@@wantafastz28 it's a matter of magnitude. For Sreetips who's running a one-man operation out of his garage, it's not economical, as you point out. But as a video it'd be informative and entertaining, with Sreetips' focus on purity etc. And it could be a good example of explaining what kind of size of operation would be needed to make electronics recycling profitable if you only focus on the precious metals (silver gold and possibly some PGMs). I suppose Sreetips and Mmllbc make some money from their channels/patreons or whatever.
Im about to make a sreetips style run of some gold filled scrap. Love both channels. If you get the e-waste free from dumpster diving or whatever, you can turn a Profit but you need a lot!
@@silver_salvage_savage if you get it free and lots of it and have the right setup of operations, sure. There are videos on RUclips from big recycling companies. If it's big enough you can make a profit on practically anything.
Motherboards are extremely complex to recycle. A virgin board is great as you may have one or two gold corner BGA's. But the only way to deal with them is strip all components inside a heated tumbler, where all of the components drop off including PCI and ram slots. Then hammer mill bare boards to recover Copper and Fibre Glass + some Solder. After that separate all gold contacted connectors and dump em on Ebay. This leaves all of the IC's along with other to filter ( size wise ) through several mesh screens. This way you at least have Gold Cornet BGA's with a mixed bunch of IC's to find real gold and the rest you could send to a refiner. I do this every day trust me. Also if you can get the Fibre Glass powdery enough it can be sold to the Resin casting industry for Resin fillers to bulk it out.
I saw a few gold fingers left on them, he had quite a few motherboards in there, pretty decent quality board scrap he has, but yeah I did notice a lot was pulled off it
This is why I watch your channel Jason, you are excellent at what you do, and doing this you are still in your field but outside your area of expertise and you ask for help. That is an amazing thing today, BRAVO! From all I have watched I believe the boards to be bare of 99% of the precious metals and the remainder is copper, zinc and steel the Zinc and copper form brass as some of the zinc boils, maybe the reason for the pockmark appearance. Ball mill the mix and see if the super fines will shaker table out...
As others have said, it looks like a lot of the high-value parts have already been removed from the boards. The gold plated fingers and gold corner BGAs and other stuff have been removed. The one board you showed with all the black IC chips on it was probably the highest value board you processed. IC chips contain gold bond wires. There would also be a lot of gold plated pins and contacts, and a few IC chips left on the other boards, but you probably just mostly got copper out of them.
After all those gold pins are just plated. I,think you would get way more yield when disolve in acid and follow the propper chemical procedure..at least it would be higher quality
Actually, smelting properly and cupeling should end up 99.9% if I'm not mistaken! Save the stage and run it a 2nd time and you may get more yet! Plus, smelting for Au, shouldn't have much, if any loss! Acids through the aqua regia process dissolves it and you'll never get all of it back! If my understanding is correct! Gold doesn't oxidize so, it all stays together when smelting it!
@@darvad77frimml69 I think you're right, the Aqua Regia process can lead to high loss and contamination but if done correctly yield .9999 fine gold from my understanding which is novice at best. I have a bunch of gold from my grandpa he used aqua regia to reclaim and he managed to pull a lot of copper, and I'd guess other metals as well which I don't fully get how he did that. Now I'm trying to figure out if I should smelt it with led, soda ash, and borax, or if I should pay for someone to do aqua regia.
@@ConTheDon187 We inquart silver into the gold to pull out other base metals. The silver is a great collector to clean the gold, before going to aqua regia. It's basic refining. add silver to gold, melt to make an alloy. pour into shot. use nitric to remove the silver and other base metals. filter. go to aqua regia. filter. precipitate pure gold. Then process the silver to cement out the silver from the solution. Then cement out the copper from the remaining solution. Then you can dispose of the waste solution. This seperation produces .99999 fine metals for casting
You need to heat your mold up to for at least 4-5 min before you pour you melt in. This will keep the form from piting that badly. Other then that you are pouring a mix of metals and the reactions are gonna be a bit weird inside while cooling too, not much you can do about that
Interesting how dirty the combined metals from boards is. I'm very novice, but seems that it would be best to process with chemicals at this point. Looking forward to your next step.
Yes sir should have been ran through chemical processes at least twice first. And adding lead wasn’t advisable. I’d sent it to a person that does the chemical process and you’d get your true weight and true value.
Jason. I had this trouble before. That stuff that isnt melting is the tantalum capacitors. They are made of sintered tantalum powder fused together. Tantalum has very high melting point so it is pretty much impossible to melt and i tried the same thing you did which was to mix with lower melting point metal to get them to alloy with no luck. The way i solved this was i ended up picking the tantalum capacitors off individually because i also wanted to recover the tantalum but i was on small scale. That would be annoying on a large scale like you have. Im surprised you didnt see tantalum on the XRF. Although it would be isolated in the chunky spots of the ingot. I dont really have a solution for you but hopefully this insight of the tantalum capacitors being the problem can help you out.
If your target metals include copper, pulling off oxides with flux seems counterproductive since the furnace is going to oxidize some of the copper. Try melting in a reduction atmosphere. Maybe a layer of charcoal rather than flux.
I get decent results using sugar as the carbon source. A lot of carbon monoxide forms which presents somewhat of a flammable gas / explosion hazard, depending on the setup as I experienced. My experiment was small scale so the noisy boom surprised me more than presenting a danger. I was also recovering silver. Anyways, I don’t know how useful molten sugar is mixed with flux, but it is a great carbon source. Either way, carbon is a great way to strip the oxygen off the metal oxides.
@@roamingchemist2514 Thanks for that info. I figured since the carbon monoxide was super heated and was able to make contact with the flame as it was expelled, that it made a seemingly explosive reaction, but you are probably more correct than my own conclusion. In any event, it was unexpected and scared me when it happened. Thank god I mainly do chemistry on a micro scale.
@@roamingchemist2514 Yes. You are undoubtedly quite correct. Hydrogen must have been involved. CO, by itself, would extinguish flames, not generate them, particularly not in an explosion.
@@Svensk7119 Both you and Roaming Chemist are wrong. Since CO is the result of incomplete oxidation of Carbon, Carbon Monoxide is flammable, not inert. Try convincing anyone who has demonstrated the burning of magnesium in a CO2 atmosphere that either gas is inert.
My thought would be to come at this backwards: Instead of going for the metals, look at a plastic removal process, then the glass. Plenty of comments have talked about the chemical extraction or electrolytic extraction that I would go for, but because your boards aren't amazing, you'd be best served looking at a chemical extraction of the plastic, then processing the things left behind. Roll those boards on a band saw to reduce their size and you don't have to crush them twice. The mold issue has also been addressed, but my favorite molds for small melts are old steel muffin tins, for anything cooler than 2kf. Sand is also a good option, but the best way to separate slag from the main material, especially if you're doing two melts, is pour it in ice water to shock the glass right off. The metal contracts and the glass shatters, it's a big dramatic boiling hissing pile of ick, but if you're dealing with a lot of silicon and fiberglass, that's going to be the easiest way to remove it. Low grade glass like that has a CoE that doesn't play well with metals, which is what you're looking for. Drop in some extra sand or broken bottles for all that glass to bind to, if you want a cleaner slag pour. And don't handle fiberglass trash with your bare hands! D: That made my toes curl up in N O P E.
I would think 35 lbs would be just enough to get the table tuned. 13:30 This makes sense, as the table sorts by density (surface area/mass), not weight or mass alone. 22:00 That was gonna be my suggestion.
