While I am super impressed by the sheer raw chemistry that everyone has made in trying to refine the precious metals... What really interests me is the plastics, acids, and other wastes that we generate in recycling on the process to getting gold. ... Not sure if you have made a dedicated video for your waste practices besides brief excerpts as it comes up, but it would be interesting if you were to attempt to recover pure carbon from plastic, highly concentrate your nitric or hydrochloric acids, or find other uses to treat the mass of stock and waste that could be formed from these chemical endeavors. :) Great work, as always! :D
@@sreetips really much of devotion here! By the way I would never ever in my life dealt with them in this way(except for demonstration only which I suppose is the exact reason why you did it so)-I always treat such stuff with plain simple nitric acid-I guess that even for such quantity of them 100 ml of 68% nitric diluted with enough water to just cover all that stuff would have been enough just because the quantity of copper on which gold is plated on is actually fairly low-not more than 10 times the amount of gold on them-so anyway it's by far faster and also generate far less waste and after all when I would have disposed of plastic shit rendering it without any foils by simply rinsing them-I would have been using some part of the same waste solution of copper nitrate(obviously after evaporating it down to couple hundred ml) to make aqua regia for already dissolving gold foils just since all that stuff is already dirty like fuck but HCl converts copper nitrate to copper chloride anyway so it just means that I would need only to use a little bit more HCl to dissolve everything..And the only problem after all is just the formation of damn ungodly copper monochloride during precipitation but it is easily fixable.. By the way it seems to me that I am doing something wrong with the step of precipitating gold with SMB in my own solutions just because I always get a bunch of copper monochloride and presuming that all the gold is already precipitated I pour the solution into a waste bucket and simply deal with copper monochloride by leaching it with HCl leaving gold behind but when I recently decided to drop most of the copper from the waste solution with zinc-I noticed that there was also quite a lot of gold dropped as well so I did recover more than a gram of gold from my waste bucket which is actually unbelievable!So can you please tell me what am I doing wrong and how to fix it?I really hate that copper monochloride crap so much for now and so I am puzzled how to precipitate gold without that shit and what is most important is how to precipitate all of the gold in one step?
Thank you for providing the information, great work. Modern electronics ( the last 20 years) has reduced the gold thickness on plated fingers to 1 micron or less. Gold from 1930 - 1990 started off from 5 microns thickness, military standards specified 5 microns so old military and government equipment is where the money is, I knew a company in the UK that searched out old military and telephone exchange equipment to salvage gold. Keep up the good work!
@@vibhorejaiswal2997 no its not. Thats the WHOLE POINT of this video. sheesh. If you get them free then the small amount you make, after subtacting chemicals, waste and electricity and time 'might' be worth it depending on how little you value your time and if you dont have a normal job but otherwise .... NO!
To completely bust that myth you should actually get an older PC and see how much you can get from it.. I would recommend an older one with older ISA slots (486 of older maybe). Gold can be found in the following areas. Fingers of the cards (Video cards, Ram, Modems, Drive controllers, Network card, and on 286 PC's you have a memory board) IDE and Floppy ports - Pins on motherboard and the drives. Other random pins on motherboard for various connections Jumpers.. Easy to overlook, but the older jumpers were gold plated. (Use a pick tool to remove) Processor and the IC chips - Remove IC chips from PCB with heat gun and a scrapper. Ram fingers and the IC chips on the ram (IC chips can have gold wiring inside them) Pins inside the ISA/PCI/VLB/RAM slots - Remove slot with heat gun (Heat from back of board), then pick pins out of connector (Yes, it sucks) Inside the drives - Pins, gold contacts on the drives, some Hard drives even have gold wiring on the heads. Brand of PC matters.. Brands like Sony don't have a lot of gold.. but brands like HP or IBM tend to have more. As for the myth,, I think a REALLY old PC, the type with tons of expansion boards and lots of slots "might" come close.. The newer PCs,, No way.. Maybe a half a gram tops in a newer desktop PC.
@@sreetips I agree. But if you are looking for gold in a PC, age and brand play a HUGE factor in how much gold was used. That's why I was saying to maybe look into a REALLY old, early to mid 90's PC if you can find one. Maybe even a 286 from the 80's. Instead of everything being built into the motherboard, they used a lot more expansion cards, and hence also had more expansion slots. Those old ISA expansion slots had larger pins in them as well. But, yeah, a new-ish PC made in the last couple decades, with PCI slots, has a much smaller amount of gold in them.
@@JohnD-JohnD But those would always be worth more in parts than in gold. They have collector's value and evne if they didn't you'd be hard pressed to consistently find them.
The laptops that have the most gold are Dell. Still its verry little.You might a gram of gold from 10 laptops but thats a lot of work to get it out. On older PCs with ceramic processors,only the processir has one third or more of a gram.Add the gold corner BGA ,add the RAM ics and all the ics from the board( they have thin but massive gold wires inside,not plated). On top of that you might get a gram of palladium wich is more expensive than a gram of gold from 10 laptops. For a beginner i reccomend buing ram sticks as cheap as possible at flea markets.Those are the easyest to get and to process.
Also in your calculations, you haven't even considered the costs of chemicals, nor utilities, nor cost of disposal. It seems even more of a loss. Thanks for the video.
@@OldSkoolF did it also as a demonstration to others who are thinking about doing this themselves as a way of making money. because of that, you have to factor in the cost of materials used, as well as time invested and the possible costs of correct disposal.
ha! just watched this 6 year old video…..and that gold button is NOW worth $950. All u had to do is wait 6 years to make a profit:-) If course,I know you werent planning in making a profit in the gold when u first made this video. A great,and laborious,video and process. Thx Sreetips! x
Mr.Sreetips great teacher,i learn a lot from your videos.now i have my little lab at home,and after few times i finaly get my first gold buttom of 3,6g 22k gold from 700g mixed e-scrap🙂.its not pure,need to be refined 1 or 2 times more,but finaly i get that from e-scrap.thanks for great videos.
That is the point of the video. But I have noticed that prices for the trimmed fingers have come down substantially. Maybe my video is helping make that happen.
Just the time ,effort and knowing what you’re doing is mind boggling . I’m a coin Roll hunter and just search boxes of coins for silver, error and the 2019 West Point quarters. I’ve been posting my finds if you want to see what you can find in those boxes . Thanks for sharing that video. Wow !!!
One of the best and most informative videos I've ever seen. I don't have what it takes to do this. Your knowledge is impressive, and I think I'm better off just selling the scrap gold I collect to somebody that has the facility to process all those chemicals.
That was a fabulous video - straightforward and totally honest and most of all you 've got a scientific turn of mind. From my own experience, I would only suggest that you replace HCl 30% by vinegar 8% acetic acid in order to speed up the stripping process. The problem associated with using concentrated hydrochloric acid is that your hydrogen peroxide gets decomposed too quickly and is no longer available to act as an oxidant to drive the reaction. 48 hours stripping would be fine. In the final analysis you succeeded in isolating gold in a cost effective way using as little as possible nitric acid HNO3 which is a GREAT ACHIEVEMENT Congratulations !
Very cool process. It's a real shame that this isn't a more economically viable way to make some extra cash on the side. Thank you for going through all the trouble to do this experiment, especially since your taking a huge loss. I for one appreciate it.
I scrapped a few computers past years and built one from scrap as you can see on my YT channel. In this batch there are also a lot of goldfingers from I think proces controllers...not computers. You should know there are many gold containing parts in a PC besides the goldfingers. All the pins in IDE and ATI cables,HDD an CDROM drive connectors. memory chips and sockets, CPU pins and sockets, USB and PS1 connectors, BCA chips etc...but I get you need many different procesae to retrieve the gold.
This ^^^ You are right that you need alot of computers to recover a meaningful amount of gold but this video isn't proof of anything. Theres quite a bit more gold in PCs than what you find on the fingers and these fingers arnt really representative of a typical PC, they look like fingers from older rack mount equipment of some kind. Stick to the refining stuff (which you do really well) and less of the clickbait please, its just a video about recovering gold from fingers with AP..
If I'm not mistaken even the monolithic ceramic capacitors contain some gold. But I do think that indeed most of the gold can be found in the goldfingers. New techniques also braught down the amount of gold contacts contain. E waste Ben melted down 500 RAM gold fingers and analyzed the compositon of the resulting aloy.
You guys should collect some scrap PCs and try to recover the gold for yourselves. Then, and only then, will you be able to comment on how much yield you can expect from this type of escrap. I don't do it because there are other types of scrap that produce much higher yields. Escrap is a dead end as far as I'm concerned, a waste of time, unless you want millions of views on youtube!
