Yess! Computer scrap again!! Nice little gold bead. Would love to see more of this content coming next 🙌🏻 i learned the hard way not to throw them straight into the aqua regia but it would be a great experiment for another video
It’s very addictive when you first start doing this… when the gold colored water turns brown from precipitation of gold, that’s one of the coolest parts and you know you’re doing it right!
I love the longer videos like this occasionally. It's nice to see the whole process in one sitting. Thank you talking us through what you do. It is greatly appreciated.
I remember a video you did on computer scrap years ago. You deduced at that time it wasn't worth the cost. Those 17 lb of scrap should get you about 1 troy ounce. I expect you spent much less than $2000.
Hey sree, I watch another channel that scraps metals. Might be worth it to connect to Mike the scavenger maybe work something out to get a channel interaction. Could boost your channel views. It’s like both sides of the industry connecting. Would be cool to see some of his electronics scrap come through your video to the processing side of recycling the precious metals. Really enjoy your content brother. You are very skilled with what you are doing. I think a lot of people gain tons of needed insights that are lost these days. Hope all is well. God bless.
Oh no those terrible Scott paper towels. They're like half the price of Bounty but you end up using twice as much for everything so you don't even save money. I'm sticking to Publix brand. Indistinguishable from Bounty and cheaper.
Hello friend, the RAM or graphics card cinguers are 100% lacquered. Entering the test slot eliminates only the contact area. * The most correct method is with caustic soda, it only destroys the lacquer and the copper comes off with the clean gold, the PCB remains colorless. * In principle, the gold of cards is a hard alloy of industrial carat 20kt and some have triple layers finished in 22 or 23kt, this always in graphics. * attention, the carats described are similar to jewelry but these are industrial and therefore toxic, follow the steps of this channel to always have clean and non-toxic gold With this general method, it is best to first remove the lacquer adhesive, which only takes minutes to separate the metals from the fiberglass and process them later. I process caustic soda with this method and it is much faster since only the washing and direct to the aqua regia
At round 18:40 when you start pouring the solution into the filter and said "valuable Liquid" I swear the background noise started sounding like a drum roll!! 😁
I always love Sreetips and the sweet asmr vocabulary trigger words: Beaker Precipitate Nitric (acid) Gold (foils as well in this case) Solution Dilute Distilled Heat Melt dish Pour I know i missed some lol. Those are always just some of my personal favorites.
Would it be possible to cook the goldfingers first in boiling water, then after cooling put them into an ultrasonic bath, and afterwards collect the peeled-off gold films for further processing ? It could save a lot of chemicals.
Wow that little bead on Ebay is WAY over spot price on gold per gm rn on the market. That is insane how many bids it has tbh and how many folks are willing to pay an 80-100 $ premium. Good job lol xD.
That's a lot of fingers. On one hand I like the idea of recycling but at least some of those original devices could have been godsent for retro enthusiasts and collectors.
They were already pre clipped and bulk scraped.. can't sell them on a slow retro but type situation without holding a ton of random inventory. No profit.
I do computer scrapping, but I also keep an eye out for items retro folks are looking for. As long as the components work, I always try to sell them first. If they don’t sell then I’ll scrap them.
Most of those fingers look like PCI connectors, from that i would hope any voodoo chips with corresponding memory would be saved, and maybe Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 chips. thought those were pretty rare on PCI cards. Nobody cares for S3 Virge cards or the like.
Happy to see you doing an ewaste video! I’m just about to finish up 30+ lbs of fingers, about 160 grams of foils. Couple thoughts… 1. Would have been nice to see you show people how to denox solutions using sulfamic acid! That 1 lb of SMB isn’t cheap where I’m at! 2. The average yield for fingers is 1.8 g/lb, which is right in line with your results! Love watching your videos when I’m not out doing it myself, you should try and source some gold cap ceramic ICs to do on the channel. They contain farrrrrr more gold per pound than fingers do and are fun to process! Thank you for the video, look forward to the next installment!
I wonder if incinerating the pcb would work? It seems like it should be possible to incinerate it, then dissolve the remains in nitric, leaving behind mostly just the gold??