Haha I love guys like you hahahaha yes you are correct the chips with a large amount of gold are gone hahahaha the reason I say I love you type of guys is bc you are so stuck on those older chips it just means you leave all the other stuff for people like me. I post on Craigslist for free computer drop off and EASY make an extra $500-$1000 bucks a month for 1 or 2 nights of taking apart system to take to the scrap yard. This month it will be closer to $2000 with how much metal prices are up. I know it take a little extra work hahahaha but come on hahahah
I go to the trouble to remove all screws and not wanted bits from the boards to reduce content, it does not take long and prepares for better material to work with. I have been using hydrochloric acid to reduce the base metals, I end up with a copper solution I can use to plate steel with copper. Removing the magnetics results in adding iron as a flux in the crucible, I suggest acid works better. I have also used a small homemade ball mill which pulverizes the material which I float sink before firing. Using water in a bucket is a fine example of gravity separation in its simplest form, it works. Dusan smelts various computer components and demonstrates types of separation with differing results, worth following. Have learnt a lot from your demonstrations, Thank you Jason
Now here is how I would approach it. Try lower Temps and do partial pours like just hot enough to melt the copper for example pick the lowest melt point metal and try skimming it or under pouring it a metal group at a time. Like separating lead from zinic silver, zinc. Get it hot enough for one group to melt but not the others. Don't think it would work for all of it but you might be able to seperate part of it if you added some lead or maybe suffer oxide of some type.
Hi jason, what you need to do is further refine your waste stream further either before the shaker table or coming off it - perhaps even both - as the most convenient and economically viable solution. Density phase separation through a water elutriation column is the answer. Each time you pass your stream through the water elutriation column you will be able to split either the lightest or heaviest material fraction cleanly off if your material is approximately the same size range - itd be however you adjust as to which fraction/s you cleanly want to separate. List your metals in your stream in order of density. I think you could group them, eg heavies, gold, silver, lead, rhodium, platinum, palladium, as heavy group 1, to recover as a batch and refine from there. Heavy group 2, COPPER is your main goal, brass and nickel. Coppers 8.93 density its easily enough to separate from the metals that range 7.5 or less in high purity, so the tin, chromium, zinc (except for whats in brass) titanium manganese and other mid to low range density metals arnt present. You would work the elutriation column setting so you see only the largest size copper particles begin to drop in the group 1 heaviest precious metal containing fraction - they wont hurt going in there anyway. Going through a 2nd column or 2nd pass youre taking the group 2 mainly copper. Just pan and adjust water flow rate until your happy with the purity of the fraction. You can then magnet out the nickel and use cucl2 or hydrochloric acid to dissolve the brass. The remaining copper should be high purity. The elutriation column is just a perspex tube 2-3inchwide 3ft long positioned upright. Water flows upwards into the tube at a rate you control. Your feed material enters the tube about halfway down the heavy material drops down and out through a narrower choke point. The choke point is where you set your flownrate. It only needs to be 1/4 to 1/2 inch max diameter. The light material flows out the top. A small column the size i mentioned will process TONS per hour and a 1500gph pump or mains water supply pressure plenty to run it for a few cents hour. The closer your material is sized the more accurattely you can separate by density, i know copper and iron easily separate in an elutriation column for example. But anyway your shaker table material its more convenient and economical to mechanically process further to better purity of the materials particularly on large scale to obtain a better priced saleable product with least costs incurred.
Every other video I've seen on recovering Gold or other metals from circuit boards has been a process involving acids. There's alot more than just normal basic metals and gold in those things. The acid methods work well because different acids dissolve different metals & leave others untouched. And you can extract & seperate them well.
A sand mold would help you in times like these. The cone mold is great when you got cleaner metal, and plenty of flux glass. But when it is like this. The sand mold is better and cheaper. The sand can be reused name times over. Just need to use a needle scaler to pop the sand off the metal when you remove it. But as I said earlier in you community post. I incinerate the board after I depopulate the gold recover items with a air hammer. Incinerate the boards, sift out the ash, and take a magnet over the pile and keep that stuff to the side. Just the way I do it. Doesn't mean that it will work good for everyone.
I've seen other RUclipsrs recover computer gold and they do it chemically. They melt it down with acids, get the gold isolated in solution, and then reconstitute it chemical into gold powder and then melt it into a small button or bar. I'm not a chemist so I couldn't tell you the exact process or chemicals used but there are many videos to watch. Good luck!
Sounds like we need to get Cody (Cody's Lab) and Sreetips involved on this one, as they both have a great deal of knowledge and experience on this subject. On an unrelated note, when you broke that piece out of the crucible, it looked a lot like the Moon, which I thought was pretty neat.
It's possible you might have some tantalum, palladium and ruthenium in there. (from capacitors and resistors) All of those are quite refractory, especially tantalum. Another thing is if you remove all the screws and steel face plates from the boards, you keep out a lot of iron.
Hi, Jason. My name is Russell I've been doing what I believe is my soul purpose in life which is prospecting and trying to build a new look for the gold production and mining industry by incorporating old techniques with more eco friendly principles to reclamation as help restore the natural order of things rather than destroy it in our wake. I am
iéd probably be cupelling the hole lot on a bed of cement . burn off the tin , led ,and zinc . might be the simplest place to start and the oxides are contained in the cement and no liquid waste
Sounds like you need a finer shred on the copper bits for the table to work. The slag looks like glass, so maybe that's the fibreglass, and resin from the capacitors.
Those big red and blue ceramic capacitors are VERY valuable! You want to pluck all red and blue ceramic capacitors off and treat them all by themselves! They have LARGE quantities of silver and PALLADIUM!! 17 to 23 grams PER POUND of capacitors! The round blue ones are tantalum-silver for the most part. There are also many other types of tantalum capacitors; some foil, some plastic rectangles, some round. There are also green ceramic capacitors and brown, round ones... those could quite a few compositions.
I WAS a board guy for 25 years. The best stuff to get is the older stuff that was made before the price of gold jumped from $38 an oz. When that happened all the specs were lowered. The military spec for gold plating was cut in half. I was still buying PCB's in the early 80's with 100 micro inches of hard gold plating.
Ya gotta scoop all the crud & impurities off the top of the liquid metal once you stir in the flux.. Ya gotta get the stirring implement up to temp first, otherwise the liquid metals will stick to it.. I've been melting down reclaimed copper since last summer & have amassed over 80lbs of copper. The goal is 300lbs.. I've been watchin this fella here on YT BigStackD Castings for a couple years & it got ME into it..
When copper acts as a colllector metal ,electro refining copper will show good result about the left out precious metals, best way to reduce time is depopulate the boards separate the mlccs and icchips , coated pins process them individually upon over years of doing this , this way it’s economical for small scale recycler
Your videos get me even more interested in mining and metallurgy. As for these circuit boards, they are notoriously a pain in the butt to extract the precious metals from without using acids and chemicals etc. The best results I've seen for getting gold & copper out of the circuit boards is by using a chemical process to dissolve the metals out of the circuit boards into solution and then precipitate the solid metal out of solution for further refining . There's this oddly interesting channel "Cody's Lab " He has a video on circuit boards . Aside from this weired thing he does where he pretends he's on Mars and wears a gerryrigged respirator and and wanders around a piece of desert property he has, and he pretends he's a robot , etc. He makes pretty good content for his channel. It's pretty cool.
