Is it worth doing? Does anyone here do it? I heard you can buy junk computer boards on ebay in bulk. How much gold is in one computer?
No. Yes, I will look up a thread for you in a sec... Why buy them when you can pick them up off the street on bulk trash days? Dunno.
Thanks for the link, Krispy. I was watching a youtube video on it and they acted like this was the pot at the end of the rainbow. I'll just stick to looking for scrap brass.
it's not that you shouldn't do it, but beware there are toxicity concerns. just do your homework before you get into such a thing. to some the effort is worth the risks or they are prepared to handle them and feel there is a worthy reward.
Krispy is right on this one. Is it worth all of the effort? Think of all of the materials you would have to have to extract the gold. What if you had an accident. I'd don't think I'd take the time to do it.
Palladium hold or sell? as you can see from these threads CT member cerdsalicious is into the scrap thing...
I have looked into this a bit in the past, what I found out is you have to stick to really old computers pentium 2 and older. almost all of the gold is in the CPU, a little on the edge connectors and practically none any where else. CPUs newer then the pentium 2 have very little gold in them. I could find no actual info on how much gold is each CPU, I do know there are tiny wires connecting the silicon chip to the packaging which are gold and the chip sets on a bed of gold for heat transfer (i believe this is a very thin gold plating). If you do succeed in finding enough of the older computers to make salvaging them worth while, you will have the problem in disposing of all of the parts with no gold (monitors, drives ...etc) And then it takes some pretty strong acid to dissolve the gold and then the disposal of the hazardous waste when your done. Most of the people doing this are in 3rd world countries where they have no problems with the waste issues. In a nut shell, do not try it.
Yup scrap PM's and mrogans are my thing. Anyways in regards to your questions, I tried doing the whole scrap pm's bymyself. Now the issue as mentioned is toxicity. Everything taht is in the room, where your conducting the scrapping, will be infected with toxins. I recomend building a secure plywood shed, ventialation system is necessary. Full body suit recomended. Now I gave that a try for a short period of time, but realized its better to buy pms. So I buy scrap off people through my store. While I prefer broken jewelery, I cant ocmplain when someone comes in with an ounce of gold! In the end if your going to do it, you eitheir value your health, or your pocket. You could sell off all the CPU boards to another scrapper, but dont expect much if any money.
You will find gold in varying amounts in connectors and some microprocessors. Obviously gold is a premium material so they will use it as sparingly as possible. The preferred material is a tin/lead material due to the cost savings over gold, but it's not suitable for harsh environments or where there is vibration present. So for devices designed for those environments you will most likely find gold used in the connectors. Printers are an example. As mentioned above you will also find gold in older computers but not always. The original IBM PC used tin/lead on it's card edge connectors. It will take some homework to find out what is good and what isn't. Keep in mind however we are talking about gold plating where its measured by thickness of atoms needed to do the job. The biggest challenge will first an efficient method to separate the metal bits from the plastics, resins and ceramics used in electronics. Once that part is done it's then a matter of refining the gold out of the other metals. You will be dealing mostly with tin/lead, copper and aluminum for the most part. With gold at $1100/oz, it's probably worth it, but you will have to set yourself up for something large scale to make it worth while. Interestingly, I saw a recycling operation for old Ma Bell telephones. 10s of millions of these very well built phones were turned in when people found out they didn't have to rent them. They recovered the materials from theses phones by tossing them in a pulverizer that reduced the phone down to small particles then a number of mechanical and chemical processes were used to separate out the various metals.
the money is to be made in rounding up old computer parts and selling them on ebay so someone else can do all the work.
There are companies that do all the hazardous work for you. All you need to do it find the gold parts and mail them in. I'm sure they'll mail you a check for your efforts to keep them in business.
