shootinginthedark
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Reclaimed Gold Pins from Cellphones
guys.
I am so not a chemist. I am not a scientist. I am an awful liberal arts major. BUT I've come into possession like 70 grams of reclaimed gold pins from
inside cellphones (I think), still covered in solder. It was a parting gift from a dickhead boyfriend. THUS I really cant wait to turn this shit into
gold and profit, get something out of the mess. What I have read: I need a filtration system (200ish on amazon?) and some kind of acid. I don't know
where to get this acid, I am terrified to work with acid. I don't know if thats even correct or if thats the best way to do it. SO if one of your guys
would take pity on me and walk me thru this or, better yet, if you're in SoCal and you can just, like, do it for me, I'd reward? Baked goods? Idk. I
keep looking at this gold just sitting and it's driving me nuts so here I am.
Thanks in advance
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j_sum1
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This is probably what you want:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouYW_7-Njbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxJ0YhATxM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhh6p4E6-I
No nasty chemicals here -- at least nothing that you would be anxious about handling.
Have fun!
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Twospoons
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You do realise that those pins are merely plated with gold, not solid - with said plating likely being a mere 20 um thick or thereabouts. So your 70g
of pins probably contains under 1/10 of a gram of gold. Which is about four bucks worth.
You'd do better to put them up on ebay, and let someone else do all the hard work!
[Edited on 18-5-2016 by Twospoons]
Helicopter: "helico" -> spiral, "pter" -> with wings
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shootinginthedark
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Quote: Originally posted by Twospoons  | You do realise that those pins are merely plated with gold, not solid - with said plating likely being a mere 20 um thick or thereabouts. So your 70g
of pins probably contains under 1/10 of a gram of gold. Which is about four bucks worth.
You'd do better to put them up on ebay, and let someone else do all the hard work!
[Edited on 18-5-2016 by Twospoons] |
His explanation was that there was solder on top and the bulk of the interior was gold. Does that jive with reality at all? He assumed of the 2.5ish
oz i'd get a little over an oz of gold. How the hell did he arrive at this
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diddi
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ok, this is what about 1kg of carefully trimmed up computer boards looks like before and after.
the gold on the right is thin foil and the beaker is about 8cm across. the deep blue/green grunge on the left is all the other metals in there. the
gold is minimal at best. I do it for fun not profit.
this is only the first step in getting clean gold, btw. it needs to be dissolved in a nasty acid combination and the crystallised again using another
chemical.
the reason gold is used is to improve the quality of connections inside the device. so the gold is only useful if it is the outer coating. so if you
have cut a pin open and it looks gold inside and silver outside, you can pretty much bet that it is in fact a copper pin with lead/tin coating. total
value: about 0$, less the expense of the chemicals used to process it. there is no point in making gold pins and then plating them.
[Edited on 18-5-2016 by diddi]
Beginning construction of periodic table display
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MrHomeScientist
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| Quote: Originally posted by shootinginthedark |
His explanation was that there was solder on top and the bulk of the interior was gold. Does that jive with reality at all? He assumed of the 2.5ish
oz i'd get a little over an oz of gold. How the hell did he arrive at this |
He is incorrect. All electronics that use gold use an incredibly thin plating. Its only purpose is corrosion resistance, so a thin plating does the
job at minimum cost to the manufacturer. There are many ways to go about recovering the gold, nearly all of which involve 'scary acids'. The videos
j_sum1 linked are a really novel approach that was pioneered on this forum, and is quite a lot less hazardous.
Moral of the story, though, is that electronics scrap won't net you hardly any gold at all and isn't profitable processing unless you have literally
tons of free scrap and cheap chemicals. I plan on doing it at some point because it's interesting to me and will be a fun exercise. If it's something
that you think you'd have fun doing, go for it! Maybe this will be your introduction into the exciting world of chemistry 
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aithecomputerguy
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| Quote: Originally posted by MrHomeScientist | | Quote: Originally posted by shootinginthedark |
His explanation was that there was solder on top and the bulk of the interior was gold. Does that jive with reality at all? He assumed of the 2.5ish
oz i'd get a little over an oz of gold. How the hell did he arrive at this |
He is incorrect. All electronics that use gold use an incredibly thin plating. Its only purpose is corrosion resistance, so a thin plating does the
job at minimum cost to the manufacturer. There are many ways to go about recovering the gold, nearly all of which involve 'scary acids'. The videos
j_sum1 linked are a really novel approach that was pioneered on this forum, and is quite a lot less hazardous.
Moral of the story, though, is that electronics scrap won't net you hardly any gold at all and isn't profitable processing unless you have literally
tons of free scrap and cheap chemicals. I plan on doing it at some point because it's interesting to me and will be a fun exercise. If it's something
that you think you'd have fun doing, go for it! Maybe this will be your introduction into the exciting world of chemistry |
Actually, the purpose isn't just corrosion resistance. It also has one of the lowest capacitance of any metal, so it cuts down on noise.
bool permission = UN->getPermission(THERMONUCLEAR_WARFARE);if(permission =
true){ this->launchNuclearMissile(this->target);}
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unionised
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Metals don't have capacitance
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Marvin
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That's not a statement that makes any sense to me. If you mean resistance then it's inferior to copper and silver.
There are forums specifically about gold reclamation, they would probably have a much better idea how much gold would be in those pins and how best to
extract it. Probably not much and it's quite easy to mess up the chemistry and pour your gold down the sink.
edit,
unionised, Gold does have a Dielectric constant, but I don't see it as applicable here.
[Edited on 22-5-2016 by Marvin]
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