I did this full time back in 1982. We did it on a large scale but you can do smaller batches. Rule of thumb. Any gold exposed strip it with a solution of hot dilute KCN in a cement mixer and add drops of concentrated H2O2 (get from hydroponics store). DO NOT stand in front of the mixer. If you drop the beaker of H2O2 in the mixer you will get blasted. DO this outside away from people. This stuff is poisen!! This will strip off all the gold, nickel and copper. Pour the liquid into a barrel and sprinkle powdered zinc dust on top to get the KCN to release the AU and take up the Zinc. Filter the AU precipitate. Wash with distilled water. In a fume hood add Nitric Acid and Hydrochloric Acid. DO NOT breath the fumes they are DEADLY. This will dissolve the AU and Zinc. Filter the hot solution through glass filter paper. You then sprinkle sodium bisulphate on the hot solution SLOWLY to remove the nitric. When the nitric is gone the AU will precipitate. Filter with distilled water and you have 3 9s fine gold. Do the aquaregia dissolve filter and precipitate a couple more times and you can get 5 9s fine gold. For the AU you could not strip off right away you could use a ball mill to smash open the chips to get at the gold wires and solder inside. Then in the final 3rd step you can smelt everything like you did. The smelting was pretty low yield for us so we out sourced that step. To dispose of the spent KCN solution from the first step let it evaporate to crystals then smelt the crystals you may recover some more AU from this but not always. Do not dump your KCN down the toilet.
You could try pouring the molten metal slowly into water making shot, then separate the good shot from the slag and metals with a high melt index. There was a video a year or so back that showed smelting on a backyard forge with a large stainless pan, they were able to pull off the different slag and metals through the heating process by adding elements and scraping the oxides to side, as I remember, I think they inquarted with both lead and silver at different stages? If you do pour small shot, you could try chemical refining?
As far as smelting, It seems you need the ability to reach hotter temperatures. I use a diesel powered furnace myself. Also pouring into graphite mold to create plates for electrolysis seem to greatly help with porosity. Just have to preheat the molds
@ Electronic Scrapper Where did you find a diesel fueled furnace? I've been looking around but haven't seen one...I have been thinking I would have to build one, but didn't really want to add more complications if I didn't have to.
This method will work great for part with gold bonding wire or anything that is pure. However anything that is plated such as gold, silver or copper will not be separated by this process. Which in e-scrap that is a majority of the metals either plated or alloyed.
As mentioned by others, it looks like the boards have already been picked clean of the higher-value parts. The Iron, Nickel and Chromium probably do not help, because of their higher melting point. Some of those components may also have Tantalum which has an even higher melting point. After pulverizing, a magnet can at least pull the Iron away, possibly some of the Nickel. Probably worth doing if you can. Would you consider drilling out a core sample from your cone, and doing XRF on that? The reason is that metals precipitating on the surface may give a different result. Finally, it looks like you did get some Gold. How does that compare to Natural Ore in terms of yield? In other words, what would be considered a High-Quality Gold Ore in terms of Ounces of Gold per ton of material? Thanks.
Seeing how many of the boards have already had their fingers and sounthbridge chips removed I'm not overly excited by them but that doesn't mean that there still isn't some goodness left. I just wouldn't expect the Au recovery to be super high. My main concern with recovery this way is the ultra fine Ag and Pd from any MLCC left on the boards (assuming those have not been removed already). I really don't see the shaker table being overly effective at recovering such a small particle size as would be in any MLCC. I've done a small scale test with crushing/grinding MLCC to a fine dust and then panning and the recovery was VERY poor but once I did a nitric soak on the panning leftovers the numbers went right back up to what I was expecting. And I was thinking about the slag issue and I wonder if there was a lot of aluminium in there. The metal looked like it began to burn when you poured it so maybe adding a bunch of lye in the flux might help. Just a thought.
Jason, a simple way is to use eco-goldex leaching solution to wash the precious metals from the shacking table concentrates. From this yep, you are separating the precious metals ( Au, Ag, PGM) from the base metals(Cu, Ni, Fe…).
I'm hardly an expert, but I've done a lot of armchair observing of different people's techniques for recovering precious minerals from computer boards and components. Streetips gentleman is probably what you need to watch yourself to understand you skipped a step I think. It takes a lot longer but the results are much more pure. That's my two cents worth.
Boards generally do not contain gold and instead use copper for interconnect. Older IC chips that were wire bonded in their package typically contain the most gold - the wire bonds inside are gold and the backside of the silicon chip will have gold sputtered on it too. Newer chips contain a lot less gold. Some of the connectors that are soldered to the board are often gold plated. Your boards seem pre-cleaned of most of the gold bearing parts.
it can be from the MlCC caps(ceramic electrolyte or something) or aluminuim in the electrolytic caps reacting with oxygen(or other stuff) in the ceramic chemicals, just a hunch so maybe HCL wash would help. it can be other things as well but if you try with a small sample of about 50-100g you can see if HCL wash helped, also normally when i see people do MLCCs they usually burn/ heat them up to liberate the metal and reduce some compounds in the caps. HCL will react with Zinc, Aluminium and Tin.
Do you run a surfactant in your water? Wondering if some of the foil copper is sticking to the substrate or plastics. Reducing surface tension could help separation.
Try running the number 1 and number 2 through the shaker table again separately and try to separate the metals a bit better. If you can get a better concentrate of copper you can just melt that and everything else you should be able to Flux it and cupel it to get the precious metals
You have poured many dissimilar metals together. I suggest you contact youtuber, streettips for some insight. If possible, make your pours into smaller pieces. Smaller is easier to work with. Also, start using hydrogen gas for your furnace. It gets much, much hotter.
The one picked up & said looks pretty old is for joining phone cable in places multiple lines are needed , from mains to buildings for example . One wire in bottom slot one in top
You already figured it out, but earlier in the video I was shouting at the screen that there's going to be iron and nickle in there screwing you up. Sprinkle some sand on your plinth before firing and the crucible won't stick to it.
I would definitely be excited to get that ewaste if it was the right price. I just bought a small 70 lbs lot at $3.13 per pound with shipping. It was all "unknown" but so far has been great for recovery.
Ultimately, I think the only decent process will be liquation. There are far too many metals in that melt to develop a thermal process that can be controlled in your furnace. It would only make sense to do this yourself, which may not be economical. If you sent it to a refiner, there's no point in melting it; or maybe even concentrating it.
You need to dissolve the slug in a Nitric Acid. Flatten the slug and chop it down to 1 mm thick strips. Dissolve in Nitric Acid. Base metals and Silver will go into solution, Gold will drop as flakes. After that filter, wash and rinse the gold and dissolve it in Agua Regia. The rest you already know. You could do it before smelting, but now you just added more steps to the recovery.
Hi Jason, I think if you sent the boards through a pryolysis machine first, all that plastic would get turned to ash, then it should be much easier to separate the metals, plus you get diesel fuel to run generators in remote areas.
The flux is sticking to the aluminum so you need Potassium chloride, you can use No Salt from the grocery store. They are never going to melt evenly with all the different alloy metals due to the different flash times they solidify at which explains all the craters, Don't forget the Tantalum which is not going to melt at those temps, the metals need to be chemically separated back into elemental form. I hope this helps.
You NEED to cover the kaowool in your furnace with a castable refractory. Not only will it improve your thermal performance, but kaowool (and all ceramic wools) release micrscopic fibers into the air that will penetrate your lungs and cause very serious and painful problems in your lungs. Also put some carboard or paper under your crucible. It creates a layer of carbon that will prevent sticking.
Some other comments mentioned it too, but it's probably a good idea to remove the batteries from the (mother)boards. They could explode during crushing and release corrosive compounds
Copper and sink is quite easy to oxidize of and a mill and a shacker table is quite handy for primary concentration to eliminate all the un necessary materials you could run it through a ball mill to get it a little finer
So to start with, most of what you had was already “depopulated” with the easy to get gold and silver already removed. Most of the buses (the circuits epoxied to the boards) are copper and the high value microchips were removed. You also had a lot of tin and small amounts of silver in the solder. Most of the capacitors, resistors and other electrical components are aluminum and carbon. Unless you get raw e-waste you aren’t going to have a large return. Also, though it stinks to high heaven, try burning everything first to remove the volatiles then run it through the ball mill. You should be able to free up a lot of the more precious metals in this manner. To remove the zinc/tin, bring the furnace up to just above the melting point of copper. The zinc/tin should vaporize, and as the vaporized metal escapes it cools into “threads” that can be collected like cotton candy. When the threads stop (generally take 10-15 minutes) most the zinc/tin is out. After that you can increase the temp and put in a standard cleaning flux to trap any undesirable slag. Scrape the surface clean regularly. After that make your pour to a preheated mold. You should end up with a very gold looking metal just on this side of silver (often called Nordic Gold or Aluminum Bronze). As an aside: adding cardboard, or really anything that will create a buffer layer between your crucible and fire brick, will prevent sticking.
