Extracting gold from computer parts (Part 2)
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- Опубликовано: 20 окт 2024
- This is the second and last part. I totally messed up and forgot to talk about what to do with the waste.
The metal waste can basically be recycled and used to clean more PCBs. I don't think I will do a video on this though.
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Nile talks about lab safety: • Chemistry is dangerous.
Pretty interesting. I recovered .18 grams of gold using the aqua regia method several years back from about 50 (iirc) Pentium 133 CPUs. I had purchased about 200 of them for the project, along with a ton of board scrap from my own collection over the years. At the time I did it, the .18 grams was nowhere near enough to justify the cost I put into it, so the rest fo the processors and scrap laid in my closet for over a decade, until just a few months ago, I finally just gave it all away because I was tired of moving it around.
A couple years back I had finally decided to sell my little nugget and made back all of the money I had initially invested, so I was pretty much break even.
The most fun part was where the sheriff and hazmat truck along with a couple more fire engines showed up at my house because a neighbor had called the police thinking I was making meth in my backyard, lol
thats indeed hillarious xD thanks for sharing
Jesse, are you making meth in your backyard again?
Bastard neighbors, they should mind their damn business
Your neighbour sounds lovely
i think your neighbour knows bit too much about making meth. suspicious.
"You'll notice the melting bowl is cracked"
yeah no sorry I was way too distracted by the burning table
Ha ha ha. So was I.
cowards i was looking at the sexy, amazing, beautiful, table
@@heresy5325 It is pretty hot.
The bowl cracked off because of the Borax which is making damages on the ceramic when used repetitively in the same contaner. It makes the same during weld-forging steel processes.
@@TheRealRB3902 starting from 14:13
that stirr bar looks cute for some reason
it does
That's what I said when I was watching the vid lol
it is.
it's a BABY T_T
i totally agree with you
How to make money extracting gold from PCBs: film it and post it on youtube... :P
tylisirn he said he's not even close to breakeven :/
Hasn't broken even with the gold. However with the number of views on the video, he has made more from youtube than from the gold which is what tylisirn was getting at.
Nathan Rogers r/whoosh
No, I believe Nathan Rogers understands the joke.
Nathan Rogers
im glad you gave us your "lessons learned" and showed the mistakes, in the video. i always see these videos from folks that have been doing this for a very long time and although they advise the viewer of some error traps, the viewer doesn't see the process develop through a novices perspective. thanks mate.
9:45 I like how he makes cleaning up a spill like the most chemistry thing ever
Cotton balls?
that was an adorable stir bar
@MyUsernameIsDead
no
Darth Bane
no
Warm Water no
@@-loarado no
@Pure No
I’ve watched a lot of these types of videos, but this one was by far the best and most descriptive. At the same time you explained everything vary simply so anyone can understand. You also explain the chemistry that’s happening which was vary appreciated. I’ve done everything but melt the gold powder. Thank you so much for making this. Thanks for the bleach tip too because nitric acid is extremely expensive lol!
My 8 GB RAM finds this video extremely offensive
The feminists hate your patriarchy
Booster Alharthy i
Sharcha everyone hates the feminists
Suigetsu Hōzuki Kim Jong-Un hates everybody
Thegamingturnip Donald Trump hates Kim-Jong Un
Great stuff!
On a side note, very old chips from the 70s and 80s, esp the chips made by the Soviet block - these chips do no uset gold coating, their made out of gold entirely
You could much better yields if you get hold of such chips, although I believed the vast majority of these were already processed.
I have a friend who had some chips from the Soviet era and he used the same process to extract- yields of free gold were pretty impressive.
Just an fyi if anyone happens to have very very old chips lying around. You get a lot more gold out of these.
I really loved the miniature extraction. Like to see more of those because they are more something that I could do myself without buying expensive beakers and such.
Just scale it down.
KAMUIIIII
The vast majority of his videos feature things you absolutely should not be doing at home.
@@xjunkxyrdxdog89 Unless you have shit ton of monies to purchase all the professional equipment, that is! But at this point you home IS LAB, effectively. So is this counts as doing at home still???
I loved how everything was so tiny. Especially that little stir bar
At industrial scale the steel and copper are what you go for, the gold is a side line of copper refining
That gold melting process looked successful at the end. The whole video contains a stream of really good information presented well, and in a straight forward, thinking process. Good work here. Good inclusion of the evaluation about profit from this method at the end.
RUclips finally recommend me some good video!