@@sreetips Ok gotcha. I guess you've already tried that then :) The method you used of going straight to aqua regia without removing the pcb material seems to have worked really well anyway.
With silver so ridiculously, grossly undervalued, I paid full price for the silver. Because it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not selling the silver. I put it away and forget about it. I don’t have to be concerned about trying to resell the silver for a “profit” because the silver (that’s rising in value) is my profit. Trading it for paper dollars (that are declining in value and purchasing power) would not be very wise.
I actually think it was not a good idea. The glass fiber material is porous. Some gold solution may stick in the pores, necessitating a lot of rinsing to recover it. Also, some AR-soluble substances may have gone into the gold solution, making it dirtier and harder to refine. I'd first remove fingers, then go AR. Or even melt and inquart the gold foils, making the whole refining process faster and more efficient.
@@sreetips I don't nearly have as much experience as you do. Sorry if I was wrong. But speaking of separation of Platinum and Palladium: I recently viewed another refiner's video where he successfully gets the Platinum by first adding Ammonium Chloride to his salt mixture. After collecting the Platinum salt percipitate, he proceeds to precipitate Palladium with DMG. Maybe it will be useful. Thank you very much for sharing your refining and chemistry experience with us!
Old processors and gold corner IC chips seem to be the only thing worth the trouble despite the high gold prices even except for maybe in conjunction with fully monetized RU-vid videos 😊😅😂 🎉 You're probably going to want to stop on eBay for a while or at least stop selling just saying
Wonderful video Sreetips! It never gets old. I love how you never let anything go to waste. At the end of the video, using the dilute H2SO4 you used to clean off the gold button to keep your sink plumbing clear. No need to buy Draino. 😆
Awesome vidography in this episode brother. Have you hired a camera man. Nice to see another method with a different result. Great show brother looking forward to the final results
Always wondered the fineness of the gold foils. If they are really around 50% or 12k thats good enough for me to skip the refining part. I always wanted to just recover the foils then melt them because in my country the nitric acid is so expensive the cost of using it out weighs the value of the yield. But if the foils are around 12k, I could melt them into a bar and still get decent money for it without refining. Like your original video from years ago where you bubbled them off in HCL for 3 weeks, that will be the method I will need to adopt. Wish I could use nitric as its so much faster!
Hey sreetips! Longtime viewer. Why don't you add superchat to your vids? Is it too much of a hassle? If so, I can understand it! But if you do add it in later on. I'd be glad to help out. Keep making cool videos please
When I did a batch of fingers, after rinsing, I put all the pieces of board into a plastic tub and scrubbed off every last speck of gold from every tiny piece of board... I'm kinda obsessive-compulsive like that. ;D I just hate having to wash the board pieces over and over to recover all the gold chloride bound up in the fiber board. Creates a lot of waste solution.
Awesome proces mr Sreetips...that 3.7 grams gold is super cool man! Keep it UP mr sreetips your chanel is geat man 🎉😂i love the science cause i a scientist to haha algebra mathmatics physics are great !👍🇳🇱
Back of the napkin math says you should get 1 troy ounce that entire box if you processed all together. I wonder if the seller knew that and thats why they sell in batches of 17 pounds?
I have a lot of scrap gold that I purchased over the years before I started buying 999.9 gold in assay cards. would you be willing to refine it for me if I let you keep whatever amount you feel would be a fair price for the refining?
@@sreetips ok it was worth a shot… I would rather pay you to do it and have you do some content and make more money that way then send it off for sale as scrap gold
I recommended a refiner to someone a while back (I don’t even do that anymore). They came back and said the guy I recommended ripped them off. The main problem is unrealistic expectations. If I take a customers material, and the yield is off, then they will naturally believe that I cheated them. By only working on my own material, if the yield is off, then I only have myself to deal with. I can’t imagine doing this for a living. One of my old mentors (Harold_V on the GRF) had two sayings that have stuck with me: 1) sooner or later the refiner ends up cheating the customer. 2) if you turn your hobby into your work, then it becomes just that, work.
