovery for is crushed quartz hardrock and black sands pan concentrate chemical refining of gold. Theres gold in the streams around me, but not enough to pan well... I got distracted with all those pretty bars or carat scrap refinery and shiny beads of car cat platinum. Something to play with and practice on at least. I'll just have to dial it down from recovering a little gold to recovering copper :D
There was a tiny bit of gold that formed a light dusting on the bottom of the beaker the next morning - not enough to get a weight and calculate a yield though
@@sreetips well I had expected to get Maybe $5 from my investment of $50, it was the experience and experiment more than anything. I guess I just have to roll that back from $5 out of $50 to 5c out of $50. No counting chemical consumption.
Really Precious Man ! ! ! Your teachings are priceless , your videos are superb , viewers are privileged with true knowledge. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks for sharing. You and your wife remind me of my Late Uncle Glen and Aunt Jill. I love the refinery concept it is amazing. I have all of the chemicals my self to refine gold. Nitric Acid was hard to come by over here and very expensive. 500 ml for almost $100.00 usd. I found an excellent person on eBay that sells gold bars and it is real gold. (If the CPU's are gold then the CPU gold bars made from them are gold too its that simple) But lets not forget All the Gold and Silver is mine saythe the Lord.
Man I am finally glad I found this video in your inventory. This answers my question about the refining process that I ask you from the other video. Too bad I didn’t find your channel before I bought my stuff from eBay. I’m going to guess your findings will be very similar across-the-board. You areToo bad I didn’t find your channel before I bought my stuff from eBay. I’m going to guess you’re findings will be very similar across-the-board. You are very knowledgeable and put out excellent video. Keep up the good work.
Hi sreetips! Very interesting video! What happened here is that the gold in these bars is so finely dispersed that when you remove base metals with nitric acid treatments, you end up with colloidal gold. If you had calculated and added enough nitric acid to remove all the base metals in one treatment without performing any rinses, you would have noticed a purple layer at the bottom of your beaker, which is your gold. Thanks for the great content! Always entertaining!
The amount of gold in these is negligible. Traces only. I got a light dusting of gold sitting on the bottom of the beaker after it sat overnight. Probably less than a half of a tenth of a gram.
Yeah I have seen these on ebay a lot and always wondered if there any gold in them 🤔 and how are they so cheap? I'm actually going to buy one though I'm putting together a dummy safe and a bad guy would definitely believe that was pure gold so trying to find me one for cheap for a diversion safe. Great video
I remember that it was an extremely low yield, but I forgot it was that ridiculous!!! Probably the biggest eBay computer scrap scam there is & there's alot out there!! Have a GREAT Day!!!
Omg. Thank you so much for this video. It's so easy to get screwed over these days. Thank you sir. I appreciate all your time your out into that. Thank you for educating us.
I'm a beginner at buying gold and silver and I saw that on eBay and was curious and I'm glad I came across your video. Very informative very interesting it was great content.
Imagine the chemistry knowledge of someone who walked into the first chemistry class offered in grade school. I'm about ten grades lower than that. At 13:50 the solution is all blue, is that from the chemicals, or does that mean silver like in all of the silver videos? Also, I don't know about anyone else, but I freaking LOVE when the beaker gets rinsed with that cool looking distilled water bottle. One of my favourite things of every video, don't know why. If I'm ever in town, I wanna stop by, watch and learn, but when it comes to the rinse, tag me in Mr. Sreetips!
Silver in solution is clear like water. Copper in solution is blue. Sterling silver is an alloy of 92.5% silver and 7.5% silver. It's the copper in the Sterling silver that turns the solution blue.
I'm not supprised that something like ebay scrap gold has been melted with lower value metals or even have no gold in it. I guessed the expectation of very low gold amount the time he started dissolving it in nitric without adding no more metals in it.
Yep. Otherwise you might think they're scamming you. There has to be SOME gold in it. It reminds me of the buckets of dirt people are buying online with guaranteed gold in them. You're never going to get more than the amount of gold they put in it purposefully.
Hey..if there was no gold to be found it wasn't through lack of trying. You done all you could. Its a shame to waste your time really but you provide valuable lessons for the world Thanks for that.
good thing i watch this computer gold bars. i can concentrate on the other 10, 14, 18K items and the nuggets. by the way could you do a video on refining the nuggets that are encased in quartz n other materials? thanks, you have been a great inspirational in my need.