Play minecraft
stop playing jail break
bruh stop commenting on all videos just for more subs
@@henom3464 probably need some views because his last vid made 16K views
vg be always watching
Ilove the step by step narration and the showing of what the chems do and make with each other. not overwhelming and it goes by rather quickly when you start watching. keep up the great work!
I've never done this, but I'm very familiar with computers and parts. The parts that I'd say have the most gold on them are RAM, GPUs, PCI/PCI-E/AGP cards, connectors (IDE/SATA, etc), cable ends (hard drive cables and sometimes you might find a very, very tiny amount of ethernet connectors), CPU pins (depending on the generation of CPU, there may or may not be pins...some use very small flat plates, which I presume would have even less gold on them). There's probably some in power supplies too, but if I had to guess, most is going to come from RAM, GPUs and PCI/PCI-E/AGP cards. I'd imagine that PCI cards and GPUs would have a bit more than RAM, due to the size of the slot. I'm not sure I'd even mess with motherboards or any of that type of stuff, the return would be too low, unless you can get it for practically free, or free. If extraction of copper is worth doing, there would be more copper in power supplies, heatsinks (CPU/GPU/motherboard) and of course the cabling/wires.
Good luck. :)
There is also tiny gold wires in all ICs.
Yep, if you crack open a metal top CPU like a p133 or 166 you can see the actual chip basically suspended on a bed of gold thread. It's pretty cool looking.
PSUs have a little palladium, and if you do a really thorough job of it, you can also recover rhodium and palladium from the capacitors on some boards (at least you could in the past, no idea if the manufacture of them has changed).
Catalytic converters are also a good source of precious metals if you can process enough of them to make it worth the money.
Yes, the older equipment has more in it than the new stuff. If you can scarf up some old mainframes, they are LOADED with it. (think VAX 11785 or 11780) but even the early PCs were good. think about the manufacturing processes and how we've improved them over time. I have a box where I collect anything cold, from tanks from vape junk to connectors to garbage rings and jewelry, once it's processed, who cares where it came from.
Old Pentiums are the best
I work at a company that refurbishes used electronics and anything we can't fix or can't financially justify fixing is sent off to a partner company for precious metal extraction. Some of the components we set aside as "high yield" that surprised me were the PCBs connected to laptop webcams and touchpads.
"Up until this point, it seemed like everything was going so well, but unfortunately with chemistry there's always something that goes wrong." This line resonates with me so much as a chemistry major.
The gold on the RAM trimming is ticker then the Gold on the surface of random PCBs. If the PCB design engineer knows what he is doing, he will specify a different process for those contact zones. (galvanic applied "Hard-Gold" instead of just chemically applied NiAu)
An other point: Correct me if I am wrong, but your process looks like recovering pure gold from the surface. In E-Waste, you have lot more issues: Most of the gold is in an Tin-Silver-Copper-...-Gold Alloy (if you are lucky - lead or bismuth were or are used as solder alloy component). Then there was a time, when the silicon in semiconductors was connected with Gold wires to the leads of the housing. To get this gold, you would have to dissolve the epoxy chip housing (and hope that there is Gold and not aluminium wires). At least when the chip has gold bonding, then it is pretty pure gold, so that's lucky.
The video was awesome by the way: As an electronics engineer, I am always interested how a chemist handles solid and liquid metals
I got very lucky and got about half a dozen old high-grade early 90's SCIENTIFIC EQUIPMENT circuit boards FOR FREE! Every single circuit pathway is heavy-gold plated. Gold was at it's lowest price back then, and high-end equipment used a LOT of it! I estimate a full ounce from those boards when I'm done!
7:25 I like how the small bottle tried to escape.
Thank you for going through the trouble of all this. Yes, it's not profitable for money, but invaluable for knowledge. You saved us a lot of trouble working with those chemicals most of us don't know as much about, or have the proper safety equipment to handle. I would not get started without the safety gear first. Great set of videos!
Really love your videos! Your narration is really easy to listen to, and I like that you include when you make mistakes and things don't go as you expected. And you're Canadian! Woo!
"a classic paper towel abstraction"
I lol'ed
+Leonard Greenpaw it is a classic but very shameful and upsetting technique. Usually we would use KimWipes but i didnt have any those.
+Leonard Greenpaw it is a classic but very shameful and upsetting technique. Usually we would use KimWipes but i didnt have any those.
