FYI what happens is that due to heat the ic manufactures did not have a way to create a ic with out the fingers melting when they got hot. so mostly of the IC's you'll get will have aluminium fingers. Not until like 2000's where as most IC's made during this time have gold fingers. some info: During the 1 gig war between Intel and Amd, AMD came up with a process to make gold fingers integrated into the CPU. FYI AMD was the 1st of them to created the 1 gig hz CPU.
The yield doing things the mechanical way can be on par with incineration, but unfortunately is takes a while to sort all the different processes to get the yield right. If there were some safe way to automate the incineration part, it could still have merit, but I've never been comfortable with just leaving a fire to do it's thing. Thanks for your comment!
For sure, I switched over to using Sulfamic acid for denoxxing pretty early on, works great and very fast. Have never used Urea, but I imagine the process is similar.
That's funny i thought to myself when you said 40cm " how many inches is that" If someone told me something in cm i would have a hard time picturing how big it is where as if in inches i can picture it like clockwork. Crazy how differently people think
Yep, we had a good discussion at work yesterday about thread sizes and how simple metric is compared to imperial, it is much more obvious (to us) that 19mm is much bigger than 6mm than when you compare a 3/4 to a 5/16 !
hey, i forgot your channel, i was out of this for a while.....this was a fun video, mini ceamics whoda thunkit, my crazy theory, i have saved over a lb. of gold corner black tops thats been ashed & smashed & cleaned, what if i put this stuff in a crucible with some chapman flux, forged it & poured it into a cone mold ? do you think the carbon & ash would melt into the flux etc. OR bad idea.......bill.
Hi Bill, I have never had much luck with smelting, but they guys that subscribe to that process rate it quite highly. The biggest problem you will always face is that your Gold will be alloyed with Copper since it is very difficult to remove Copper with smelting. So either way, you are likely to have to treat it chemically.
thanx for reply, yes i did the nitric bath so its all gold i dont have a blue bowl ill try some of the top crap & then let you know there is 5 grams at least.......hate that ash & carbon.@@successfulengineer
You could flatten it and have it XRFed at a jeweler, but if it's just a small bead, it's probably not worth putting too much effort into it. Save it up until you have 20 more of the same, then refine them all together.
I processed about 48 of these chips a few days ago. Recovered a few grams of gold and some palladium salt precipitated too. I’ve yet to process the salts but I was interested if you recovered any PGMs too?
Hey there, I only ever cemented PGMs out of solution and left the black sediment in a container, never attempted refining anything other than Gold and Silver.
That was pretty impressive returns for those chips. Do you think the yield would have been much higher if all the gold on the chips had dissolved? or would it have been negligible? Keep up the great videos, have a great day :)
Hi there, thanks for the compliments, also good knowing people are enjoying these videos. I'm about halfway through processing the bulk of those chips at the moment, and so far the yield is on par with the 15g total I was expecting, I think the gold remaining would have been quite thin, but maybe could have added another 5% to the result. I will definitely be on the lookout for anything with gold braze in the future. I think the good yield comes from the thickness of the braze, compared to how thin bond wires and plating on fingers usually is. It's also comparatively easy to leach the gold out of the ceramics compared to regular ICs, so really a no-brainer.
Awesome, can't wait to see the final results :) I'm looking to getting into home refining as well and i do find your videos informative. Thanks again and good luck with the results, can't wait to see the gold bar when you are done ;)
OCD? Eh? Who cares? 40 cm is 40 cm...roughly 'bout a foot and a half...a meter being a little over three foot If you are not using metric in the USA then I pity you. Working with powers of ten is just so much easier than the English System which has no rhyme nor reason behind it. For those who need the exact...you do the arithmetic. There are 2.52 cm/inch...Divide 40 cm by that...
Hi again. So I was trying to copy you exactly and everything went as a text book until dropping the gold process. I added 2 tea spoons of SMB to about 70ml of distilled water and the solution turned clear/colorless just like yours. I was expecting to see some brown/dark color change so I kept adding more SMB. Anyway my solution turned like a milky orange color and just sits there. Tested with stannous and I do get a positive for gold. Any fix to that? Help!!