Good accurate information to reference to when weighing up my own adventures which no matter what the costs, effort or results end up being, I have never lost out even with what can be seen as a failure. The experience, knowledge and refinement of technique that you can get is worth a priceless sum that is achieved only when you actually do it! Eventually like streetips it becomes a skill not anyone with chemicals can do... Well.! Great channel.
Thank you so much for making this video because like so many others I was planning on scrapping computers to recover the precious metals. Needless to say disappointing to learn the truth, however, invaluable information and so thankful that you made this video!!!
If you don’t have to buy the scrap in the first place then the only costs are the acids and the time to process it so it could be worth it’s weight in gold pardon the pun
Depending on the computers age . The combination of the processors, IC chips, pins, and fingers may yield up to 1% - 4 % by weight for each component. Slot card fingers contain the least amount of gold on computers.
If anybody was wondering the gold button is worth around $550 so yeah he lost $250 but as he said he didn’t do it to make money but a very well Informative video thanks 😊 keep up the good work 👍🏻
actually your only correct to a certain point, newer computers dont have much in them, that is where your are correct, but if you stumble on to a huge stockpile of old desktop pcs like i did, with ceramic cpu's with solid gold pins and wiring, not plated, old hard drives with solid gold pieces weighing .6 grams+ alone, not to mention the pins are heavily plated much more then any other pins, not to mention that it has several ic;s and eeproms that have solid gold wiring, and the the ceramic chips with gold or gold plated caps. what makes the 1/4 ounce myth true is if your dealing with old pc's. the gold plating tech sucked bad back so in the begining things were much more heavily plated back then, then they are nowadays, and and has been very skimpy for the last 30 to 35 years. so the whole key is to buy old desktop towers and dismantle them yourselves, dont bother with the monitors, but the must be old, like back when a 33mhz cpu with was the bomb and having 16mb a ram was godlike lol. i dismanteled 8 old desktops, ill post the finishing total weight when finsihed, there are so many different karats to deal with, ill combine everything, and purify it to .999, then ill post the total weight. im retired so i have lots of spare time, and it is time consuming so you have top consider that too, if you have the time, but when I bought 200 old desktop towers for $200, im pretty sure ill make around a $100 a tower scrapping gold out of all parts, and that being conservative, so the myth holds true for the old old pcs, back in the day when you were running windows 3.1, 95, 98, and so yes the myth holds true for newer pc's, so then its not worth if unless you got free time and can get them for free or very very cheap, like a $1 to $5, anf then $5 might be to much.
I was considering a venture turning scrap into gold. After watching this I think I'll find other ways to make money. Thanks for saving me a lot of heartache.
Excellent. This actually gave me an answer to an experiment I tried as a chem freak at about age 15, and that is 60 years ago, when I tried to dissolve gold in aqua-regia. I see that I was just impatient ... honest, it has been bugging me that long. Thanks
It's always good to hear that my video was valuable to a viewer. It's the reason I do this! I wish videos like the ones I produce were available - for free - back when I first started refining eight years ago.
I just got my equipment and I plan to hang around the E-waste dump for a few hours tomorrow. I'm gonna be swimming in free money minus the cost of the chemicals and griffon beakers and the filter flask and my soul
Thank you for the clarification sir. Always seemed like no profit in my opinion. The cost outweighs the profit and disposing of harsh chemicals is an important factor. Aggravating to watch you to go through this effort for loss, thank you for your sacrifice brother.
Honestly for the amount of time that it took to do that. That is not worth wasting your time that is only about $630 worth of gold but it is an awesome video and thank you so much for the lesson you have taught me
Thanks for the vid, it was very informative! Any chance you'd do another vid to show how to process the waste for safe disposal for those who go ahead and go through the process? Just asking for all us packrats with a half dozen dead computers laying around the house!
It would be very interesting to see you add all the costs associated with your process; things like the acids, and other single-use (or minimal-use) products, and then deduct that from the gross value of the finished product so that we can see what kind of NET profit there is.
Wow, a chemistry course in one afternoon! Thanks man, you know your stuff. That button sure was pretty. I've got a ton of old PC boards lying around my garage but sadly, no chem lab to extract the gold. What fascinated me about the subject -is there any way to streamline the extraction process? What about using a torch to melt the gold plating off of the fingers and thereby skipping several steps in the refining process?
I gave up on my experiment after 2 days. Thanks for finishing it all for me to see. I hope you at least got enough views to cover the cost of your time. I subscribed. I was frustrated with you.
Wouldn't heat speed up your AP soln's work? Outstandingly clear video! I wondered why you did not deNox first with Sulfammic acid? Also your aurochloric acid was a bit green, indicating Fe and or Cu? I would have liked to see a Stannous test on your last filtrate solution in the small erlenmeyer flask.
Man! Having a spill sucks,,, those foils are not easy to get up sometimes,, and it’s always disappointing to see the amount of precipitant when it’s all done,, with all that material, one would expect more.... So this is a very good video of how to process the material and what to expect from it,,,Great Job Kadriver
The time I tried that it stunk so bad. Made everything on the porch oxadize then when I went to refine it I used bleach n it just started shooting orange smoke everywhere all over the neighborhood n got the cops called on me so now I don't do all that. I will just collect the gold fingers. That was a learning experience that I don't want to do again. Burnt my nose n skin so bad. Nope not for me.
Thank's for all the information and help, i learn that the only way to have a profit is if we get the scrap for free, today the gram is 50 dlls, 555 dlls against 818.
Great video again, However, The visible gold in any computer is not even a third of the gold it contains, The chips are where most of the gold is stored, but you are right buying fingers to recover gold is never going to be profitable. Love your channel. keep the videos coming. I have 12 kilos of fingers and prob around 20 kilos of chips to process, these are pcs I have had for free. This is a way to make a profit from Pcs. No cost to me other than time breaking them down and collecting the components until ready to process
Now that's the way to do it. As stated in the video, my goal was to get the gold out and purified, then to get you a yield in grams, 1.88 grams of pure gold per 1/2 kilo, that's about what you should get from the fingers.
And also sreetipps can you use iron out instead. Of stumpiut it seems to have some of the same ingredients???? Try it and let me know i watch your videos I’ll be looking for the iron out one
What other options are there to remove the gold from the fingers? could you run all those boards through a shredder (industrial of course) and grind it all up into a powder in a ball mill, then just use aqua regia alone?
Interesting and well done. Most concise vid I have seen on this. One thing you need to consider is cost of Chemicals,electricity, coffee filters, rubber gloves and gas and possibly the cost of equipment used. Everything detracts from profit of any sort including the time spent doing this. I am curious about extracting the base metals [[I assume it is Copper]] from the Acid-Peroxide solution as well. Need to research the melt/Carbonizing temps of the fober board versus Gold-it might be simpler to remove the Fiberboard the turn the Gold into solution verus removing the Gold from the Fiberboard first. I do metal casting/jewelry making, I am still fairly new to the process but my needs for Gold are low so I would simply scavenge gold from electronics then go thru the same process and use it for plating versus trying to mass enough for it to be sold as Gold for profit.
I will watch it. Being Disabled I have all the free time on the planet and no income to do anything with. I trued to become a Gigalo but made more $$ picking upn cans. Tried Comedy-even got compared to some top comedians. People say things like "Compared to Eddie Murphey you really suck." so...making a profit at something for once would be nice. :)
Thanks for the info, when adding in cost of materials to remove the gold and cost of materials to neutralize waste the actual money made is a little less than the spot price of gold per oz.
You are so right. That is a factor, although minor compared to gold worshipping, that definitely effects the price of gold. It reminds me of Germany's plan to extract gold from seawater. I don't know if the were going to buy materiel or destabilize gold. It wasn't remotely cost effective or could ever be.
One thing to consider is, what if the gold pins,fingers, or any computer gold bearing components are free or at little cost. The charge in nitric, filters, electric, and all does not compare. The yield of free time and material and gold in your hand is a great investment to build a crop.
The amount of times I've watched this video. Love it. I have found that you can very easily pull the foils off the card stock with pliers. I think that would save you lots of time and waste.
Beg to differ, ,the old 286, to early pentiums (586?) Has much heavier plating= heavier gold. 15 years doing this, the newer computers are not worth recovering. All that weighing is meaningless, unless I'm missing something important.
You missed nothing. You got the point of the video. While I have no problem refining this type of material, I rarely do it because the yields are so low and the amount of waste that must be treated is high. I like refining material that is up around 50% yields - Karat scrap that my wife gets for me for pennies on the dollar, if you are looking to make a profit.