Thanks for this video and thanks to the person who provided the material to attempt to refine. Too bad there isn't a way to warn potential scam victims. And eBay policy let's scammers do this BS. Thanks for the always accurate scientific method approach of all your refining. With your no nonsense just straight facts proven by experimentation process of showing others how to do this, I have gained much knowledge that I don't have to question further. It is very much appreciated. Thanks for your awesome videos.
So here is a hilarious story I have melt bars like this coming and I was at the coin shop when they where delivered. I got home a few hours later and someone stole it. I hope they have fun with their zero content gold!
@@sreetips As I remember, the first step was dry weight. Then suspend a beaker full of water, with a catch pan under with a known weight. Carefully lower the unknown in suspended by fine string. Catch the water it displaces and weigh it. 1 cc is 1 gram so the weight in grams equals the cc of the bar. Now you know grams per cc. Compare it to a known sample of gold.
Great video. Recently, very recently I saw these bars on eBay and smelled BS. There is no way that they could contain more than trace amounts of gold I was thinking. I even emailed FIVE of the scheisters selling this "fool's gold" and NOT ONE returned my detailed inquiry. I still have them in my send box so I am sending them the video and also complaining to eBay, even though I did not buy any bars since it was obvious. I hate when scammers get on the site. It undermines the credibility of good sellers and tarnishes all of the sellers IMHO.
Your video is the proof of the saying "There's a fool born every minute". I would recommend that if anyone is considering buying any of these bars, they should definitely watch your video first. 👍👍
Freaken love your videos. You are like the Walter White of gold refining. You would have to use about 5000ml of Nitric to remove the base metals from that garbage, I bet Nitric acid is not cheap.
Normaly im not get enithing from my experiment,because i test diferent junk and items.Great video Sreetips,people need to know how much any material have gold in self.Chears mate,gretings from Serbia.
Those gold bars that they sell on eBay are for making jewelry or crafts, to achieve gold-colored pieces. If you read the product specifications, it warns you. This metal is composed of 66% Copper and 34% Brass.
Thanks for this video! I was looking at those same kind of bars last night on ebay do try this same thing. You saved me some money and time. Thank you sir!
I bought some trimmed circuit card fingers once. The seller actually told me, "you're going to make lots of money with this scrap." He didn't know that I had experience with it and already knew that it would be a loss. They are betting on the buyer of the over priced scrap to be to embarrassed to speak out after getting ripped off.
@@sreetips I am currently mining my own coin pins from electronic circuit boards - I never did this before and I don't know what the end result will be - but I do know that I have spent zero (0) dollars in recovering my dead electronics - an Urban Miner needs to be creative to minimize cost. I have spent about 50 hours of my time and I have recovered 207 grams of gold plated source material. Thanks for youe videos - they are awesome - Jack
you sir, are pretty much the goto channel when it comes to smallscale refining, i will be setting up a small ventilation cabinet soon and trying out your household chemical variant! thank you for the inspiration and also many thanks for debunking this ebay scam!
Hey... I tried something since i had a few cell phone boards and computer pins... May make an interesting comparison... I desolved the base metals using LEMON juice! Of course i ran it through a coffee filter first... But seemed almost as effective as hydrochloric acid... Yet should be WAY safer to use...
Lemon juice is safer than hydrochloric acid. But after those metals get dissolved into the lemon juice to gets toxic and must be treated before disposal.
I know this is an old video, but I’m curious, did you ever put copper in the nitric that you poured off to see if any silver would cement out? I know that would have eventually happened in the stockpot, but I was wondering if you tried to cement it out separately to see if there was any silver yield. I only ask out of curiosity because I have ZEE-row interest in wasting my nitric to investigate 😂
Thanks for sharing the information, I really want to try some precious metal smithing at some point. But It's good to know this metal would be strictly for practice. Sure is pretty though. Pretty worthless... than gold atleast.
Thank you for doing this yield...youve saved a lot of us frim getting ripped off trying to get the gold oit of those scrap metal bars...i figured it was too good to be true...
First thing I want to say is THANK YOU VERY MUCH for this video! I want to say that your test was good to see. There are so many different types of "gold" pins and ewaste products out there!! I have watched all of your ewaste videos and this is the lowest yield of any. I think it would've produced more yield if you had the pins or whatever ewaste you got and made the gold drop bars yourself! I trust your way of processing more than others!! The source of this melt is only known by one person, the person that melted it!!! I have seen mil spec gold pins melted and essayed and it came up 1/3 for one and another was 4/5 of a karat. The person that did that melt was expecting a higher grades, but that's just the way it was. I've also seen regular mother board computer pins melted and essayed, coming up with 1 gram per kilo. It seems like this was half that, more like 1 gram per 2 kilos! That's pretty bad. I'm wondering if someone didn't mix some brass in with it. I have heard that the plating on pins & other ewaste items are 8 karat plating or less. Unless it's Mil Spec Pins or Air craft, etc. Alot more to say on the subject but I'll stop here. Again Thank You for this video!! There are alot of people probably thinking they're going to get 8, 10 & 12 karats of gold from these kind of bars, that will never happen with ewaste, unless someone like you refined it to a higher quality!!