Hi there, how many chips did you process, it would help to have some idea of how much gold is likely in the solution. What process did you follow for removing the excess Nitric Acid ? 2 Teaspoons of SMB is quite a lot, should be good for dropping out many many grams of gold. If you overdose on the SMB I believe it can mess up your Stannous testing and you will likely have crystals forming on everything. If the solution turned clear, it is likely that the gold did precipitate out, but unless you had a bit of gold there, it may not turn obviously brown. I've never had a solution turn a milky orange color, but you may have severely overdosed on SMB. If it were me, I would wait a day or two for the solution to clear up as everything settles to the bottom, then siphon off most of the clear liquid into another beaker, add a length of copper plate or pipe and let anything left in that solution cement out for a couple of days. That way your gold will either be in the settled contents of the first beaker or stuck (loosely) to the copper in the second beaker.
Thanks for getting back to me. Here's what I did: 88 chips (14 pin size) washed in HCl a couple of times to get rid of left over cement and other metals. Then I washed them good with distilled water and started my AR process (150 ml of HCL on hot plate and added .25ml of nitric 3 times (total of 3/4ml of nitric). Added my ex's 3g wedding band to consume excess nitric (took .3g to consume the nitric). When reaction stopped I added 4 distilled water ice cubes and filtered the solution into a clean beaker and got a nice 300ml of yellowish color AR. Tested positive for gold at this time. Then I mixed 2 tea spoons of SMB in 70ml of hot distilled water, stirred my AR dumped the SMB and stirred again - it changed from yellow to clear solution. Maybe at this point I should've placed the beaker on the shelf but after 30 min didn't see any powder at the bottom so I made the mistake of adding another 2 tea spoons of SMB - that's when it turned milky orange. Looked at it this morning and it looks yellow and clear again with some salt at the bottom and still tests positive for gold. Can it be saved? What do you think? I may have approx. .6-.8g of gold in there I think. Thank you so much.
Hi Michael, sounds like you used 0.75ml of Nitric all up then ? And consumed 0.3g of the wedding band to consume the excess. If those numbers are correct, then there was very very little gold on those ICs. My gut usually expects about a gram for of gold for every 1ml of Nitric I use, so the total gold in your chips sounds like it was closer to 0.4g You are absolutely correct about your hunch that you should have waited after you did the initial drop, when there is only a small amount of gold, it can take a day or so to settle. 0.7g of gold in 300ml solution is a reasonable amount, so I'm surprised you didn't observe it darken. The trick with copper always works, so I would siphon the clear liquid off into beaker #2, add a length of copper pipe sitting in the solution for 2 days, you will either see a fine brown powder cement on the pipe or a find black powder (Platinum). It is also very likely that the gold did drop out on that first edition of SMB and the Stannous result you see now is due to either Pt/Pd in the solution or a consequence of the SMB overdose. Either way you gold is still there and will almost always be recoverable. Chips can be a bit tricky sometimes, so I always recommend people start with some plated computer fingers just until they have dissolved the gold and brought it back a few times. Let me know how the copper goes in beaker #2.
This was my first drop ever and after watching your video and having those PROMs available I was so sure it will be a success....but I failed. I do have lots of foils recovered from telecom boards and RAM sticks but I wanted to try the PROM's because it looked so easy. I will definitely take your advise with the copper plate in the solution and will let you know how it worked out. Thanks again for educating me.