NileRed
I just love how you made it sound so professional, even though its a thing normal people do XD. Also Hi! Love your videos :D
"What you see here is the classic filth-removing technique"
*wash my hand*
By the way, many IC chip packages have 24k gold wire connecting the chip itself to the lead frame. But you will need to dissolve the epoxy to get to them.
Couldn’t you just burn all the plastic epoxi etc and make live much more easy?
Hey thank you so much for this video! I have a slight obsession with circuit boards and have been curious as to how I could get the gold out of them, like just for a hobby. It’s like this video was made just for me!!! I’m so excited!! I can’t wait to try this!! Thank you again!!
7:11 aww a little stir bar for a little container!
Dunno whats wrong with me
Would love to see more total synthesis videos like the caffeine one you have planned
+Bart Pratt dont worry things will happen eventually!
Gorgeous video (pt1 & pt2)and a big thanks to your careful scientific work on yields.
Your data is the best I have seen on Gold recovery.With your figure of $11 per pound of
scrap that is $22,000 per ton.So in large scale processes that would be very profitable.
That thing with spilled material happened to scientist working on expensive materials (cant't remeber which, saw it on periodic videos channel) he spilled entire country's worth of ultra expensive material on wooden table. He basically made the same procedure "cut the table, process table" to recover it :)
Plutonium. Whole uk national reserve, about a few mg in the fifties.
Link to the video please!
I believe it was plutonium.
Periodic table of videos on yt
ruclips.net/video/89UNPdNtOoE/видео.html skip to 16:18. (Might be 15:18) it’s a long video then at the end he talks about it.
filtration from a small bottle
that's cute as shit
yes
No
Shit isn't cute my dude
@@carterruhleproductions7781 but mine is :(
@@VivekYadav-ds8oz Bahaahaa
@1:08 And now we have our finished ram spaghetti.
Not quite aldente yet.
You make incredible videos man. I always get excited when I see a new NileRed chemistry vid on my feed.
+woofyams thanks, i am glsd you like them!:)
@NileRed why do I find the typo so adorable though
This is excellent and thanks for doing that. I have acquired a lot of old satellite receivers and other equipment that are full of PCBs and didn't know what to do with them as I live in a remote area of northern BC and shipping it away would cost too much. I can scrap it here and salvage a bit of gold in the process. Win/win!
7:13 that's the cutest little stir bar I've ever seen
whats a stir bar
@@laffys7384 *puts hand on shoulder* “Just Look At the name”
Really great that instead of editing out your mistake .. you show that mistakes do happen .. and how to deal with them. ☮
That tiny stir bar at 7:15 is so cuteeeee lol
Never thought a boy would say “cute” unless they are making fun of another boy
Love the Paper Towel Extraction technique, I've never seen that procedure in my texts. Very useful!
7:10 I din't know there were stir bars that small!
“Didn’t”
@@eczplaysgamesyt2885 Thank god you caught that minor typo from 2 years ago, I'm sure Roach is highly ashamed his crime was right out in the open for all that time.
8:12 I love these mini kitchen cooking shows.
"Classic paper towel extraction." :)
I've been chuckling about that for a good half hour now every time I think about it.
Great job with the gold processing over the past two videos! I really truly hope you continue your chemistry videos for a long time. It'll be a sad, sad day when you and ChemPlayer finally stop (hopefully in the far distant future).
I don't know if you've realized but you guys are creating something that no one in the history of humanity has ever had the convenience of. You're creating this amazing video record of chemical reactions that will hopefully live on and benefit people for a long long time.
You never know, the next Einstein 50 years from now could make some amazing scientific breakthrough and credit it all back to being inspired to get involved in science because of videos like the ones you guys make.
Maybe that sounds silly but I don't know how else to emphasize the importance of the documentation of cold hard applied science.
Damn that was some emotional shit.
Best explanation of the process available on RUclips!👍👍👍👍👍
Instructions unclear. I now have a multi-million dollar gold mine.
Gimme ur instructions lol
I ended up being a sulfate miner in China... send help pls
Nilered ... Thank you for the informative video I finally understand how an why the reaction works , all the many videos I've seen are good aswell but your explanation an simplifying of the details was easy to understand.
Also if u do gold drops often can u make a video for a stockpot (your left over waist from the gold solutions setting in a bucket) I have a lot an don't know how to refine the black stuff at the bottom of the bucket . I heard it's gold an platinum. I tried looking myself an did the research but me and others don't understand how to properly refine it. please an thanks
1:05 "I repeatedly wet the RAM trimmings, and then I shake them around" *proceeds to shake them with the might of a tornado*
1:03 is a little better so u can see it but if u have captions it’s still a little better
8:34 - it's like ElectroBOOM with chemistry. I love it!