Make a chromium mold instead of steel so nothing sticks to the sides. Only rhodium and higher melting points will stick to the chromium. Chromium melting point is 3,465 degrees F. And Platinum is 3,214 degrees F. And Rhodium melting point is 3,567 degrees F.
Hey! Love this idea. I’m not terribly sure you’d need to put the whole board through the mill. Maybe I’d try to use acid to separate the metal from the boards. I don’t know. Great video though! Never thought about a shaker board to do this before.
I am sure you've had a million different comments on here telling ya what to do.. you can't treat this stuff like ore.. You have copper, brass, tin (I know), silver, palladium, gold, stainless steel, iron, nickel, silicon materials, lead. So you tell me, without chemical separation; how do you melt all those different materials together and separate them at the same time?.. you depopulate the boards.. separate the components... incinerate the chips, THEN you can use your shaker table, then pan, then smelt or melt.. everything else you sell as a scrap recovery material and its quite valuable separating the material then reselling.. best way to make money but time consuming.
take a look for separating out pc board components, many of the small rectangle IC parts are Tungsten, NiCr, Palladium, & Platnum. All of which affect melting points.
Yes, those are really good boards. What you want to look for are PCI chips, RAM sticks and IC chips (IC chips, of course, have to be processed differently than the others).
@@geneplummer6645 the FeNiCo alloy? That is typically used in metal-to-glass applications like vacuum tube. It’s melting point is around 2600F if I remember right.
@@ursamines7643 his best bet would be to go to chemical separation from the shaker table , or sacrifice the precious metals fragment and just sell it at copper value and let the refiners take it from there
@@geneplummer6645 I would agree that chemistry would be the answer. Plus the copper can be dropped out using iron according to the reactivity series of metal
Depopulated boards will almost only produce aluminum and copper. The gold is in the chips, fingers and pins. And caustic soda or lye is used to clean green solder from all boards.
A cheap experiment would to get an old broken chest freezer. And line the inside with 6 mil vapour barrier plastic. Then set up a low voltage, low amp electrolytic refining process. You can use an old battery charger. You put the ground up material in some sort of basket on one side and bunch of copper plates on the other. All the copper would be drawn to a copper plates. The rest of the material would drop to the bottom of the tank as anode sludge. That sludge would be much less material to be sent off for further refining.
Pre heat mold ? Maybe clean the mold could be getting contamination from that . Ive only smelted pure . Gold silver aluminum. I would suggest getting a graphite mold .
How about ball milling into a finer powder, separating with a magnet, run both results separately across the table, and finally drying and smelting the six factions individually? Also those appear to be low value boards to begin with but I can offer you a one time shipment of fully populated boards. I will call you during the week.
The best way I find to test for gold is as I said in your YT post the other day. The way I do it Is, get one board at a Time use a paint stripping gun (heat gun) to melt all the solder and then all the plated fingers come lose (it makes it easier to pull the the plated metals out of their plastic housing too) then I once I have a couple of kilos melt it all down stirring periodically to make sure all has melted then I add about an extra kilogram or so of bright copper i.e. copper wire or refined copper and pour it into copper/gold shot, then cover it with Nitric acid thus the all the metals except the gold will dissolve, you may need to keep adding nitric to it once the fumes stop you'll know all the base metals have dissolved you can put it on the heat to make it run faster if you so wish. all you should be left with is gold mud and that can be melted down into shot again and given the Aqua Regia to get rid of what is left of the base metals and you should be left with Fine gold .999%.
Using lead to lower the melting point makes me wonder what zinc bismuth or something else also work because I remember seeing a video about making gold solder for jewelry using zinc or cadmium and I believe it was only about 6% zinc but closer to 30% if you use cadmium and cadmium had to be about 10% more than you wanted to end up with because it ends up being lost (sacrificial cadmium)
I think you're on the right track. The Borax worked as a flux and welded your sample to the steel cone. I wonder if adding chemical separation would do the job the way you want it done?
Those are for the most part low grade boards. All the good ic have been removed. As other have said some of the components are made from extremely high melting point metals. This could be throwing your melt off. I would plate out the copper and refine the slimes.
Remelt it without borax. To get purity, flux it then put on a stainless basin then pour acid. If red smoke it's still reacting. Wait until white smoke then dilute water. Separate water to recover silver mixing salt or copper. The brown powder is pure gold.
There are a lot of metals on those boards that were easier collected by depopulating them first . Like tantalum the yellow rectangle chip with the red line . Palladium in the brown and blue bulbus looking things . best wishes
I really think you and the RUclipsr "sreetips" should pair up for a joint video. Especially related to this video.
Sreetips would be all over it😉
He says this is a waste of time if going for gold
@@wantafastz28 it's a matter of magnitude. For Sreetips who's running a one-man operation out of his garage, it's not economical, as you point out.
But as a video it'd be informative and entertaining, with Sreetips' focus on purity etc. And it could be a good example of explaining what kind of size of operation would be needed to make electronics recycling profitable if you only focus on the precious metals (silver gold and possibly some PGMs).
I suppose Sreetips and Mmllbc make some money from their channels/patreons or whatever.
Im about to make a sreetips style run of some gold filled scrap. Love both channels. If you get the e-waste free from dumpster diving or whatever, you can turn a Profit but you need a lot!
@@silver_salvage_savage if you get it free and lots of it and have the right setup of operations, sure. There are videos on RUclips from big recycling companies. If it's big enough you can make a profit on practically anything.
Appreciate the honesty and reality. As others say, BigstackD always says cardboard between crucible and fire brick.
BigstackD representing for Australia 💪👍🇦🇺
I use a piece of paper to keep my crucible free.
Use the electrolytic process to refine your copper and the precious metals will be in the anode slimes.
This is the way to go.
Motherboards are extremely complex to recycle.
A virgin board is great as you may have one or two gold corner BGA's.
But the only way to deal with them is strip all components inside a heated tumbler, where all of the components drop off including PCI and ram slots.
Then hammer mill bare boards to recover Copper and Fibre Glass + some Solder.
After that separate all gold contacted connectors and dump em on Ebay.
This leaves all of the IC's along with other to filter ( size wise ) through several mesh screens.
This way you at least have Gold Cornet BGA's with a mixed bunch of IC's to find real gold and the rest you could send to a refiner.
I do this every day trust me.
Also if you can get the Fibre Glass powdery enough it can be sold to the Resin casting industry for Resin fillers to bulk it out.
it looks like everything of value was already removed from the boards.
copper usually makes for 20% of the weight unless low low grade.
It did look like some components still had gold fingers on them. But for the content overall probably not worth the effort.
I agree .. probably a waste of time only value is probably some of the sockets and any and if chips that were left.
100% correct those are all processed and the chips are all missing
I saw a few gold fingers left on them, he had quite a few motherboards in there, pretty decent quality board scrap he has, but yeah I did notice a lot was pulled off it
This is why I watch your channel Jason, you are excellent at what you do, and doing this you are still in your field but outside your area of expertise and you ask for help. That is an amazing thing today, BRAVO!