I like how clear you are, but this is a failed experiment how can you get an accurate estimate if you don't complete the reaction also how come you added your own(denox) gold but there was still gold left? I'm only jealous i want those boards lol 😆
The leftover Gold will have been stuck under dies, where it is hard for fresh solution to reach and dissolve it. Given enough time it would have worked, but the reaction slows so much that you wouldn't know its still going. This was a long time ago, but from memory, I ended up crushing the ceramics much finer in subsequent runs to ensure I got all the Gold out first time. And yeah, they were by far the easiest and most Gold I ever recovered from so little material.
you mentioned that stannous chloride was formed from the tin and hydrochloric acid . thats awesome , i am having trouble buying stannous chloride , but i do have tin granuals and hcl.......can u plz tell me how to make stannous chloride with the tin granuals
Hi Peter, yep, that is all you need, use a few grams of of pure-ish Tin and dissolve it in about 10ml HCl. The reaction at room temperature is very slow, so you really need to heat it and keep the temperature around 70 degrees C or so. It takes a fair while to dissolve. Store it in a dark bottle with a few granules of Tin in the bottom. It will last for a few months like this. You can test it by adding a drop of your Stannous Chloride to a few drops of pregnant Aqua Regia and it will very quickly go dark as the SC produces colloidal Gold.
I have a bunch of larger EPROMs with the glass window on top and I want to process them. Some pins/legs are falling off when I crack them open. Do you recommend going through the pain of removing all of them? I'm assuming I will have a lot cleaner solution by eliminating as much metal as possible. Great video btw.
Michael Leardini Absolutely, get rid of as much of the base metal as you can before moving to acid. Those pins should be magnetic, so relatively easy to remove. Thanks for the comment!
Thank you sir. I watched all your videos (more than once)...love the fact that you don't use subtitles and explain very well with details your steps. Best,
hi, great video as always very good information. i have one question. you said in few videos that you drop some sulfuric acid in ar solution to help the remove of nitric and help the gold precipitate. how much do you use sulfuric acid in this case? thanks for your last answer i use some sodium nitrate to substitute nitric acid. in this case it dissolve all metal and i re refine the gold later. continue your channel 👍 !!
David gold Hi there, thanks for your comment ! we add a few drops of Sulfuric acid to precipitate the Lead so we can filter it out. The Sulfuric also helps to evaporate off excess Nitric, but these days I prefer to remove excess Nitric using Sulfamic acid as per my other video. Good luck and be safe
i really love what you've done there with the explanations about the base metals. I can't help but think that you missed out on quite a bit there seeing as my own results on similar material run about .85 grams plus another .25 for the rest of the board. do you think its better too run it smaller and also do a nitric wash?
Hey there, from memory I did miss out on a bit of gold with that first trial batch. Was a while ago now, but I think for the bulk of them I smashed them up a bit finer and went a bit overboard with the AR to ensure ALL gold was dissolved. Can't quite remember the final yield, but it was definitely the best material I have ever processed. These days I tend to do the HCl wash, then incinerate, then always do a Nitric wash. But my main driver is to get very clean gold on the first drop. Appreciate your comment!
Hi, question, now you have disolved all the tin, how would you collect the tin and return it to a powder ready to melt, Tin is still a high value metal. Many thank's, Danny. South Wales. UK.
Hi, generally the process I follow is to precipitate the Gold via SMB, then leave overnight for the Gold to settle out. Carefully decant the barren liquid, then wash and dry the Gold. Washing is basically just boiling the powder in water for a few minutes, followed by a few minutes in hot HCl, followed by two more water washes. Obviously decanting the fluid after every wash step. After that I just put the beaker on a coffee pot warmer to dry the powder.
I love your little hobby burned nitric hands haha please don't take this the wrong way my hands have looked much worse I had the same hobby back in 15-16 but went more towards silver crystals which went quite successfully but still have an itch for the gold side bummer part is ebay ppl want to get rich w/o the risky work I reckon I will have to become a professional dumpster diver to get my materials at the ripe age of 60 again thanks for your vids
Ha yeah, wised up pretty quickly on that one, these days I feel embarassed for people when I see stained hands in a video ! I found it best to let a wide circle of friends know that I wanted any EWaste they came across, amazing the stuff that show up then !
Hi there, thanks for the comments. These boards were out of a 1980's mainframe computer from a large company. Still some of the best E-waste I have come across.
Best I've seen had some old Telecom from some early 80 i.b.m that were very nice seems to be old is gold but my man said b.g.a flat packs are good as well!