Love your videos!
You explain everything so nicely!!!😊
I think it is possible to filter precipitated gold by standard coffe filter, by boilig the precipitated gold suspension, that should coales the gold particles so they won"t go through :)
+Qwertypp10 that is true. I should have done that!
Informative, interesting, high quality. Really good video!
+Darude_Mama thanks!
I really like how you share the mistakes and the steps you take to fix them. Another channel would just go "oh well" and skip over. Btw watched all your vids newest to oldest and I have reached here! So I guess I'm a fan
Its always great to see a new video of yours!
+Dawid Ziaja There will be a bunch more coming soon too. Im on an editing spree
+NileRed you should make a actual foundry watch kindofrandoms video
+Isaac Janing
That channel doesn't have anything like that on it. Did you mean king of random?
+Go IntoTheCalm yah
you know he gets closer to the end when he uses smaller and smaller containers.
That was the cutest stir bar I have ever seen
It's so smol ;_;
@@diemilch555 small*
@@eczplaysgamesyt2885 what?
@@eczplaysgamesyt2885 That's 2 lives you've saved now. Well done citizen.
I work for a local computer repair company, if you are interested in doing this for fun call a local place and see if they could sell scrap parts for cheep. I am always trying to offload old ddr2 ram and HDD boards. Also check out where the local computer drop off location is. Each county should have a drop location for old technology to properly dispose of them. People will often take junk there and if you know what you are looking for pickup old circuits and salvage them for the gold. Fun little experiment.
Your videos are like crack. LoL
I hated chemistry in undergrad, but now I work as a biologist doing some fluorescence chemistry in the laboratory.
Im glad you like them!
"So, what you're seeing now is a classic paper towel extraction..." I love this science-y rephrasing of "I mopped up the spill with paper towel"
"The classic paper towel extraction". Totally scientific. I'm surprised it isn't used in major labs around the world!
+MatVenture youd be surprised how many times it is used in research
NileRed I know I've used it alone in mine, that's for sure!
Great series! Best gold recovery vid on youtube! Thank you
And to think, all those E.T. Atari cartridges were just dumped in a landfill. There must be whole dollars worth of gold amongst those carts.
**When will u ever learn** u know it’s props🤦🏻🤦🏻🤦🏻🤦🏻
im glad you did it twice foe folks who are just learning about chemistry
I know this is an old video, but have you ever thought about making a video about separating the copper and nickel from the waste byproduct of this process? Edit: Copper itself might be worth something, but I'm mostly just curious of the process.
As a big fan of tiny things, I really enjoyed the last extraction
Me watching this video : i n t e r e s t i n g
My computer parts working to let me see how other parts are getting destroyed : D:
Can't wait to see you distle mercury. I recently recovered mercury from a mercury displacement contactor. It was the first time I've ever seen mercury. It's such cool stuff. Especially when I used your method of cleaning it.
You need to do that process with old-tech processors, with a 1kg you can extract between 5g to 8g of gold.
Sorry for my bad syntax English skill.
i used to work for a company that did this on a massive scale and they would usually just incinerate the entire board with massive scrubbers to keep the toxic fumes under control then would recover the gold platinum silver and other metals from the ash
I am not sure if you have answered this before but where do you usually get your chemicals?
internet.
+Ashton Calleder i get them wherever i can. Ebay mostly
NileRed hows the quality of Ebay grade chemicals?
Depends on the seller. Most chemical supply sellers on eBay are professional chemists.
I've also had overflow when adding the SMB when doing highly concentrated batches, now I always neutralize excess nitric acid with urea before adding SMB (and keeping the flasks in a shallow bucket/container - first spill went straight down the drain :)
I actually wanna see ephedrine extraction from the cold pills! Could be a cool video!
Calm down there Walter White
Hey I do this quite frequently, it's basically not worth it at all besides all the fun BUT. The best way I found to get all the gold off the spent trimmings is to get all the acid off of them and then just put them into a big bowl of water and shake them around a bunch. It'll all fall to the bottom and then just continue to shake pieces as you pull them out and nothing will be stuck to it. It also helps to massage the pieces as you pull up just in case some aren't finished yet
Thanks, now i can buy a new ferrari
@ redditor keanu Chungus 69 minecraft good fortnite bad
@@boigiwrgos2996 *uno reverse card* B
Quick question: Is her any reason why you don't just stop after step 1? At that point, you have solid metallic gold plus a small bit of debris, but if you just sent it in as-is, it seems it would save you a lot of time and chemical costs. Asking because I truly am not sure if there is a good reason.