I have scrapped 8088 XT Clones, and even older PCs and found much higher quantities of gold. Archaic Connor SCSI 2 Mb HDD were vented (non-sealed), the platters were almost pure paladium, and the parts of the heads were solid gold. A single HDD could yield as much as 0.3125 oz of gold.
your videos are outstanding to all .one thing I do to remove foils is a soldering iron and on full heat i scrape all foils off .its much faster and no acids loss .then I remove the base metals after scraping all foils off .love your video's Tim from AUSTRALIA victoria Melbourne .god bless
no supprisetingly it would be a pound in a hour but i remove them off the board's not cut offs .i recon it would be a lot quicker with a flat sharp gass soldering iron .i loved your video but i looked at the fingers and how i slice the fingers off .its like a small hot spatchuler scraping off fingers i recomend you try it as I used to do A.P way but i was to inpatient .in Australia people get all the fingers after scraping them off and just melting a button with all base metals and sell on eBay and people bid like crazy .they do say contains gold but low .but people bid like mad .I've learned heaps from you thanks Tim from AUSTRALIA
sreetips if you utube E waste Ben in AUST removing fingers and pins from finger strip boards its interesting .he is a friend of mine and very clever in e waiste .regards Tim from AUSTRALIA
sreetips he is very clever .i process 25 tons of copper a month in granulation .i have been doing e waiste gold for a few years .tonight I try to drop 80 grams of gold from some old 9ct rings with smb .but no good .stanous chloride test posative gold still in solution .3 beakers 1 dropped beutifull 2 and 3 in scratching my head .can I rack your brain for advice .....
First off great video, love your series, and thanks for helping deter many people from getting into trying to make money from e-waste. It's a dangerous and costly venture and not suitable as a hobby. It takes tons of these materials to make a few hundred grams of gold.
Such a shame about the money loss not to mention the time (over a week just to isolate the gold), chemicals used and your lab set up costs - it seems the scrap sellers are always onto a winner. Great video thanks. I've noticed some other youtubers show an even longer chemical process which refines the gold even more which seems to be an even more pointless and costly nightmare !!!
is it just me... or could this process be made far more less cost and time intensive to use mechanical separation prior to acid bath? A nice aggregate tumbler to reduce the parts, followed by an agitator. Perform the acid bath in a two stage tumbler... should reduce processing from 8 days to no more than 3, and reduce chemical consumption.
James Copeland that’s how large refiners do it ten % higher retune. No smell no mess just sell. That six pounds would of net me 4/5 hundred no waiting no chemicals.
I would start by putting everything through a grinder, then incinerate before acid. I would have helped a lot imo if Sreetips only had cut the fingers into smaller chunks.
Omg... that was ssooo time consuming, if you figure all the chemicals and your time...what a mess! Loved watching you work! Thank you so much...oh yeah, not an easy way to get rich!✌🏼
I was torn on this vid because I'm a fan, I'm also an ewaste scrapper and collector. My 1st year I was able to get over 100 computers all but 4 had CPU's some of them had the I486's and other vintage CPU's and lots of slot cards or what you referred to as cuircut board cards and alot more cuircut boards with nice mlcc's, bga chips, memory chips, and alot of the pins that vary in quality of gold plating. That was just my 1st year. Now I have my friend from church and family bringing me all their computers and electronics. All of my stock I got for free, with very limited spent on gas, 80% of all I have has been dropped at my front door. I feel very fortunate for that. The part that has me torn is the way the process was done. I think more could've been added to the 11g if you processed the 5 plus gallons. I've never done what you do but on the 1st filtering you had an open filter that had a good amount of gold and small gold foils allowed to go straight into the 5 gallon bucket that was not a part of the processing. The one thing I'm glad you pointed out is the prices that was being asked and paid for from eBay. I personally think that $30 to $40 per pound should be the max anyone should try to sell finger for depending on the quality. I sort mine into many different categories according to the quality!!!! I'm very new to your channel and I love it, I was not wanting to put anything that would be looked at as negative. I know I did, I'm hoping if you read this you can correct my thought process on this if it's incorrect in anyway. That will be the only way I can learn. Thank You VERY MUCH for this video!!!!!!
Shane, when I first started refining about 9 years ago I started collecting old PCs. I removed the hard drives, circuit cards, mother boards and power supplies. I accumulated about 20 of them. I got several ounces of trimmed fingers, the CPUs were all junk with very little PMs. One day I looked and my shop was full of all this worthless scrap and I ended up carting it to the dump. I realized that scraping electronics was not worth my time. The yields are just too low and the amount of waste produced was high. Getting the gold from old electronics is fun and I was able to make a few videos but it just not my cup of tea. I like working with karat scrap and Sterling silver. The yields on karat gold is up over 50% depending on the gold content. If I have 100 grams of 14k gold I can expect to recover almost two troy ounces of pure gold. That is what keeps my shop running and allows me to do this as a fun hobby. All the best to you and your family. Thanks for all you comments and thanks for being a wonderful subscriber!
sreetips Thank you for your TIME which is alot to ALL of us as it should be, one of the things in life that is not possible to control, I thank you for sharing your hobby. Mine is ewaste, at least for now. I don't have the ability to purchase scrap gold jewelry and I'm not going to be able to refine till I know I'll be as safe as possible through education from you and anyway I can. Right now as I said I'm getting everything dropped off at my door, free of cost. I'd agree to an extent about computers of the past 15 even 20 years. It's the older ones that have the I486's or Pentium Pros. Which the I486's have more gold than the Pentium Pros. If it's free I'll take it. It's the same with almost all the items & products I'll need to process it, I have the word out, from what I see I'm going to need I have friends and family that are bringing me chemistry supplies now, I'll hold till I'm ready for processing. I'm trying my best to get items that people don't want and I get it at no cost. I won't get into the personal teasins why I'm in the position I'm in, in life. Let's just say it's kind of CRAZY!!!!!!
A few times, while reading comments, I had to scroll back up to the video to make sure it wasn't ol' Presidente George W. Bush .. lol. All jokes aside, GREAT Video! Well worth the watch!
Copper II chloride does the work of dissolving the copper base metal the gold foils are printed on. The copper goes into the solution making it turn green. You can reclaim the copper using steel/iron into the solution which allows you to use the same solution indefinitely. I don't blame sreetips for not making this a regular process because it is hard to make a profit.
Something I found was the duller the gold plating, the thicker the gold. I found an honest scrapper many years ago, and I just sell everything I find to him. Much faster and easier :).
That is a formula for success. This is a direct quote from one of the professional refiners that I learned from, “no matter how trusted the refiner is, eventually they all end up cheating the customer.”
Not important since he was going to aquis the gold of Hydrochloric and Peroxide with first clearing all gold from that green colored acid in his litmus tests in filters then putting all gold into liquid Aqueous (using Nitric Acid this time vs bleach in other experiments) to again filter and then repowder with meth-bisulfe to burn all near 100 percent gold extraction process by process.
"...There's a .25oz of pure gold in every pc..." You're the first person I've ever heard say anything remotely like that. I love watching your videos, but I absolutely hate "mythbusting" videos that claim to be busting "myths" that literally no one is propagating.
Bobby, the price of gold has already exceeded $3100 per Troy ounce. The published spot price is rubbish and can not be relied on to determine the price of your gold.
That's way cool! I've wanted to do this for years but the glassware you use will get the average person put on the government watch list for Meth, PCP, and MDMA making tools... Thanks for sharing!👍👍
Yes youd be surprised how many pcs are thrown away.. but if you're going to break down your own units, go to the scrapyard and buy their scrap pcs for scrap value.
So yeah they are in dumps I'd say don't buy from junk yards as I've never found one to take a loss on the transaction and paying anything over spot metal is too much TBH I have 30 computers broken down 50 t.v T boards gold chip only well in excess of 75 lbs of ram motherboards hi grade boards and can't find a reputable buyer boardsort did respond but said to keep saving so if that amount isn't worth it wth is? Mean scrap yard wants to pay shredder steel price which shows there isn't no money in it I'm telling you the truth it's a rabbit hole better left unexplored! Be safe God bless and happy scrapping!
he puts any waste into one of his stock pots - typically acid that is still good (but may have silver or even a bit of gold in it) may be used on a following project and all of the "waste" he will cement out any copper or other dissolved metals (to keep I think) and balance the pH before draining. He does a really good job of not pouring crap down the drain. He has a few videos where he does process his "stock pot"; i.e. leftovers from other projects not worthy of going after at the time - but once he has enough, it can be worth the chemicals and time (and power bill for the hot plate, fan, etc) to extract any remaining precious metals.
@@geometricart7851 that is one of the things you can use, depending on what you have in solution. More or less, his goal is to cement out any of the metal ions and then neutralize the pH so it is safe to pour down the drain - I say that as some solutions may be acidic and some may be basic depending on specific process used for a given project. Depending on what else remains in the solution would decide what you'd want to use to neutralize the solution - i.e. don't want it to let off chlorine gas unless you plan on it and do it in a fume hood, etc.