From all I have watched I believe the boards to be bare of 99% of the precious metals and the remainder is copper, zinc and steel the Zinc and copper form brass as some of the zinc boils, maybe the reason for the pockmark appearance. Ball mill the mix and see if the super fines will shaker table out...
As others have said, it looks like a lot of the high-value parts have already been removed from the boards. The gold plated fingers and gold corner BGAs and other stuff have been removed. The one board you showed with all the black IC chips on it was probably the highest value board you processed. IC chips contain gold bond wires. There would also be a lot of gold plated pins and contacts, and a few IC chips left on the other boards, but you probably just mostly got copper out of them.
Still should get some grams from the sockets and slot card connectors. Those using chemicals gets quite a bit of out it.
After all those gold pins are just plated. I,think you would get way more yield when disolve in acid and follow the propper chemical procedure..at least it would be higher quality
Actually, smelting properly and cupeling should end up 99.9% if I'm not mistaken! Save the stage and run it a 2nd time and you may get more yet! Plus, smelting for Au, shouldn't have much, if any loss! Acids through the aqua regia process dissolves it and you'll never get all of it back! If my understanding is correct! Gold doesn't oxidize so, it all stays together when smelting it!
@@darvad77frimml69 I think you're right, the Aqua Regia process can lead to high loss and contamination but if done correctly yield .9999 fine gold from my understanding which is novice at best. I have a bunch of gold from my grandpa he used aqua regia to reclaim and he managed to pull a lot of copper, and I'd guess other metals as well which I don't fully get how he did that. Now I'm trying to figure out if I should smelt it with led, soda ash, and borax, or if I should pay for someone to do aqua regia.
@@ConTheDon187 We inquart silver into the gold to pull out other base metals. The silver is a great collector to clean the gold, before going to aqua regia. It's basic refining. add silver to gold, melt to make an alloy. pour into shot. use nitric to remove the silver and other base metals. filter. go to aqua regia. filter. precipitate pure gold. Then process the silver to cement out the silver from the solution. Then cement out the copper from the remaining solution. Then you can dispose of the waste solution. This seperation produces .99999 fine metals for casting
You need to heat your mold up to for at least 4-5 min before you pour you melt in. This will keep the form from piting that badly. Other then that you are pouring a mix of metals and the reactions are gonna be a bit weird inside while cooling too, not much you can do about that
Interesting how dirty the combined metals from boards is.
I'm very novice, but seems that it would be best to process with chemicals at this point.
Looking forward to your next step.
Actuly the best process would be bacteria cool process
Yes sir should have been ran through chemical processes at least twice first. And adding lead wasn’t advisable. I’d sent it to a person that does the chemical process and you’d get your true weight and true value.
Jason. I had this trouble before. That stuff that isnt melting is the tantalum capacitors. They are made of sintered tantalum powder fused together. Tantalum has very high melting point so it is pretty much impossible to melt and i tried the same thing you did which was to mix with lower melting point metal to get them to alloy with no luck. The way i solved this was i ended up picking the tantalum capacitors off individually because i also wanted to recover the tantalum but i was on small scale. That would be annoying on a large scale like you have. Im surprised you didnt see tantalum on the XRF. Although it would be isolated in the chunky spots of the ingot. I dont really have a solution for you but hopefully this insight of the tantalum capacitors being the problem can help you out.
Could it be also Palladium from some components, their melting temperature being higher they don't melt well so they become softer ?
@@knowldedge5012 no it is tantalum. Worth lots of money actually.
If your target metals include copper, pulling off oxides with flux seems counterproductive since the furnace is going to oxidize some of the copper. Try melting in a reduction atmosphere. Maybe a layer of charcoal rather than flux.
I get decent results using sugar as the carbon source. A lot of carbon monoxide forms which presents somewhat of a flammable gas / explosion hazard, depending on the setup as I experienced. My experiment was small scale so the noisy boom surprised me more than presenting a danger. I was also recovering silver. Anyways, I don’t know how useful molten sugar is mixed with flux, but it is a great carbon source. Either way, carbon is a great way to strip the oxygen off the metal oxides.
@@mwilson14 Carbon monoxide is inert, not explosive. You were probably generating hydrogen gas from the sugar in a reducing atmosphere.
@@roamingchemist2514 Thanks for that info. I figured since the carbon monoxide was super heated and was able to make contact with the flame as it was expelled, that it made a seemingly explosive reaction, but you are probably more correct than my own conclusion. In any event, it was unexpected and scared me when it happened. Thank god I mainly do chemistry on a micro scale.
@@roamingchemist2514 Yes. You are undoubtedly quite correct. Hydrogen must have been involved. CO, by itself, would extinguish flames, not generate them, particularly not in an explosion.
@@Svensk7119 Both you and Roaming Chemist are wrong. Since CO is the result of incomplete oxidation of Carbon, Carbon Monoxide is flammable, not inert.
Try convincing anyone who has demonstrated the burning of magnesium in a CO2 atmosphere that either gas is inert.
My thought would be to come at this backwards: Instead of going for the metals, look at a plastic removal process, then the glass. Plenty of comments have talked about the chemical extraction or electrolytic extraction that I would go for, but because your boards aren't amazing, you'd be best served looking at a chemical extraction of the plastic, then processing the things left behind. Roll those boards on a band saw to reduce their size and you don't have to crush them twice.
The mold issue has also been addressed, but my favorite molds for small melts are old steel muffin tins, for anything cooler than 2kf. Sand is also a good option, but the best way to separate slag from the main material, especially if you're doing two melts, is pour it in ice water to shock the glass right off. The metal contracts and the glass shatters, it's a big dramatic boiling hissing pile of ick, but if you're dealing with a lot of silicon and fiberglass, that's going to be the easiest way to remove it. Low grade glass like that has a CoE that doesn't play well with metals, which is what you're looking for. Drop in some extra sand or broken bottles for all that glass to bind to, if you want a cleaner slag pour.
And don't handle fiberglass trash with your bare hands! D: That made my toes curl up in N O P E.
Also ya wear gloves that stuff is toxic
I would think 35 lbs would be just enough to get the table tuned.
13:30 This makes sense, as the table sorts by density (surface area/mass), not weight or mass alone.
22:00 That was gonna be my suggestion.
i like how you keep the explanations short and sweet just leaving it mostly sifting the material and watching it flow into the buckets
You should do a video where you clean out the settling tank and re run that stuff to see what your missing out on.
Yeah, much of the gold will be foil, so it may have washed all the way down
Thanks for taking us along Jason 👍
Lab time can be frustrating time but you'll get it figured out.
Lots of great suggestions in the comments.
The good stuff allready depopulated . The gold corner BGAs 4side leg ic 's.
Haha I love guys like you hahahaha yes you are correct the chips with a large amount of gold are gone hahahaha the reason I say I love you type of guys is bc you are so stuck on those older chips it just means you leave all the other stuff for people like me. I post on Craigslist for free computer drop off and EASY make an extra $500-$1000 bucks a month for 1 or 2 nights of taking apart system to take to the scrap yard. This month it will be closer to $2000 with how much metal prices are up. I know it take a little extra work hahahaha but come on hahahah
@@Thunder_Dream_Designs I do that for hobby/ fun.haha. good luck hahahaha.
I go to the trouble to remove all screws and not wanted bits from the boards to reduce content,
it does not take long and prepares for better material to work with.
I have been using hydrochloric acid to reduce the base metals,
I end up with a copper solution I can use to plate steel with copper.
Removing the magnetics results in adding iron as a flux in the crucible, I suggest acid works better.
I have also used a small homemade ball mill which pulverizes the material which I float sink before firing.
Using water in a bucket is a fine example of gravity separation in its simplest form, it works.
Dusan smelts various computer components and demonstrates types of separation with differing results, worth following.