I bet you could make a pretty decent bloopers real of your funniest or scariest moments in your career using your many many videos or even a highlights reel just because you have so many videos and so much great content in them and especially any that has never been seen before (for your many Die Hard fans)
i know you've had issues with the fumes eating up the blower in the fume hood. but where on your house does it ventilate to? do you have a pvc pipe that goes up high so the fumes dont eat up the side of your house or roof?
Have you ever considered precipitating gold with stanous solution? And why not use normal (table)salt instead of borax during melting, which is less expensive and less toxic? Nice result by the way :)
Odd ball question, I was just watching your recent .9999 gold video and it made me ask myself, "Does mixing the purity of gold affect final purity or value?" For example, if one created a bar of 50% four nines and 50% three nines; what would the final purity be? Does it lower to the lesser purity, rise to the higher, or truly fall in the middle? I've seen some gold buyers just scrap price the gold so it doesn't matter the purity, and some actually test its purity and then quote based off that. But it is mixed? How would that work?
I paid about twenty four hundred (including tax). But that doesn’t matter. I should clear over twenty grand with this scrap. I couldn’t believe my luck when I seen the listing. And the seller was highly recommended 100% feedback. It’s getting harder to find. I’ll end up with several videos from this 17 pound batch of trimmed fingers. Computer scrap is very popular.
You have used hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant in some videos. I've tried it out (thanks to your videos) and it works beautifully! The process is so much cleaner without the nitric. Why do you prefer nitric acid to hydrogen peroxide?
Couldn't you put these in a 5 gallon bucket with the delute nitric acid and let them soak ahead of time to remove the metals, Or does it require heat to get the metals removed?
all my old waste material if it has values left i put in a slow leach pot which has 2 litres of HCL and about 8 table spoons of sodium nitrate. I leave if for a month and keep swapping it out with other materials until i get some good values to chase and recover.
I am interested in going straight to aqua regia and just dissolving all the metal all at once. Then boil down to syrup to remove nitrates, rehydrate with hydrochloric acid and then get the gold out. Really what I want to see is a method of dissolving computer scrap that may have silver and gold, but dissolve everything without hydrochloric acid. Then how do you separate the gold, silver then base metals all in one solution.
There’s only one obstacle: I’m buying silver, not selling. We spent a long time hunting and accumulating that silver. And with the spot price so grossly undervalued, selling silver right now, if you don’t have to, wouldn’t be a very good idea. Silver is money. Trading it for paper dollars would be foolish.
I don't have an ultrasonic cleaner. I was going to soak the stuff in vinegar and water overnight. Then hit it with a torch. Then after I add my cleaned material to the beaker, I want to put some distilled water in there, and add the nitric slowly? Anything that sticks to a magnet, take it out. But, if it just slightly pulls a little bit, that's ok? As long as you don't have to much of it? Disclaimer, if I get sick or die, my family will reward you. Not sue you. No worries, man! I've got a full body suit. Respirator with organic vapor cartridges (and I still have no intent on breathing while near the Nitric 〽️), goggles and gloves. And 5lbs of sodium bicarbonate to neutralize the Nitric acid in the case of any mishaps, or I can't detour some asshole from going near it. 1 pound of baking soda for every 100ml's of Nitric. Then when I'm done I was going to put the full body suit in a plastic bag. Cover the contents with baking soda. Wrap it up 3-4x and dump it in the trash. By putting the sodium bicarbonate in there, it will make it safe for trash handlers to handle it.
I've had a testing kit in here for 5 years. I've replaced it a couple of times. But, I do have some experience with nitric and hydrochloric acids. I do have blurred vision already from using it in my car.
Is there a way to mechanically remove the foils like with a blade or bash them with a hammer? Would be tedious work but I'm sure the yield would go way up.
The nitric solution at the beginning: is there not any chance of silver in it? Wouldn't it be better to drop as waste into he copper bucket just in case?