The process and procedures in this video were perfect. The Acid/Peroxide method does take a long time, even if you have air bubbling through or if it’s on heat. However, I need to say the title is a slight misleading. This video does not accurately show the amount of gold in a computer, but rather the quick shiny portion of the cards. Other sources of gold in a computer include: - *Card Edges* - *IC black packs* - *Processors (legs and IC components)* - *Pins/Jumpers* - *Miscellaneous connectors with gold plating* - *Hard Drive and CD ROM connectors* - *Flat Wire connector edges* All in all, this video is a narrow scope of the entire entity at hand. Paying to get scrap. Bad idea. Asking friends and family for scrap computers to collect and recycling would net the most money. Build up a pile and separate everything out. Heat sinks, steel cases, wires, certain surface mount components, and recycle that to get money too. People are too focused on GOLD, rather than the entire picture.
@@sreetips I respect that. I’m not getting defensive over your reply. What I’m pointing out, is the title may lead some inexperienced people to believe is the card edges are the only gold in a computer. 👍 great work on the silver cell series. Your videos are very thorough.
Without giving too much away, my career revolves around computers. "Newer" computers (post 2000ish) are virtually worthless as far as gold content. If you want high yield, you HAVE to get older computers. Older the better. Older PCs use much heavier gold plating on everything. Sometimes if you're lucky, components are solid gold. Fingers aren't the only source of gold. IC chips, pins, and processors also have gold and a decent amount of silver. Now I can't say whether or not purchasing old computer scrap is worth it or not. Luckily because of my career, I get mountains of ancient computer scrap for free and make quite a bit of money off it as well. :) I will say that getting gold off fingers is the worst. It's every bit as bad as sreetips says it is. Not exactly sure why it took so long to get the gold off the fingers though. I can generally get it done in less than a day. The reason I got into gold salvaging is because of sreetips. I learned almost everything I know about it from him. Thank you to Mr. sreetips. You're videos are the best!
In general I like your videos, but this time I noticed too many mistakes, discrepancies, too many unnecessary steps and too much unnecessary waste. You created 5 gallons (20 Litres) of waste to refine 11 grams of gold to probably no more than .995 fines. Hydrogen peroxide isn't that important, because reaction will start on its own just with bubbler. Your solution was far from exhausted and did't need any interference, before all foils were freed. Why filtering two times, creating ball of filters to dissolve. Foils are very easy to decant, in the worst case, you need just one small filter. I don't filter foils at all. Just decant them, and those minuscule amounts missed, I catch in my stock pot. No steering after addition of chemicals. No denoxing. The headline is "How much gold in a scrap PC" I watched this video because I expected to see some numbers. Only numbers you mentioned were about trimmed fingers. You were surprised about 1.88 grams/pound yield. Fingers you bought were most likely from older computers, which you didn't mention. New material yields about 1 gram/pound, as you expected. I believe that you have enough experience to avoid these mistakes. For people rushing into this hobby, I consider this very bad direction. Sorry for criticizing you this way, I just want you to realize that some hobbyists have no idea at all abut this process and will follow it exactly, not realizing that there is better and cheaper way, specially in countries where people pay large premium for chemicals needed. Thanks for your understanding.
Emma Lopez it would be the same process as it’ll still be a circuit board/processor your dealing with only way smaller which means less yield per unit and a lot more work breaking down the phones if I remember correctly a mobile phone has only about 0.03g so about 40 mobiles for just over 1g return
In my early life I worked at as both the assay chemist and the production chemist for a precious metals refiner/recycler. The thing that most people do not realize is that the gold plating on these parts varies depending on when, where and for what purpose the boards were made. When we recycled the gold from the circuit card edges of some of the old IBM mainframes we found they were 100 mil thick plate. When we recycled gold off of more modern consumer electronics many times the parts were just flash plated to look like gold plating. For example the gold on your lightning connector for apple products is good heavy gold plate. However the cheap charger cords you get at the gas station snack shop are gold flashed. You will know the difference when the cheap cords stop working a lot faster than the quality apple product. So story short we never bought scrap from scrappers without doing an assay. I would never buy from an unknown person without doing an assay and being able to sample from the bulk bin. Even then we often got shorted. It is a hard business.
WERRY NICE ,,, A GOOD JOB BRO , THANK YOU lovely 2 try your way of making gold out of pc matriell and fingers . love from norway , and thank u for this movie .
Great video, very informative but i see some room for improvement in the process to make it more efficient.. Might try it since i have a lot of computer parts laying around🤔
While I am super impressed by the sheer raw chemistry that everyone has made in trying to refine the precious metals... What really interests me is the plastics, acids, and other wastes that we generate in recycling on the process to getting gold. ... Not sure if you have made a dedicated video for your waste practices besides brief excerpts as it comes up, but it would be interesting if you were to attempt to recover pure carbon from plastic, highly concentrate your nitric or hydrochloric acids, or find other uses to treat the mass of stock and waste that could be formed from these chemical endeavors. :) Great work, as always! :D
wow you spent alot just to help out randoms you never met. ive liked and subscribed because your devotion deserves it.
Thanks Dean
sreetips you sir are a beaken of light when it comes to the merky world of gold reclamation from E-WASTE and otherwise.
I appreciate that.
@@sreetips really much of devotion here!
By the way I would never ever in my life dealt with them in this way(except for demonstration only which I suppose is the exact reason why you did it so)-I always treat such stuff with plain simple nitric acid-I guess that even for such quantity of them 100 ml of 68% nitric diluted with enough water to just cover all that stuff would have been enough just because the quantity of copper on which gold is plated on is actually fairly low-not more than 10 times the amount of gold on them-so anyway it's by far faster and also generate far less waste and after all when I would have disposed of plastic shit rendering it without any foils by simply rinsing them-I would have been using some part of the same waste solution of copper nitrate(obviously after evaporating it down to couple hundred ml) to make aqua regia for already dissolving gold foils just since all that stuff is already dirty like fuck but HCl converts copper nitrate to copper chloride anyway so it just means that I would need only to use a little bit more HCl to dissolve everything..And the only problem after all is just the formation of damn ungodly copper monochloride during precipitation but it is easily fixable..
By the way it seems to me that I am doing something wrong with the step of precipitating gold with SMB in my own solutions just because I always get a bunch of copper monochloride and presuming that all the gold is already precipitated I pour the solution into a waste bucket and simply deal with copper monochloride by leaching it with HCl leaving gold behind but when I recently decided to drop most of the copper from the waste solution with zinc-I noticed that there was also quite a lot of gold dropped as well so I did recover more than a gram of gold from my waste bucket which is actually unbelievable!So can you please tell me what am I doing wrong and how to fix it?I really hate that copper monochloride crap so much for now and so I am puzzled how to precipitate gold without that shit and what is most important is how to precipitate all of the gold in one step?
I've never used nitric to lift the foils so I've never experienced the problems that you are having. No experience to share with this.
Thank you for providing the information, great work. Modern electronics ( the last 20 years) has reduced the gold thickness on plated fingers to 1 micron or less. Gold from 1930 - 1990 started off from 5 microns thickness, military standards specified 5 microns so old military and government equipment is where the money is, I knew a company in the UK that searched out old military and telephone exchange equipment to salvage gold.
Keep up the good work!
Is it profitable now if I purchase motherboards or other electronic components in bulk quantity in cheap price??
@@vibhorejaiswal2997 if the boards are free it's worth it
@@tomvarley4344 no not free but in minimum prices like in per kg price .
I know ppl who sell motherboards etc.in ton quantity.
Plz reply
@@vibhorejaiswal2997 no its not. Thats the WHOLE POINT of this video. sheesh. If you get them free then the small amount you make, after subtacting chemicals, waste and electricity and time 'might' be worth it depending on how little you value your time and if you dont have a normal job but otherwise .... NO!
To completely bust that myth you should actually get an older PC and see how much you can get from it.. I would recommend an older one with older ISA slots (486 of older maybe).
Gold can be found in the following areas.
Fingers of the cards (Video cards, Ram, Modems, Drive controllers, Network card, and on 286 PC's you have a memory board)
IDE and Floppy ports - Pins on motherboard and the drives.
Other random pins on motherboard for various connections
Jumpers.. Easy to overlook, but the older jumpers were gold plated. (Use a pick tool to remove)
Processor and the IC chips - Remove IC chips from PCB with heat gun and a scrapper.
Ram fingers and the IC chips on the ram (IC chips can have gold wiring inside them)
Pins inside the ISA/PCI/VLB/RAM slots - Remove slot with heat gun (Heat from back of board), then pick pins out of connector (Yes, it sucks)
Inside the drives - Pins, gold contacts on the drives, some Hard drives even have gold wiring on the heads.