Interesting video. Sorry about your dining table
haha!
Robert bradberyry
After separating it from the pcbs cant you just melt It? I dont know what purity is the gold on the pcbs but disolving It to then precipitate it sound like avoidable steps considering you spent a week to separate the gold from the pcbs
POV:
you didn't get recommended this. You got here from part 1.
actually i got recomended
I like that you give instructions of thing that are so complicated that i never gonna try to do it
My dad took my pc rams the other day.
I see why
i love seeing what you do to recover from disasters. & i love that you don't cut that out to make yourself look perfect.
Is it possible that extracting copper and tin would be more profitable than extracting gold?
I think what you need to think of i actually extracting everything. including gold, copper and other metals, if you have the gear to do so. That's what the big e-waste plants do.
actualy i had a friend that would take copper from old parts and he made a lot on it.
Leonid Uvarov yes because you have more tin, steel, and copper in a computer than gold
Glad to see someone talking about the economics of this process as well as the chemistry. Some people hear the word gold and think they are going to get rich!
13:24 ... bro you dropped gold outside of the crucible when you removed the filter from the vial...
The green stuff is CuCl! You can use it for PCB etching. That can be sold too.
7:11 Smol bar very cute
Hey Nile! You should really post that Lithium Peroxide video next! Im really looking forward to it! I've got all of my equipment now and I'm totally psyched to get going! I just my first extraction of caffeine from coffee using a soxhlet extractor but I cant wait for the total synthesis too!
hi this is moe bradberry
IM ROBERT BRADBURRY
Ha lol
Yessss I knew I wasn't the only one
hi mr. tank man
Your comment is SLAMMIN!
You spelt my last name wrong. It's Bradbury.
love the way you are so professionally talking about the "paper towel extraction" XD
don't worry buddy some day you'll have cody-level refining and recovery skillz
I work in an assay Lab at a gold mine, when we're dissolving the beads that contain the gold we simply use hot plates to make the aquaregia work faster, take 3-4 hours of dissolution work and shorten it down to about 25 minutes, and less with a good stir bar. Not much of what I learned in undergrad is used here, although they're considering bringing in cyanide so at least I could use my upper level inorganic chemistry knowledge and the 18 electron rule ...
*cried in inflated worldwide ram prices*
Just wait until you hear about 3000 series graphics cards lmao the future sucks ass
@@Samiozdyep exactly and also B.I.N.G
Easy way to melt gold powder: use the same final filter paper to trap all the gold powder. Bunch it all together at the bottom and dry it. Cut off the excess paper. Wet the ball of gold wrapped in the rest of the paper with alcohol (either ethanol or isopropyl... this will hold the particles together) and immediately hit it with an acetylene torch in a crucible. It'll melt into a nice little ball of solid gold.
You can do the same thing with silver, copper, platinum, and rhodium. Not sure how well it'd work with palladium, since that triggers catalysis of hydrocarbons and atmospheric nitrogen when heated.
For copper powder, to prevent oxidation when melting, mix it with finely-divided charcoal powder. This will smelt any copper oxide and increase yield.
lol the miniapparatus is so cute xD
I just wanna take a moment to say is that mini stir bar and miniature apparatus’s are so cute!!!
“A fan sent this to me.” I had a good laugh at that.
It’s quite odd (but also funny) that you consider us “fans” instead of viewers.
:0
i am a fan!
Super cool, I never took chemistry in high school, wish I would have. The question I have is do the chemicals you use cost more than the gold is worth, my guess is yes, but there's got to be companies that do this on a huge industry scale that does make them money.
Can somebody please tell me how many times he said “gold” in this video
hey. melting gold is something I'm working on myself. I'm using a propaine torch and a spoon. the trick is to get the spoon red hot from the bottom then add borax and hit the gold on top with the torch. but it can be done with propaine. it just takes a little time
+brofessor brett I didn't even think of using a spoon. Good idea!
Cutest. Stir bar. Ever ❤️
I move that there should be more videos of tiny chemistry with adorable teensy apparatuses.
When they sell you the computer, all values have been calculated, so don't expect that you can profit from this.
Who told you that?
@@Red-Eagle The facts told me that. Duh?
Thanks for the Video....Helps me understand the gold extraction process