Have learnt a lot from your demonstrations, Thank you Jason
Now here is how I would approach it. Try lower Temps and do partial pours like just hot enough to melt the copper for example pick the lowest melt point metal and try skimming it or under pouring it a metal group at a time. Like separating lead from zinic silver, zinc. Get it hot enough for one group to melt but not the others. Don't think it would work for all of it but you might be able to seperate part of it if you added some lead or maybe suffer oxide of some type.
Hi jason, what you need to do is further refine your waste stream further either before the shaker table or coming off it - perhaps even both - as the most convenient and economically viable solution.
Density phase separation through a water elutriation column is the answer. Each time you pass your stream through the water elutriation column you will be able to split either the lightest or heaviest material fraction cleanly off if your material is approximately the same size range - itd be however you adjust as to which fraction/s you cleanly want to separate. List your metals in your stream in order of density. I think you could group them, eg heavies, gold, silver, lead, rhodium, platinum, palladium, as heavy group 1, to recover as a batch and refine from there. Heavy group 2, COPPER is your main goal, brass and nickel. Coppers 8.93 density its easily enough to separate from the metals that range 7.5 or less in high purity, so the tin, chromium, zinc (except for whats in brass) titanium manganese and other mid to low range density metals arnt present. You would work the elutriation column setting so you see only the largest size copper particles begin to drop in the group 1 heaviest precious metal containing fraction - they wont hurt going in there anyway. Going through a 2nd column or 2nd pass youre taking the group 2 mainly copper. Just pan and adjust water flow rate until your happy with the purity of the fraction. You can then magnet out the nickel and use cucl2 or hydrochloric acid to dissolve the brass. The remaining copper should be high purity. The elutriation column is just a perspex tube 2-3inchwide 3ft long positioned upright. Water flows upwards into the tube at a rate you control. Your feed material enters the tube about halfway down the heavy material drops down and out through a narrower choke point. The choke point is where you set your flownrate. It only needs to be 1/4 to 1/2 inch max diameter. The light material flows out the top. A small column the size i mentioned will process TONS per hour and a 1500gph pump or mains water supply pressure plenty to run it for a few cents hour. The closer your material is sized the more accurattely you can separate by density, i know copper and iron easily separate in an elutriation column for example.
But anyway your shaker table material its more convenient and economical to mechanically process further to better purity of the materials particularly on large scale to obtain a better priced saleable product with least costs incurred.
Every other video I've seen on recovering Gold or other metals from circuit boards has been a process involving acids. There's alot more than just normal basic metals and gold in those things. The acid methods work well because different acids dissolve different metals & leave others untouched. And you can extract & seperate them well.
A sand mold would help you in times like these. The cone mold is great when you got cleaner metal, and plenty of flux glass. But when it is like this. The sand mold is better and cheaper. The sand can be reused name times over. Just need to use a needle scaler to pop the sand off the metal when you remove it. But as I said earlier in you community post. I incinerate the board after I depopulate the gold recover items with a air hammer. Incinerate the boards, sift out the ash, and take a magnet over the pile and keep that stuff to the side. Just the way I do it. Doesn't mean that it will work good for everyone.
When you say incinerate the boards, do you mean pyrolysis? Doesn't it give off alot of bad fumes? The resins and glues?
@@scrapping4shiba bad fumes... lol... epic toxic.... so going with yep...
I've seen other RUclipsrs recover computer gold and they do it chemically. They melt it down with acids, get the gold isolated in solution, and then reconstitute it chemical into gold powder and then melt it into a small button or bar. I'm not a chemist so I couldn't tell you the exact process or chemicals used but there are many videos to watch. Good luck!
Sounds like we need to get Cody (Cody's Lab) and Sreetips involved on this one, as they both have a great deal of knowledge and experience on this subject.
On an unrelated note, when you broke that piece out of the crucible, it looked a lot like the Moon, which I thought was pretty neat.
And put a piece of cardboard between the fire brick and the crucible and it never sticks
big lol
@@MB-bt9km it true
@@MB-bt9km It carbonizes as a release agent.
It's possible you might have some tantalum, palladium and ruthenium in there. (from capacitors and resistors) All of those are quite refractory, especially tantalum. Another thing is if you remove all the screws and steel face plates from the boards, you keep out a lot of iron.
Couldn't stop looking at nut In the fine grade bucket. Stainless steel nut. Blahhh fine grade
Hi, Jason. My name is Russell I've been doing what I believe is my soul purpose in life which is prospecting and trying to build a new look for the gold production and mining industry by incorporating old techniques with more eco friendly principles to reclamation as help restore the natural order of things rather than destroy it in our wake. I am
iéd probably be cupelling the hole lot on a bed of cement . burn off the tin , led ,and zinc . might be the simplest place to start and the oxides are contained in the cement and no liquid waste
I like the humbleness in your videos. I’ve learned quite a bit. It’s like watching an educational video with the voiceover done by Nicholas Cage.
Thanks for making these videos and explaining everything along the way. I never would have seen this without your show. Great entertainment.
I second the notion of you and Sreetips doing a video together, or at least collaborating with one another.
Sounds like you need a finer shred on the copper bits for the table to work.
The slag looks like glass, so maybe that's the fibreglass, and resin from the capacitors.
Those big red and blue ceramic capacitors are VERY valuable! You want to pluck all red and blue ceramic capacitors off and treat them all by themselves! They have LARGE quantities of silver and PALLADIUM!! 17 to 23 grams PER POUND of capacitors!
The round blue ones are tantalum-silver for the most part. There are also many other types of tantalum capacitors; some foil, some plastic rectangles, some round.
There are also green ceramic capacitors and brown, round ones... those could quite a few compositions.
Thank you for showing us the experiments and frustrations. I'm sure that some knowledge was gained by your viewing audience.
I WAS a board guy for 25 years. The best stuff to get is the older stuff that was made before the price of gold jumped from $38 an oz. When that happened all the specs were lowered. The military spec for gold plating was cut in half. I was still buying PCB's in the early 80's with 100 micro inches of hard gold plating.
Hi Jaon try 10lbs soda ash 5 lbs borax and 1 lb feldspar that will thin the melt and spearate metal from slags.
You can scale down on that ratio.
Hey J, the problem is the borax; it’s too acidic. Add some base to it WITH the borax, and you’ll be bueno bro.
By
Maybe try adding some potassium nitrate. I'd guess the massive amount of copper would already act as the collector metal.
Ya gotta scoop all the crud & impurities off the top of the liquid metal once you stir in the flux.. Ya gotta get the stirring implement up to temp first, otherwise the liquid metals will stick to it.. I've been melting down reclaimed copper since last summer & have amassed over 80lbs of copper. The goal is 300lbs.. I've been watchin this fella here on YT BigStackD Castings for a couple years & it got ME into it..
When copper acts as a colllector metal ,electro refining copper will show good result about the left out precious metals, best way to reduce time is depopulate the boards separate the mlccs and icchips , coated pins process them individually upon over years of doing this , this way it’s economical for small scale recycler
Your videos get me even more interested in mining and metallurgy.
As for these circuit boards, they are notoriously a pain in the butt to extract the precious metals from without using acids and chemicals etc.
The best results I've seen for getting gold & copper out of the circuit boards is by using a chemical process to dissolve the metals out of the circuit boards into solution and then precipitate the solid metal out of solution for further refining .
There's this oddly interesting channel "Cody's Lab "
He has a video on circuit boards .
Aside from this weired thing he does where he pretends he's on Mars and wears a gerryrigged respirator and and wanders around a piece of desert property he has, and he pretends he's a robot , etc. He makes pretty good content for his channel. It's pretty cool.