Brand of PC matters.. Brands like Sony don't have a lot of gold.. but brands like HP or IBM tend to have more.
As for the myth,, I think a REALLY old PC, the type with tons of expansion boards and lots of slots "might" come close.. The newer PCs,, No way.. Maybe a half a gram tops in a newer desktop PC.
Not only that, but the yield in gold from a single scrap PC would be minuscule. Almost nothing.
@@sreetips I agree.
But if you are looking for gold in a PC, age and brand play a HUGE factor in how much gold was used.
That's why I was saying to maybe look into a REALLY old, early to mid 90's PC if you can find one. Maybe even a 286 from the 80's. Instead of everything being built into the motherboard, they used a lot more expansion cards, and hence also had more expansion slots. Those old ISA expansion slots had larger pins in them as well.
But, yeah, a new-ish PC made in the last couple decades, with PCI slots, has a much smaller amount of gold in them.
@@JohnD-JohnD But those would always be worth more in parts than in gold. They have collector's value and evne if they didn't you'd be hard pressed to consistently find them.
@@trevor245
eh.. If they are functional,, maybe..
The laptops that have the most gold are Dell.
Still its verry little.You might a gram of gold from 10 laptops but thats a lot of work to get it out.
On older PCs with ceramic processors,only the processir has one third or more of a gram.Add the gold corner BGA ,add the RAM ics and all the ics from the board( they have thin but massive gold wires inside,not plated).
On top of that you might get a gram of palladium wich is more expensive than a gram of gold from 10 laptops.
For a beginner i reccomend buing ram sticks as cheap as possible at flea markets.Those are the easyest to get and to process.
I gotta give you props for dedication and determination. I don't think I've got it in me to do that. Thanks for the video.
Also in your calculations, you haven't even considered the costs of chemicals, nor utilities, nor cost of disposal. It seems even more of a loss. Thanks for the video.
Did it as science....
@@OldSkoolF did it also as a demonstration to others who are thinking about doing this themselves as a way of making money.
because of that, you have to factor in the cost of materials used, as well as time invested and the possible costs of correct disposal.
@@surebrec5113 I got it the first vid I watched of his.... Just in time its a tough sell..
Was the first thing i thought of lol, guess he'll make it back in views and potential donations though
@@surebrec5113 And...all the proper equipment to do it safely!!!
ha! just watched this 6 year old video…..and that gold button is NOW worth $950. All u had to do is wait 6 years to make a profit:-)
If course,I know you werent planning in making a profit in the gold when u first made this video.
A great,and laborious,video and process. Thx Sreetips!
x
Mr.Sreetips great teacher,i learn a lot from your videos.now i have my little lab at home,and after few times i finaly get my first gold buttom of 3,6g 22k gold from 700g mixed e-scrap🙂.its not pure,need to be refined 1 or 2 times more,but finaly i get that from e-scrap.thanks for great videos.
Moral of the story just save up the gold fingers and sell them to a sucker !
That is the point of the video. But I have noticed that prices for the trimmed fingers have come down substantially. Maybe my video is helping make that happen.
Poor ignorance is sweet to people that have the sense to exploit it's unseen value!
@Kenny Coultrap Or you know, the public education system!
You are a sucker for even thinking that.
Just the time ,effort and knowing what you’re doing is mind boggling . I’m a coin Roll hunter and just search boxes of coins for silver, error and the 2019 West Point quarters. I’ve been posting my finds if you want to see what you can find in those boxes . Thanks for sharing that video. Wow !!!
You're amazing I wish I had you as a uncle growing up . Nice job on the video
One of the best and most informative videos I've ever seen. I don't have what it takes to do this. Your knowledge is impressive, and I think I'm better off just selling the scrap gold I collect to somebody that has the facility to process all those chemicals.
This was a lifelong quest of a forward thinking great uncle, so I'm told.
Now I know in about an hour. Thanks, Mr Sreetips!
Glad I caught this video before going into electronic scraping. Thank you for sharing your skill and knowledge.
Gold is everywhere, dinnerware can contain heavy gold plating, gold plated jewelry anything gold plated. You're not just limited to e scrap
@@thatguysson8241 And when you get the scrap for free the profits are considerable.
@@m1a1abrams93 where are you selling ND what quantity do you take there ? Please any info would help out greatly good luck and happy scrapping!
That was a fabulous video - straightforward and totally honest and most of all you 've got a scientific turn of mind. From my own experience, I would only suggest that you replace HCl 30% by vinegar 8% acetic acid in order to speed up the stripping process. The problem associated with using concentrated hydrochloric acid is that your hydrogen peroxide gets decomposed too quickly and is no longer available to act as an oxidant to drive the reaction. 48 hours stripping would be fine. In the final analysis you succeeded in isolating gold in a cost effective way using as little as possible nitric acid HNO3 which is a GREAT ACHIEVEMENT Congratulations !
when watching this video he makes it look easy trust me its because of the time he has spent learning the process and his setup. great video
Excellent video! You answers so many questions about extracting gold from computers.
Very cool process. It's a real shame that this isn't a more economically viable way to make some extra cash on the side. Thank you for going through all the trouble to do this experiment, especially since your taking a huge loss. I for one appreciate it.
I scrapped a few computers past years and built one from scrap as you can see on my YT channel. In this batch there are also a lot of goldfingers from I think proces controllers...not computers. You should know there are many gold containing parts in a PC besides the goldfingers. All the pins in IDE and ATI cables,HDD an CDROM drive connectors. memory chips and sockets, CPU pins and sockets, USB and PS1 connectors, BCA chips etc...but I get you need many different procesae to retrieve the gold.
This ^^^ You are right that you need alot of computers to recover a meaningful amount of gold but this video isn't proof of anything. Theres quite a bit more gold in PCs than what you find on the fingers and these fingers arnt really representative of a typical PC, they look like fingers from older rack mount equipment of some kind. Stick to the refining stuff (which you do really well) and less of the clickbait please, its just a video about recovering gold from fingers with AP..
If I'm not mistaken even the monolithic ceramic capacitors contain some gold.
But I do think that indeed most of the gold can be found in the goldfingers. New techniques also braught down the amount of gold contacts contain. E waste Ben melted down 500 RAM gold fingers and analyzed the compositon of the resulting aloy.
If it's industrial type of stuff that is probably the main reason of the bigger than expected yield I bet.
You guys should collect some scrap PCs and try to recover the gold for yourselves. Then, and only then, will you be able to comment on how much yield you can expect from this type of escrap. I don't do it because there are other types of scrap that produce much higher yields. Escrap is a dead end as far as I'm concerned, a waste of time, unless you want millions of views on youtube!
@@sreetips millions of views....that could be where the money is!
Good accurate information to reference to when weighing up my own adventures which no matter what the costs, effort or results end up being, I have never lost out even with what can be seen as a failure. The experience, knowledge and refinement of technique that you can get is worth a priceless sum that is achieved only when you actually do it!
Eventually like streetips it becomes a skill not anyone with chemicals can do... Well.!
Great channel.
Thank you so much for making this video because like so many others I was planning on scrapping computers to recover the precious metals. Needless to say disappointing to learn the truth, however, invaluable information and so thankful that you made this video!!!
If you don’t have to buy the scrap in the first place then the only costs are the acids and the time to process it so it could be worth it’s weight in gold pardon the pun
Very educational and entertaining. Lots of hard work. I appreciate you sharing!
Depending on the computers age . The combination of the processors, IC chips, pins, and fingers may yield up to 1% - 4 % by weight for each component. Slot card fingers contain the least amount of gold on computers.
Which parts contain the most gold?
@@PaulCoty big black square chips have gold microwires in it.
ICs other than high end microprocessors rarely have any gold on the ins AT ALL.
After watching how much you spent in the start of the video I let the ads play through, I've also subscribed. thank you for this!