The sellers of these bars are ripping people off and making a killing. Now folks have a place to come and see what they can expect from this type of nearly worthless scrap BEFORE they go out and spend their hard-earned money on this junk.
@@sreetips I agree! I don't think anyone should pay for ewaste. It can be picked up for free. Then after they study what they have and watch your videos on how to properly refine it (the cheapest way possible), then they can have fun and have a little to show for it. To have an ounce of gold people need to understand it'll probably take at least a ton (2,000lbs) of ewaste to get it. This is a fairly new craze that's going on with ewaste and backyard refining (not you, you're a chemist) is something that hits a person hard. I know first hand I got the bug in Sept of 2017. I spent alot of time researching about it and accumulating and processing ewaste. I haven't gambled (Vagas style) or did anything else addictive in over 20 years, but I remember what it felt like. I felt the same way when it came to ewaste. That's what's going on around the world. It's very addictive. That's why you have 70,000 subs and will probably hit 100,000 before the end of the year. This is a little (Ok alot) off topic, but I was thinking for awhile that RU-vid is fairly new. Everyone has there own reason for doing it. Some are out to just make money, some like you, like to teach and some just like to be seen. Two of the big ones are refining and ewaste. If someone got two big RU-vid Channels to work together like You and ewaste ben! You both have 60k + subs (I'm only using you two as examples because I don't know many more than that), but if two or more got together as a team I think a million subs in the first year easy! I think RU-vid might just be the future of entertainment. Like t.v. shows you need more than one person to take it to the next level. I might be rambling and none of this is accurate but if is. It's going to be great for the ones to get it started. I have so many ideas about what it would take to make a huge channel. I've only seen one video of cody's lab. I know he's got more subs than most other people that are doing what he does. When I said two need to get together to make it big, that would only be to start after it starts working you'd need a cast of people (the best of the best) then I think it could go where RU-vid has never seen before. It could be like CBS, ABC, NBC was in the 50's, 60's and 70's. The ideas going through my head about this seem to never stop. If I was to count I wouldn't be surprised if it was one or two hundred thousand words a week. So far, this is all I've spoken of about it and you are the 1st person I've said anything to. I really hope you don't think I'm crazy. I'm not, just very passionate. Thanks for your Channel, it's GREAT!!!
I literally just did the same experiment with one off ebay, used nitric and muriatic method but non the less there was zero gold yielded from a 86 gram bar of "melted pins"
@@TheJrains I'm an ewaste scrapper for my self and my self only. I'm nearing 100lbs of gold ewaste. Every single bit I got for free! It's literally everywhere! I have a medical condition so can't get around like most, so my friend will bring me this stuff and set by my front door!!! So no gas is spent!! You got 86 GRAMS?!?!?!! Should have done your research, 86 grams isn't even 3 oz. !!! Your average computer mother board computer pins will only produce 1 gram of gold for every kilo ( that's 2.2 pounds ) that's 1000 grams. One part per thousand. You had 86 grams, one part per 1,000 of 86 grams is not even measurable by most scales or seen by the eye. If you want to have some real fun. Go get a contract with a school or big office to get there ewaste for free and start taking everything that could contain gold. Wait until you get several hundred pounds of gold pins or even more on other things like CPU's and IC chips, keep in mind more than half the IC chips out there have copper wires not gold, but you won't know till you start to process. Hope you have a GREAT Day!!!!
I really appreciate your dedication to; and, in depth presentation of, SOLID SCIENCE. Debunking the gold drop bars, undoubtedly, saved many honest folk their, "Honest Money"! Could you add a reputable source of obtaining, cuts, that are worth the effort of refining?
Thanks Sreetips for this video. Its Amazing what people do for some bucks. A true scrapper never buys drop melted metals, just because, some people take their chances to cheat others.
i guess the original bars will also stick to a magnet, but the seller would likely attribute that to impurities. how about to measure mass & volume, would that be quicker vs nitric acid?