Cody's Lab is awesome. Man extracted uranium
I did this full time back in 1982. We did it on a large scale but you can do smaller batches. Rule of thumb. Any gold exposed strip it with a solution of hot dilute KCN in a cement mixer and add drops of concentrated H2O2 (get from hydroponics store). DO NOT stand in front of the mixer. If you drop the beaker of H2O2 in the mixer you will get blasted. DO this outside away from people. This stuff is poisen!! This will strip off all the gold, nickel and copper. Pour the liquid into a barrel and sprinkle powdered zinc dust on top to get the KCN to release the AU and take up the Zinc. Filter the AU precipitate. Wash with distilled water. In a fume hood add Nitric Acid and Hydrochloric Acid. DO NOT breath the fumes they are DEADLY. This will dissolve the AU and Zinc. Filter the hot solution through glass filter paper. You then sprinkle sodium bisulphate on the hot solution SLOWLY to remove the nitric. When the nitric is gone the AU will precipitate. Filter with distilled water and you have 3 9s fine gold. Do the aquaregia dissolve filter and precipitate a couple more times and you can get 5 9s fine gold. For the AU you could not strip off right away you could use a ball mill to smash open the chips to get at the gold wires and solder inside. Then in the final 3rd step you can smelt everything like you did. The smelting was pretty low yield for us so we out sourced that step. To dispose of the spent KCN solution from the first step let it evaporate to crystals then smelt the crystals you may recover some more AU from this but not always. Do not dump your KCN down the toilet.
Big scale copper electroplating might be the easiest cheapest way to separate the copper from the other elements
You could try pouring the molten metal slowly into water making shot, then separate the good shot from the slag and metals with a high melt index. There was a video a year or so back that showed smelting on a backyard forge with a large stainless pan, they were able to pull off the different slag and metals through the heating process by adding elements and scraping the oxides to side, as I remember, I think they inquarted with both lead and silver at different stages? If you do pour small shot, you could try chemical refining?
Sreetips on RUclips knows his acids and is good at recovering the gold from computer boards
ty,,, i done. no one is doing anything I want. Im 39, most of my adult life has been hell....
As far as smelting, It seems you need the ability to reach hotter temperatures. I use a diesel powered furnace myself. Also pouring into graphite mold to create plates for electrolysis seem to greatly help with porosity. Just have to preheat the molds
@ Electronic Scrapper
Where did you find a diesel fueled furnace? I've been looking around but haven't seen one...I have been thinking I would have to build one, but didn't really want to add more complications if I didn't have to.
This method will work great for part with gold bonding wire or anything that is pure. However anything that is plated such as gold, silver or copper will not be separated by this process. Which in e-scrap that is a majority of the metals either plated or alloyed.
As mentioned by others, it looks like the boards have already been picked clean of the higher-value parts. The Iron, Nickel and Chromium probably do not help, because of their higher melting point. Some of those components may also have Tantalum which has an even higher melting point.
After pulverizing, a magnet can at least pull the Iron away, possibly some of the Nickel. Probably worth doing if you can.
Would you consider drilling out a core sample from your cone, and doing XRF on that? The reason is that metals precipitating on the surface may give a different result.
Finally, it looks like you did get some Gold. How does that compare to Natural Ore in terms of yield? In other words, what would be considered a High-Quality Gold Ore in terms of Ounces of Gold per ton of material? Thanks.
Seeing how many of the boards have already had their fingers and sounthbridge chips removed I'm not overly excited by them but that doesn't mean that there still isn't some goodness left. I just wouldn't expect the Au recovery to be super high. My main concern with recovery this way is the ultra fine Ag and Pd from any MLCC left on the boards (assuming those have not been removed already). I really don't see the shaker table being overly effective at recovering such a small particle size as would be in any MLCC. I've done a small scale test with crushing/grinding MLCC to a fine dust and then panning and the recovery was VERY poor but once I did a nitric soak on the panning leftovers the numbers went right back up to what I was expecting.
And I was thinking about the slag issue and I wonder if there was a lot of aluminium in there. The metal looked like it began to burn when you poured it so maybe adding a bunch of lye in the flux might help. Just a thought.
Can you run your cone mold through a steel shot blaster to remove the stuck lead? And smooth up the surface at the same time?
This is going to be cool. Love your set up. Enjoy watching your videos too.
Thank you.
Jason, a simple way is to use eco-goldex leaching solution to wash the precious metals from the shacking table concentrates. From this yep, you are separating the precious metals ( Au, Ag, PGM) from the base metals(Cu, Ni, Fe…).
I'm hardly an expert, but I've done a lot of armchair observing of different people's techniques for recovering precious minerals from computer boards and components.
Streetips gentleman is probably what you need to watch yourself to understand you skipped a step I think. It takes a lot longer but the results are much more pure. That's my two cents worth.
Boards generally do not contain gold and instead use copper for interconnect. Older IC chips that were wire bonded in their package typically contain the most gold - the wire bonds inside are gold and the backside of the silicon chip will have gold sputtered on it too. Newer chips contain a lot less gold. Some of the connectors that are soldered to the board are often gold plated. Your boards seem pre-cleaned of most of the gold bearing parts.
it can be from the MlCC caps(ceramic electrolyte or something) or aluminuim in the electrolytic caps reacting with oxygen(or other stuff) in the ceramic chemicals, just a hunch so maybe HCL wash would help.
it can be other things as well but if you try with a small sample of about 50-100g you can see if HCL wash helped, also normally when i see people do MLCCs they usually burn/ heat them up to liberate the metal and reduce some compounds in the caps.
HCL will react with Zinc, Aluminium and Tin.
Do you run a surfactant in your water? Wondering if some of the foil copper is sticking to the substrate or plastics. Reducing surface tension could help separation.
Jet dry
Try running the number 1 and number 2 through the shaker table again separately and try to separate the metals a bit better. If you can get a better concentrate of copper you can just melt that and everything else you should be able to Flux it and cupel it to get the precious metals
You have poured many dissimilar metals together. I suggest you contact youtuber, streettips for some insight. If possible, make your pours into smaller pieces. Smaller is easier to work with. Also, start using hydrogen gas for your furnace. It gets much, much hotter.
The one picked up & said looks pretty old is for joining phone cable in places multiple lines are needed , from mains to buildings for example . One wire in bottom slot one in top
hit the cone mold with a blow torch to remove the low melting lead
You already figured it out, but earlier in the video I was shouting at the screen that there's going to be iron and nickle in there screwing you up. Sprinkle some sand on your plinth before firing and the crucible won't stick to it.
I would definitely be excited to get that ewaste if it was the right price. I just bought a small 70 lbs lot at $3.13 per pound with shipping. It was all "unknown" but so far has been great for recovery.
Ultimately, I think the only decent process will be liquation. There are far too many metals in that melt to develop a thermal process that can be controlled in your furnace. It would only make sense to do this yourself, which may not be economical. If you sent it to a refiner, there's no point in melting it; or maybe even concentrating it.
Sell it as is to a refiner and save yourself the headache
He’s trying to show that you can get stuff out of them so he can sell more of his products that are used to extract the metals.
Yeh, the whole point is to do it himself. And show the rest of us as he does it.
You need to dissolve the slug in a Nitric Acid. Flatten the slug and chop it down to 1 mm thick strips. Dissolve in Nitric Acid. Base metals and Silver will go into solution, Gold will drop as flakes. After that filter, wash and rinse the gold and dissolve it in Agua Regia. The rest you already know. You could do it before smelting, but now you just added more steps to the recovery.
You could try a magnet on the discharge of your hammer mill to pull ferrous metals away from your shacker table to pre clean the #1 and #2 cons.
Fascinating to watch the process this set up does
The material isn’t fine enough. Piorisation would improve the process and your table would work as it should ! Cheers
Hi Jason, I think if you sent the boards through a pryolysis machine first, all that plastic would get turned to ash, then it should be much easier to separate the metals, plus you get diesel fuel to run generators in remote areas.
that's a really cool setup to recover the metal.