Thank you
If anybody was wondering the gold button is worth around $550 so yeah he lost $250 but as he said he didn’t do it to make money but a very well Informative video thanks 😊 keep up the good work 👍🏻
He also lost money in time, materials and electricity
I'm sure he gets money from his videos. He more than earns it
actually your only correct to a certain point, newer computers dont have much in them, that is where your are correct, but if you stumble on to a huge stockpile of old desktop pcs like i did, with ceramic cpu's with solid gold pins and wiring, not plated, old hard drives with solid gold pieces weighing .6 grams+ alone, not to mention the pins are heavily plated much more then any other pins, not to mention that it has several ic;s and eeproms that have solid gold wiring, and the the ceramic chips with gold or gold plated caps. what makes the 1/4 ounce myth true is if your dealing with old pc's. the gold plating tech sucked bad back so in the begining things were much more heavily plated back then, then they are nowadays, and and has been very skimpy for the last 30 to 35 years. so the whole key is to buy old desktop towers and dismantle them yourselves, dont bother with the monitors, but the must be old, like back when a 33mhz cpu with was the bomb and having 16mb a ram was godlike lol. i dismanteled 8 old desktops, ill post the finishing total weight when finsihed, there are so many different karats to deal with, ill combine everything, and purify it to .999, then ill post the total weight. im retired so i have lots of spare time, and it is time consuming so you have top consider that too, if you have the time, but when I bought 200 old desktop towers for $200, im pretty sure ill make around a $100 a tower scrapping gold out of all parts, and that being conservative, so the myth holds true for the old old pcs, back in the day when you were running windows 3.1, 95, 98, and so yes the myth holds true for newer pc's, so then its not worth if unless you got free time and can get them for free or very very cheap, like a $1 to $5, anf then $5 might be to much.
you must be nuts if you think you are going to make $100 per computer...
Thanks for proving this i hope you recouped all the money they cost you i have learned alot from your videos
I was considering a venture turning scrap into gold. After watching this I think I'll find other ways to make money. Thanks for saving me a lot of heartache.
I don’t refine much computer scrap because the yields are so low
Thanks sreetips. Maybe I'll try my hand at panning!
You give towards people correct information for about gold from computer scraps etc. Appreciate...
thanx for the effort and cost, to show us! I found the procedure interesting ;-) !
My new favorite channel. Streetips
Excellent. This actually gave me an answer to an experiment I tried as a chem freak at about age 15, and that is 60 years ago, when I tried to dissolve gold in aqua-regia. I see that I was just impatient ... honest, it has been bugging me that long. Thanks
It's always good to hear that my video was valuable to a viewer. It's the reason I do this! I wish videos like the ones I produce were available - for free - back when I first started refining eight years ago.
i am into recovery and recycle business..I like your good explanation old is gold thank you very much
I just got my equipment and I plan to hang around the E-waste dump for a few hours tomorrow. I'm gonna be swimming in free money minus the cost of the chemicals and griffon beakers and the filter flask and my soul
Thank you for the clarification sir. Always seemed like no profit in my opinion. The cost outweighs the profit and disposing of harsh chemicals is an important factor.
Aggravating to watch you to go through this effort for loss, thank you for your sacrifice brother.
That's because he bought the things off of ebay. Go to an E-waste dump and gather them yourself and you'll be making profit for sure
Thanks for this informative video, I was thinking of doing this work but now I know what's involved, I wont do this work.
Honestly for the amount of time that it took to do that. That is not worth wasting your time that is only about $630 worth of gold but it is an awesome video and thank you so much for the lesson you have taught me
Agree
Thanks for teaching me your profession. I'm enamored and look forward to your other videos!
You're a very good chemist, thank you for sharing this.
Thanks for the vid, it was very informative! Any chance you'd do another vid to show how to process the waste for safe disposal for those who go ahead and go through the process? Just asking for all us packrats with a half dozen dead computers laying around the house!
It would be very interesting to see you add all the costs associated with your process; things like the acids, and other single-use (or minimal-use) products, and then deduct that from the gross value of the finished product so that we can see what kind of NET profit there is.
You are providing a public service like the men who destroy the scammer call centers in India. You are also a great chemist.
Wow, a chemistry course in one afternoon! Thanks man, you know your stuff. That button sure was pretty. I've got a ton of old PC boards lying around my garage but sadly, no chem lab to extract the gold.
What fascinated me about the subject -is there any way to streamline the extraction process? What about using a torch to melt the gold plating off of the fingers and thereby skipping several steps in the refining process?
Acid peroxide recovery and hcl/bleach refining is the easier, softer way
what the hell you think the fingers are made out of that a torch wouldn’t melt?!
You give it a try and let us know how it works.
Yeah you will prolly vaporize what ever your burning. Waste of Ebay money...
thank you so much as all ways great show i really aperecate the effort
I gave up on my experiment after 2 days. Thanks for finishing it all for me to see. I hope you at least got enough views to cover the cost of your time. I subscribed. I was frustrated with you.
Welcome. Computer scrap contains gold. But the yields are small and the amount of waste is high. For these reasons, I rarely process escrap anymore.
You're so patient showing this you deserve a million thumbs up if I had a million I would give them to you
Wouldn't heat speed up your AP soln's work? Outstandingly clear video! I wondered why you did not deNox first with Sulfammic acid? Also your aurochloric acid was a bit green, indicating Fe and or Cu? I would have liked to see a Stannous test on your last filtrate solution in the small erlenmeyer flask.
Those are cu and thin sputter gold on that. So you are right with color.
Is it possible any of the board dye made it through the process?
No, the green is from copper. Gold in solution appears yellow. Copper in solution appears blue. Yellow and blue make green.
I like your good explanation. I subscribed. Greetings from Germany
Do you think that I could get more views if I translated my video to German?
I believe you could get millions of views if you translated to arabic language and I can help you
Excellent video. Very very informative. Excellently done. Very professional. Lots of important information.
Excellent! Thank you.
Man! Having a spill sucks,,, those foils are not easy to get up sometimes,, and it’s always disappointing to see the amount of precipitant when it’s all done,, with all that material, one would expect more.... So this is a very good video of how to process the material and what to expect from it,,,Great Job Kadriver
Awesome videos on your channel! I only see one problem...there are still several spaces where you haven't written "SREETIPS" in sharpie...lol...
Lmao!!!😂😂
The time I tried that it stunk so bad. Made everything on the porch oxadize then when I went to refine it I used bleach n it just started shooting orange smoke everywhere all over the neighborhood n got the cops called on me so now I don't do all that. I will just collect the gold fingers. That was a learning experience that I don't want to do again. Burnt my nose n skin so bad. Nope not for me.
Thank's for all the information and help, i learn that the only way to have a profit is if we get the scrap for free, today the gram is 50 dlls, 555 dlls against 818.
Thank you very much for your breakdown and the headache you indored to save us all the trouble of having to find out the hard way I commend you sir
Can you define the word indored for us?
Great video again, However, The visible gold in any computer is not even a third of the gold it contains, The chips are where most of the gold is stored, but you are right buying fingers to recover gold is never going to be profitable. Love your channel. keep the videos coming. I have 12 kilos of fingers and prob around 20 kilos of chips to process, these are pcs I have had for free. This is a way to make a profit from Pcs. No cost to me other than time breaking them down and collecting the components until ready to process
Now that's the way to do it. As stated in the video, my goal was to get the gold out and purified, then to get you a yield in grams, 1.88 grams of pure gold per 1/2 kilo, that's about what you should get from the fingers.
and you did that :)
Is there any way to precipitate silver without using nitric acid
And also sreetipps can you use iron out instead. Of stumpiut it seems to have some of the same ingredients???? Try it and let me know i watch your videos I’ll be looking for the iron out one
Sulfuric acid will dissolve silver, but it doesn't do it very well.
What other options are there to remove the gold from the fingers? could you run all those boards through a shredder (industrial of course) and grind it all up into a powder in a ball mill, then just use aqua regia alone?
Yes, shredding them would create greater surface area. But turning to powder and going Aqua- you will waste plenty of nitric acid on the plastic.
Interesting and well done. Most concise vid I have seen on this. One thing you need to consider is cost of Chemicals,electricity, coffee filters, rubber gloves and gas and possibly the cost of equipment used. Everything detracts from profit of any sort including the time spent doing this. I am curious about extracting the base metals [[I assume it is Copper]] from the Acid-Peroxide solution as well. Need to research the melt/Carbonizing temps of the fober board versus Gold-it might be simpler to remove the Fiberboard the turn the Gold into solution verus removing the Gold from the Fiberboard first. I do metal casting/jewelry making, I am still fairly new to the process but my needs for Gold are low so I would simply scavenge gold from electronics then go thru the same process and use it for plating versus trying to mass enough for it to be sold as Gold for profit.
I've got a new video uploading right now that shows how to make a profit refining precious metals
I will watch it. Being Disabled I have all the free time on the planet and no income to do anything with. I trued to become a Gigalo but made more $$ picking upn cans. Tried Comedy-even got compared to some top comedians. People say things like "Compared to Eddie Murphey you really suck." so...making a profit at something for once would be nice. :)
Thanks for the info, when adding in cost of materials to remove the gold and cost of materials to neutralize waste the actual money made is a little less than the spot price of gold per oz.
You are so right. That is a factor, although minor compared to gold worshipping, that definitely effects the price of gold.
It reminds me of Germany's plan to extract gold from seawater. I don't know if the were going to buy materiel or destabilize gold. It wasn't remotely cost effective or could ever be.
Sounds like gold processing with extra steps.
Yeah, I can see why large scale recyclers just grind up the boards...