Once you've gone through the single AR refine, you usually end up with around 98% pure gold. The 80's chips are either fantastic, or terrible. Really it is ceramic chips that are almost always good. Modern BGA chips are probably just as good or even better on a gold / weight ratio.
Lol thanks, I did watch the ball crusher vid as well, thanks for that. I've been thinking about a building or buying a small hammer mill to render all my gold bearing stuff. Thanks for the great vids
danz409 Very low I would say, probably around $10 for power and chemicals. Took about 4 hours of work, certainly worth the effort. Glassware I dont price in because their value is spread over many cycles obviously.
Hi there, filtered rainwater is a good option, bottled drinking water may also be OK, you want to avoid water that contains dissolved minerals or Chlorine. At the end of the day, you can always get some tap water and boil it off and condense the steam with some copper tube.
Yes, very good practice to use distilled water everywhere, just so you know what is going into your solutions. I keep my refining ice cubes in a freezer in the workshop to make sure nobody steals them for their drinks!
Yes, very good practice to use distilled water everywhere, just so you know what is going into your solutions. I keep my refining ice cubes in a freezer in the workshop to make sure nobody steals them for their drinks!
probably should have broken them up into smaller pieces,,, I bet if you break them more even though you've processed them once already you'll get more gold out of those,, when you're done dissolving the gold out boil for 5 minutes twice to remove all the dissolved gold,,filter all,,then precipitate,,,I know this from experience
those bond wire that you claim as "Aluminum". Put a dab of hydrochloric acid. If the bond wire is dissolve, it's shitty Al. But if it doesn't dissolve...it's a better thing!
I have gone through the process once, and got a little bit of silver and Palladium out of them, but I'm really a gold-bug, so I haven't bothered again.
At the moment I just save them up in a large container, I usually depopulate my boards in a dedicated oven, so they come off with the chips. I don't think they would have much value selling online in NZ since there are not that many people into recovery / refining yet. I also wouldn't want the hassle of separating all the other small bits out of the MLCCs ! But I haven't ever found a very good video on doing MLCCs, so I may run another batch and do a how-to at some point.
Ya Old Lucky Dawg.....! Ha....That Small CPU Chip has 24k Gold on it...it is about the only cpu i have ever had with good quality high grade gold...Out of Many, Many different types....But the Gold on that small cpu is not very much of gold on it...i have processed about 30 of them...i did a Scratch Acid Gold Test on one...is how i know...it passed a 22k Test....:)
Me Too....Nice Yeild....! Your first process is probbly maybe 18k....? 80s Ewaste is much better than todays ...Science People claim as much as 2 tons of gold is in landfills each year here in usa....Wish i could be there when it gets tossed....Haha.....i would be a Dumpster Diver Expert.....!! Love to Process Free Ewaste...i do it a little different than you do ..But each there own.....:)
You should have ground then incinerated it, your yield would be so much higher regardless of anything else. I think you lost about 20 percent of what you could have gotten.
@@successfulengineer All of the large particulate is trapping your metals, if you reduce this to its minimum then your yield will be greater. Hence the incineration.
@@slip8293 I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. What large particulate? These ceramic ICs were milled to a powder? You cant incinerate ceramic because it is literally ceramic, it gets super hot, then cools down and looks identical to when you started?!?!
Please come to the point. You spend 15 minuts on BS! 80 seconds on basically say this is the result! Try this. Look, this is the result. Takes 6 seconds!
Most people watching these videos appreciate the detail and are interested in the process followed. If you were going to be processing chips like these for the first time, you too would appreciate the detail. Nothing worse than watching a BS video where someone shows a bunch of chips in a bucket, then some gold, completely utterly pointless.
Hi, thanks for the positive comment, I know how frustrating it was in the beginning watching videos with lots of skipped steps! The ball mill at the moment is just running from mains, have recently upgraded it to a medium-ish sized stepper motor and power consumption is about 10W, so cheap enough to run that I'm not worried about trying to solar power it. Feel free to shoot through any questions if you get stuck, always happy to help!