I enjoy watching the recovery process. I am interested to see what the cost of the process is compared to what you extract from the boards. Thanks for the great shows
Twenty four hundred bucks. I plan to make twenty grand. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I seen it listed. These kinds of listings are getting hard to come by. I feel very luck to have that much material from a single trusted seller. I would have paid more.
Don’t know. I’ve never taken the time to calculate it. The fingers were twenty four hundred including tax. The chemicals and everything else I’d estimate less than fifty bucks.
Considering the labor time, energy, chemicals etc. I wonder if pulverizing and gravity separation should precede refinement. Pulverizing probably would take minutes and gravity probably under an hour lending to 3.6 grams 525 / hr.. Not sure?
I only know what I've learned from you, but wouldn't making this aqua regia speed this up? Or maybe the gold is too fine to refine with aqua regia? What I mean to say is, why didn't you just go straight to aqua regia?
The labor required to cut the fingers pins or gather n clean motgerboards becomes prohibative for a positive return in usa. Without a scaled operation with volume. So much electronic ore is sold online for the actual value of pure gold or even 2 and 3x the gold content for cermaic cpus and lowgrade cpus end up selling fopr 10x the gold melt value . So many of the youtube videos of people doingbthe whole proccess to gather a gram or so from ewaste are done in less affluent coubtries and sped up 10x . I just scored a bunch of pentium pro cermaics. Thought i was buying all 512k but recieved several 256k .. i probably over paid at 30 each and will find the averages on those 2 sizes. I think the pentium pro 1000k has a small profit at 30 bucks. But people pay 45 to 75 for the 256k size . Ive got an assay ton of 1970s 1980s military grade computer electronics connectors started this morning Lots of tin solder
@@sreetips I have deffinatly taken some losses trying to find where the gold is. Both in materials and labor. But deffinatly spent less than a chemical metalurgy degree costs and I learn valuable KNOWLEDGE with each lesson.. "happy trees " big brother.
For such a thin gold foils you can use "Gold leaching method". You may use chinese reagent "Jin Chan" in combination with Ferricyanide (K₃[Fe(CN)₆]) to wash off the gold.
I know you're just doing it for your video, but off camera would it be better to say put all the items in a stock bucket and let it sit for a month or would that be detrimental? Love your video. Thanks 😎👍🇨🇦
Yes. In this video you get to see “a way” to recover the gold. Not necessarily “the way”. There are many different ways to get the gold from this type of scrap.
Gold fingers are one of the few e-scrap parts you can dump into nitric and not end up with horrid metastannic acid (a tin complex), which is 'grey goo' that's god-awful to separate out. For most parts, a long soak (about a week in warm conditions) in HCl with some copper chloride mixed in gets rid of the base metals. Even plated pins will give you grey goo, because the soldered end ALWAYS has a lot of tin, and often the core of the pins is tin-containing brass, which created HUGE amounts of goo in nitric acid.
Cool experiment to try: iron nitrate (either +2 or +3 oxidation states) in solution decomposes into iron oxide (black solid) and NO2 gas or nitric acid (depending upon the oxidation state of the iron) when heated over 90C (basically heat to a light simmer). The NO2 or nitric acid vapor is easily distilled back into usable dilute nitric acid!
$278.17 for spot price 3.7g as of 7- 28-2024 per pound of scrap. I do not think you told us how much you paid per lot, or per pound. Was it worth it? In a previous video, I thought you said this was not profitable. I know the spot price of gold has gone up since your last vid on processing fingers, and i would bet the price of fingers has gone up too. Adding chemicals and other expenses, you are at break even on the current ebay bid. If you have income from RU-vid,it may be enough to offset your cost?
Doesn’t matter. I paid about twenty four hundred including tax. I bought this to make videos. The real value is in the videos. I expect to make more than twenty grand from this material. The gold that I recover - that’s just a bonus.
I can’t imagine trying to resell the gold to get my money back and make a “profit”. That’s not what I’m doing here. I need this stuff to make my videos. The value is in the videos.
@@sreetips Good for you, Kevin. You deserve every penny for the work you put in making excellent content, and sharing your knowledge about recovering and refining precious metals. My favorites are when you get into the weeds and figure a way through the processes.