One thing to consider is, what if the gold pins,fingers, or any computer gold bearing components are free or at little cost. The charge in nitric, filters, electric, and all does not compare. The yield of free time and material and gold in your hand is a great investment to build a crop.
The amount of times I've watched this video. Love it. I have found that you can very easily pull the foils off the card stock with pliers. I think that would save you lots of time and waste.
Save time? It would take him 6 years to pull every piece off. That's what the acid is for.
Beg to differ, ,the old 286, to early pentiums (586?) Has much heavier plating= heavier gold. 15 years doing this, the newer computers are not worth recovering. All that weighing is meaningless, unless I'm missing something important.
You missed nothing. You got the point of the video. While I have no problem refining this type of material, I rarely do it because the yields are so low and the amount of waste that must be treated is high. I like refining material that is up around 50% yields - Karat scrap that my wife gets for me for pennies on the dollar, if you are looking to make a profit.
I have scrapped 8088 XT Clones, and even older PCs and found much higher quantities of gold. Archaic Connor SCSI 2 Mb HDD were vented (non-sealed), the platters were almost pure paladium, and the parts of the heads were solid gold. A single HDD could yield as much as 0.3125 oz of gold.
@@JFDhater You mean 20mb hdd..?
@@deavman no. 2 Mb. 2048 kb.
@@deavman and that is a typo about the palladium also. the platters were almost pure platinum.
WOW... very interesting.
Subbed 👍
your videos are outstanding to all .one thing I do to remove foils is a soldering iron and on full heat i scrape all foils off .its much faster and no acids loss .then I remove the base metals after scraping all foils off .love your video's Tim from AUSTRALIA victoria Melbourne .god bless
Scraping the foils off with an iron must take a while.
no supprisetingly it would be a pound in a hour but i remove them off the board's not cut offs .i recon it would be a lot quicker with a flat sharp gass soldering iron .i loved your video but i looked at the fingers and how i slice the fingers off .its like a small hot spatchuler scraping off fingers i recomend you try it as I used to do A.P way but i was to inpatient .in Australia people get all the fingers after scraping them off and just melting a button with all base metals and sell on eBay and people bid like crazy .they do say contains gold but low .but people bid like mad .I've learned heaps from you thanks Tim from AUSTRALIA
sreetips if you utube E waste Ben in AUST removing fingers and pins from finger strip boards its interesting .he is a friend of mine and very clever in e waiste .regards Tim from AUSTRALIA
I've seen his videos. He's a genius.
sreetips he is very clever .i process 25 tons of copper a month in granulation .i have been doing e waiste gold for a few years .tonight I try to drop 80 grams of gold from some old 9ct rings with smb .but no good .stanous chloride test posative gold still in solution .3 beakers 1 dropped beutifull 2 and 3 in scratching my head .can I rack your brain for advice .....
Its no wonder I watch your videos! Not only do I learn your science from these, but I learn what is going to give gold and what won't.
Dislikes are from ebay sellers that you just exposed lol
Thanks sir
First off great video, love your series, and thanks for helping deter many people from getting into trying to make money from e-waste. It's a dangerous and costly venture and not suitable as a hobby. It takes tons of these materials to make a few hundred grams of gold.
Such a shame about the money loss not to mention the time (over a week just to isolate the gold), chemicals used and your lab set up costs - it seems the scrap sellers are always onto a winner. Great video thanks. I've noticed some other youtubers show an even longer chemical process which refines the gold even more which seems to be an even more pointless and costly nightmare !!!
is it just me... or could this process be made far more less cost and time intensive to use mechanical separation prior to acid bath?
A nice aggregate tumbler to reduce the parts, followed by an agitator. Perform the acid bath in a two stage tumbler... should reduce processing from 8 days to no more than 3, and reduce chemical consumption.
James Copeland that’s how large refiners do it ten % higher retune. No smell no mess just sell. That six pounds would of net me 4/5 hundred no waiting no chemicals.
I would start by putting everything through a grinder, then incinerate before acid.
I would have helped a lot imo if Sreetips only had cut the fingers into smaller chunks.
Holy Shee-it! Count Dracula here has really struck gold!
Omg... that was ssooo time consuming, if you figure all the chemicals and your time...what a mess! Loved watching you work! Thank you so much...oh yeah, not an easy way to get rich!✌🏼
I was torn on this vid because I'm a fan, I'm also an ewaste scrapper and collector. My 1st year I was able to get over 100 computers all but 4 had CPU's some of them had the I486's and other vintage CPU's and lots of slot cards or what you referred to as cuircut board cards and alot more cuircut boards with nice mlcc's, bga chips, memory chips, and alot of the pins that vary in quality of gold plating. That was just my 1st year. Now I have my friend from church and family bringing me all their computers and electronics. All of my stock I got for free, with very limited spent on gas, 80% of all I have has been dropped at my front door. I feel very fortunate for that. The part that has me torn is the way the process was done. I think more could've been added to the 11g if you processed the 5 plus gallons. I've never done what you do but on the 1st filtering you had an open filter that had a good amount of gold and small gold foils allowed to go straight into the 5 gallon bucket that was not a part of the processing. The one thing I'm glad you pointed out is the prices that was being asked and paid for from eBay. I personally think that $30 to $40 per pound should be the max anyone should try to sell finger for depending on the quality. I sort mine into many different categories according to the quality!!!!
I'm very new to your channel and I love it, I was not wanting to put anything that would be looked at as negative. I know I did, I'm hoping if you read this you can correct my thought process on this if it's incorrect in anyway. That will be the only way I can learn. Thank You VERY MUCH for this video!!!!!!
Shane, when I first started refining about 9 years ago I started collecting old PCs. I removed the hard drives, circuit cards, mother boards and power supplies. I accumulated about 20 of them. I got several ounces of trimmed fingers, the CPUs were all junk with very little PMs. One day I looked and my shop was full of all this worthless scrap and I ended up carting it to the dump. I realized that scraping electronics was not worth my time. The yields are just too low and the amount of waste produced was high. Getting the gold from old electronics is fun and I was able to make a few videos but it just not my cup of tea. I like working with karat scrap and Sterling silver. The yields on karat gold is up over 50% depending on the gold content. If I have 100 grams of 14k gold I can expect to recover almost two troy ounces of pure gold. That is what keeps my shop running and allows me to do this as a fun hobby. All the best to you and your family. Thanks for all you comments and thanks for being a wonderful subscriber!
sreetips
Thank you for your TIME which is alot to ALL of us as it should be, one of the things in life that is not possible to control, I thank you for sharing your hobby. Mine is ewaste, at least for now. I don't have the ability to purchase scrap gold jewelry and I'm not going to be able to refine till I know I'll be as safe as possible through education from you and anyway I can. Right now as I said I'm getting everything dropped off at my door, free of cost. I'd agree to an extent about computers of the past 15 even 20 years. It's the older ones that have the I486's or Pentium Pros. Which the I486's have more gold than the Pentium Pros. If it's free I'll take it.
It's the same with almost all the items & products I'll need to process it, I have the word out, from what I see I'm going to need I have friends and family that are bringing me chemistry supplies now, I'll hold till I'm ready for processing. I'm trying my best to get items that people don't want and I get it at no cost. I won't get into the personal teasins why I'm in the position I'm in, in life. Let's just say it's kind of CRAZY!!!!!!
I get that many fingers on the way to work!
Some are worth gold.🤣🤣🤣🤣
A few times, while reading comments, I had to scroll back up to the video to make sure it wasn't ol' Presidente George W. Bush .. lol. All jokes aside, GREAT Video! Well worth the watch!
Copper II chloride does the work of dissolving the copper base metal the gold foils are printed on. The copper goes into the solution making it turn green. You can reclaim the copper using steel/iron into the solution which allows you to use the same solution indefinitely. I don't blame sreetips for not making this a regular process because it is hard to make a profit.
Something I found was the duller the gold plating, the thicker the gold. I found an honest scrapper many years ago, and I just sell everything I find to him. Much faster and easier :).
That is a formula for success. This is a direct quote from one of the professional refiners that I learned from, “no matter how trusted the refiner is, eventually they all end up cheating the customer.”
would have been interesting to know how much the foil weighed when dry
Not important since he was going to aquis the gold of Hydrochloric and Peroxide with first clearing all gold from that green colored acid in his litmus tests in filters then putting all gold into liquid Aqueous (using Nitric Acid this time vs bleach in other experiments) to again filter and then repowder with meth-bisulfe to burn all near 100 percent gold extraction process by process.
"...There's a .25oz of pure gold in every pc..."
You're the first person I've ever heard say anything remotely like that. I love watching your videos, but I absolutely hate "mythbusting" videos that claim to be busting "myths" that literally no one is propagating.