The flux is sticking to the aluminum so you need Potassium chloride, you can use No Salt from the grocery store. They are never going to melt evenly with all the different alloy metals due to the different flash times they solidify at which explains all the craters, Don't forget the Tantalum which is not going to melt at those temps, the metals need to be chemically separated back into elemental form. I hope this helps.
The boards look good gold platinum silver plus other precious metals Love the videos Jaxon
Produces
You NEED to cover the kaowool in your furnace with a castable refractory. Not only will it improve your thermal performance, but kaowool (and all ceramic wools) release micrscopic fibers into the air that will penetrate your lungs and cause very serious and painful problems in your lungs.
Also put some carboard or paper under your crucible. It creates a layer of carbon that will prevent sticking.
Some other comments mentioned it too, but it's probably a good idea to remove the batteries from the (mother)boards. They could explode during crushing and release corrosive compounds
Copper and sink is quite easy to oxidize of and a mill and a shacker table is quite handy for primary concentration to eliminate all the un necessary materials you could run it through a ball mill to get it a little finer
So to start with, most of what you had was already “depopulated” with the easy to get gold and silver already removed. Most of the buses (the circuits epoxied to the boards) are copper and the high value microchips were removed. You also had a lot of tin and small amounts of silver in the solder. Most of the capacitors, resistors and other electrical components are aluminum and carbon. Unless you get raw e-waste you aren’t going to have a large return. Also, though it stinks to high heaven, try burning everything first to remove the volatiles then run it through the ball mill. You should be able to free up a lot of the more precious metals in this manner.
To remove the zinc/tin, bring the furnace up to just above the melting point of copper. The zinc/tin should vaporize, and as the vaporized metal escapes it cools into “threads” that can be collected like cotton candy. When the threads stop (generally take 10-15 minutes) most the zinc/tin is out. After that you can increase the temp and put in a standard cleaning flux to trap any undesirable slag. Scrape the surface clean regularly. After that make your pour to a preheated mold. You should end up with a very gold looking metal just on this side of silver (often called Nordic Gold or Aluminum Bronze).
As an aside: adding cardboard, or really anything that will create a buffer layer between your crucible and fire brick, will prevent sticking.
Make a chromium mold instead of steel so nothing sticks to the sides. Only rhodium and higher melting points will stick to the chromium. Chromium melting point is 3,465 degrees F. And Platinum is 3,214 degrees F. And Rhodium melting point is 3,567 degrees F.
Hey! Love this idea. I’m not terribly sure you’d need to put the whole board through the mill. Maybe I’d try to use acid to separate the metal from the boards. I don’t know. Great video though! Never thought about a shaker board to do this before.
I am sure you've had a million different comments on here telling ya what to do.. you can't treat this stuff like ore.. You have copper, brass, tin (I know), silver, palladium, gold, stainless steel, iron, nickel, silicon materials, lead. So you tell me, without chemical separation; how do you melt all those different materials together and separate them at the same time?.. you depopulate the boards.. separate the components... incinerate the chips, THEN you can use your shaker table, then pan, then smelt or melt.. everything else you sell as a scrap recovery material and its quite valuable separating the material then reselling.. best way to make money but time consuming.
take a look for separating out pc board components, many of the small rectangle IC parts are Tungsten, NiCr, Palladium, & Platnum. All of which affect melting points.
Yes, those are really good boards. What you want to look for are PCI chips, RAM sticks and IC chips (IC chips, of course, have to be processed differently than the others).
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask 😊
You are dealing with ceramic, PGMs, and other metals like tantalum that have a melting point over 5k degrees. Propane furnace can’t get that hot.
and kovar , did i spell that right , as well
@@geneplummer6645 the FeNiCo alloy? That is typically used in metal-to-glass applications like vacuum tube. It’s melting point is around 2600F if I remember right.
@@ursamines7643 his best bet would be to go to chemical separation from the shaker table , or sacrifice the precious metals fragment and just sell it at copper value and let the refiners take it from there
pretty low grade stuff for the most part anyway
@@geneplummer6645 I would agree that chemistry would be the answer. Plus the copper can be dropped out using iron according to the reactivity series of metal
I suggest you run another heat batch. It was still separating- cooling down. I have done that with heavy solder silver melts. Try it, it might work.
Mmmmm forbidden chewy center!
Depopulated boards will almost only produce aluminum and copper. The gold is in the chips, fingers and pins. And caustic soda or lye is used to clean green solder from all boards.
Is it possible that the remaining fiberglass is insulating the metal mixture causing un-uniform heating ?
A cheap experiment would to get an old broken chest freezer. And line the inside with 6 mil vapour barrier plastic. Then set up a low voltage, low amp electrolytic refining process. You can use an old battery charger. You put the ground up material in some sort of basket on one side and bunch of copper plates on the other. All the copper would be drawn to a copper plates. The rest of the material would drop to the bottom of the tank as anode sludge. That sludge would be much less material to be sent off for further refining.
Pre heat mold ? Maybe clean the mold could be getting contamination from that . Ive only smelted pure . Gold silver aluminum. I would suggest getting a graphite mold .
Looks like some PC, laptop and server mother boards.....good stuff.
How about ball milling into a finer powder, separating with a magnet, run both results separately across the table, and finally drying and smelting the six factions individually? Also those appear to be low value boards to begin with but I can offer you a one time shipment of fully populated boards. I will call you during the week.
^this^ ball mill, pyrolize, smelt, electrofine cu, then pms will be in anode slimes
@@user-lb8do4ew6k I have no clue what you are saying...
Someone already took the high yield parts like processors and IC chips.
Probably why he got it all for free, it was already garbage.
The best way I find to test for gold is as I said in your YT post the other day. The way I do it Is, get one board at a Time use a paint stripping gun (heat gun) to melt all the solder and then all the plated fingers come lose (it makes it easier to pull the the plated metals out of their plastic housing too) then I once I have a couple of kilos melt it all down stirring periodically to make sure all has melted then I add about an extra kilogram or so of bright copper i.e. copper wire or refined copper and pour it into copper/gold shot, then cover it with Nitric acid thus the all the metals except the gold will dissolve, you may need to keep adding nitric to it once the fumes stop you'll know all the base metals have dissolved you can put it on the heat to make it run faster if you so wish. all you should be left with is gold mud and that can be melted down into shot again and given the Aqua Regia to get rid of what is left of the base metals and you should be left with Fine gold .999%.
Using lead to lower the melting point makes me wonder what zinc bismuth or something else also work because I remember seeing a video about making gold solder for jewelry using zinc or cadmium and I believe it was only about 6% zinc but closer to 30% if you use cadmium and cadmium had to be about 10% more than you wanted to end up with because it ends up being lost (sacrificial cadmium)
Those boards are good in large numbers! On a computer board most of the gold is located in the IC and BGA chips
I think you're on the right track. The Borax worked as a flux and welded your sample to the steel cone. I wonder if adding chemical separation would do the job the way you want it done?
Those are for the most part low grade boards. All the good ic have been removed. As other have said some of the components are made from extremely high melting point metals. This could be throwing your melt off. I would plate out the copper and refine the slimes.
Remelt it without borax. To get purity, flux it then put on a stainless basin then pour acid. If red smoke it's still reacting. Wait until white smoke then dilute water. Separate water to recover silver mixing salt or copper. The brown powder is pure gold.
There are a lot of metals on those boards that were easier collected by depopulating them first . Like tantalum the yellow rectangle chip with the red line . Palladium in the brown and blue bulbus looking things . best wishes
Can you recover the Palladium from MMLCs or silver while you're trying to process the gold