Had to go back 4 yrs. to find it but now I will rethink my electronic gold refining. Those watches and other jewelry pieces looking better now.
Electronics contain gold or else they would stop working in a few days. But the amount is tiny.
@@sreetips When gold goes to 3000.00 it will pay to harvest, until then I'll bank it in it's current form.
Bobby, the price of gold has already exceeded $3100 per Troy ounce. The published spot price is rubbish and can not be relied on to determine the price of your gold.
That's way cool! I've wanted to do this for years but the glassware you use will get the average person put on the government watch list for Meth, PCP, and MDMA making tools... Thanks for sharing!👍👍
Thousands of listings for lab glassware on eBay....
Yeah, never was worth buying pc scrap, but if you can get it for free why not! (Dumpster diving)
do people actually toss their computers in the trash? Isn't that Environmentally insensitive?
@@geometricart7851 some do =d u should go to a dump u prob will find some parts =d
Yes youd be surprised how many pcs are thrown away.. but if you're going to break down your own units, go to the scrapyard and buy their scrap pcs for scrap value.
@@geometricart7851 stfu
So yeah they are in dumps I'd say don't buy from junk yards as I've never found one to take a loss on the transaction and paying anything over spot metal is too much TBH I have 30 computers broken down 50 t.v T boards gold chip only well in excess of 75 lbs of ram motherboards hi grade boards and can't find a reputable buyer boardsort did respond but said to keep saving so if that amount isn't worth it wth is? Mean scrap yard wants to pay shredder steel price which shows there isn't no money in it I'm telling you the truth it's a rabbit hole better left unexplored! Be safe God bless and happy scrapping!
What do you do with the leftover chemicals used in all your experiments?
he puts any waste into one of his stock pots - typically acid that is still good (but may have silver or even a bit of gold in it) may be used on a following project and all of the "waste" he will cement out any copper or other dissolved metals (to keep I think) and balance the pH before draining. He does a really good job of not pouring crap down the drain. He has a few videos where he does process his "stock pot"; i.e. leftovers from other projects not worthy of going after at the time - but once he has enough, it can be worth the chemicals and time (and power bill for the hot plate, fan, etc) to extract any remaining precious metals.
didn't you watch the video he reuses it.
@@chouseification also you can neutralize acids with sodium bicarbonate right?
@@geometricart7851 that is one of the things you can use, depending on what you have in solution.
More or less, his goal is to cement out any of the metal ions and then neutralize the pH so it is safe to pour down the drain - I say that as some solutions may be acidic and some may be basic depending on specific process used for a given project.
Depending on what else remains in the solution would decide what you'd want to use to neutralize the solution - i.e. don't want it to let off chlorine gas unless you plan on it and do it in a fume hood, etc.
@@geometricart7851 yeah, but after that?
The process and procedures in this video were perfect. The Acid/Peroxide method does take a long time, even if you have air bubbling through or if it’s on heat.
However, I need to say the title is a slight misleading. This video does not accurately show the amount of gold in a computer, but rather the quick shiny portion of the cards.
Other sources of gold in a computer include:
- *Card Edges*
- *IC black packs*
- *Processors (legs and IC components)*
- *Pins/Jumpers*
- *Miscellaneous connectors with gold plating*
- *Hard Drive and CD ROM connectors*
- *Flat Wire connector edges*
All in all, this video is a narrow scope of the entire entity at hand.
Paying to get scrap. Bad idea. Asking friends and family for scrap computers to collect and recycling would net the most money.
Build up a pile and separate everything out. Heat sinks, steel cases, wires, certain surface mount components, and recycle that to get money too.
People are too focused on GOLD, rather than the entire picture.
I don’t refine escrap anymore because the yields are too low and the amount of waste is high.
@@sreetips I respect that. I’m not getting defensive over your reply. What I’m pointing out, is the title may lead some inexperienced people to believe is the card edges are the only gold in a computer.
👍 great work on the silver cell series. Your videos are very thorough.
Good point, thank you
Thank you for the video. It was cool to see.. Some think there is a lot of gold in a computer but they don't really know.
Without giving too much away, my career revolves around computers. "Newer" computers (post 2000ish) are virtually worthless as far as gold content. If you want high yield, you HAVE to get older computers. Older the better. Older PCs use much heavier gold plating on everything. Sometimes if you're lucky, components are solid gold. Fingers aren't the only source of gold. IC chips, pins, and processors also have gold and a decent amount of silver. Now I can't say whether or not purchasing old computer scrap is worth it or not. Luckily because of my career, I get mountains of ancient computer scrap for free and make quite a bit of money off it as well. :)
I will say that getting gold off fingers is the worst. It's every bit as bad as sreetips says it is. Not exactly sure why it took so long to get the gold off the fingers though. I can generally get it done in less than a day.
The reason I got into gold salvaging is because of sreetips. I learned almost everything I know about it from him.
Thank you to Mr. sreetips. You're videos are the best!
448 grams in a pound
jr01098 one once =$1400
@@unvaccinatedamerican8648 do you mean OUNCE?
Debra Polenz lol
Debra Polenz I’ll stick to oz
I like your videos ....!!! you have learn to us so much ...! THANKS
your a good man saving people from getting burned .god bless you
Buy stuff from yourself leave yourself good review. Oldest trick in the book
In general I like your videos, but this time I noticed too many mistakes, discrepancies, too many unnecessary steps and too much unnecessary waste. You created 5 gallons (20 Litres) of waste to refine 11 grams of gold to probably no more than .995 fines. Hydrogen peroxide isn't that important, because reaction will start on its own just with bubbler. Your solution was far from exhausted and did't need any interference, before all foils were freed. Why filtering two times, creating ball of filters to dissolve. Foils are very easy to decant, in the worst case, you need just one small filter. I don't filter foils at all. Just decant them, and those minuscule amounts missed, I catch in my stock pot. No steering after addition of chemicals. No denoxing. The headline is "How much gold in a scrap PC" I watched this video because I expected to see some numbers. Only numbers you mentioned were about trimmed fingers. You were surprised about 1.88 grams/pound yield. Fingers you bought were most likely from older computers, which you didn't mention. New material yields about 1 gram/pound, as you expected. I believe that you have enough experience to avoid these mistakes. For people rushing into this hobby, I consider this very bad direction. Sorry for criticizing you this way, I just want you to realize that some hobbyists have no idea at all abut this process and will follow it exactly, not realizing that there is better and cheaper way, specially in countries where people pay large premium for chemicals needed. Thanks for your understanding.
You are correct on all counts. I rarely process this type of scrap because the yields are low and the amount of waste is high. Thanks for watching!
Jerry Davis : how can I get gold from old cell phones, easy way, please?
Emma Lopez it would be the same process as it’ll still be a circuit board/processor your dealing with only way smaller which means less yield per unit and a lot more work breaking down the phones if I remember correctly a mobile phone has only about 0.03g so about 40 mobiles for just over 1g return
Savage
Jerry Davis I
Yeah....I just learned ewaste will be off the list of to do's!!! Thank you so much!👍
Thanks for posting.. It's good to see what we can expect from such an operation
In my early life I worked at as both the assay chemist and the production chemist for a precious metals refiner/recycler. The thing that most people do not realize is that the gold plating on these parts varies depending on when, where and for what purpose the boards were made. When we recycled the gold from the circuit card edges of some of the old IBM mainframes we found they were 100 mil thick plate. When we recycled gold off of more modern consumer electronics many times the parts were just flash plated to look like gold plating. For example the gold on your lightning connector for apple products is good heavy gold plate. However the cheap charger cords you get at the gas station snack shop are gold flashed. You will know the difference when the cheap cords stop working a lot faster than the quality apple product. So story short we never bought scrap from scrappers without doing an assay. I would never buy from an unknown person without doing an assay and being able to sample from the bulk bin. Even then we often got shorted. It is a hard business.
Strongly agree. This is why I don’t process much escrap anymore. The amount of time and materials often exceeds the minuscule yield recovered.
WERRY NICE ,,, A GOOD JOB BRO , THANK YOU lovely 2 try your way of making gold out of pc matriell and fingers . love from norway , and thank u for this movie .
YOUR A F###### LEGEND I was able to start my own little refinery bc of you thanks for all your videos I can't thank you enough
Fascinating video. Enjoyed it!
Thank you so much for your videos! Truly unique and awesome content! Always excited to see what you're working on next!
thank you sir, great video! I have a bucket full of board fingers and now i might just try to get the gold out.
Another cool vid . i didnt think you were doing it for a profit either . just to skpw how and what to expect . thanks it was fun watching
Great video, very informative but i see some room for improvement in the process to make it more efficient.. Might try it since i have a lot of computer parts laying around🤔