Refining electronic boards

hello All

i was wondering if any of you had any ideas or knowledge of the
amount or quantity of gold silver or other precious metals that is
used on a single mother board, a memory stick, Ram chip and an
Intelchip.over the years have accumulated quite a bit of these
boards and chips, last week i made a few phone calls to find out who
would refine these things, to my surprise not any of the metal
refiners that we know of are interested. I was under the impression
that Hoover and strong would be,since they were advertising for their
green metal,(reclaimed metal). I did find one place in Minnesota
that will purchase the boards and chips and pay a flat per pound fee.
( $3.00 per pound of mother boards). this almost is counter
productive for me to get the material there from the east coast would
probably cost more then their per pound payment. I know that there is
more labor involved to get the precious material out of these
electronic boards, but was wondering if any of you had experience in
self refining the boards yours selves? would it be worth the labor
and energy ?

Hratch Babikian
Atelier Hratch Babikian

Anyone considering refining should buy a book entitled: “Recovery and
Refining of Precious Metals”, second edition by C.W. Ammen

http://www.ganoksin.com/jewelry-books/us/product/0412720604.htm

All of Mr. Ammen’s titles are worth having.

The boards I used to plate at HP had 3-5 millionths of an inch of
gold on them. We did relatively heavy plating for the industry at
the time. I don’t know what the current standard is though. It takes
a lot of boards to make for much gold.

James Binnion
James Binnion Metal Arts

Hi Hratch,

I did find one place in Minnesota that will purchase the boards and
chips and pay a flat per pound fee. ( $3.00 per pound of mother
boards). this almost is counter productive for me to get the
material there from the east coast would probably cost more then
their per pound payment. 

I can’t help you with a refiner for the electronic boards, but if you
use the Flat Rate boxes from the Post Office, shipping costs can be
minimized & the pkg is also trackable.

Dave.

Hratch,

As a person holding an Extra Amateur license, I have had a lifetime
of experience playing with electronics and circuitry.

It used to be, about a generation ago, that you could scrape the gold
off circuit board fingers with a razor blade. But not so any longer.

True, refining or recycling precious materials from used electronics
is a worthwhile salvage activity, but only to those with sufficient
economies of scale.

You could recover about one ounce of gold per ten tons of electronic
material. There’s better things to be doing with your time.

Andrew Jonathan Fine

I don’t remember where we sent them, but a few years ago a friend
and I took apart a very large pile of outdated (1980’s and 90’s)
computers and sent the boards to be recycled. As I recall we had
trouble finding a refiner that would take them and we had to have a
large amount (we filled the back of his pickup truck with boards).
From that, in probably 2001, we got about $800 worth of gold and
other metals. Not bad considering what gold prices were at that time
but hardly worth the work of pulling all those boards. Not to mention
disposing of the rest of the PC, cases from that era were metal and
heavy and made from a grade of sheet iron that was at that time
worthless as scrap.

Ben Brauchler
BenzGemz.com

Colt Refining will do the work, if you have enough material to make
it worth while. Not sure what the yield would be, but their minimum
refining charge of $500 will cover 200 pounds of unprocessed material
and then you can expect something like several percent off of spot.
So if you have a big pile of it go to

Hello friend

I read an article about that a few months ago, i hope you can find
what you want:

http://www.ganoksin.com/pdf_reader/recycling_of_gold_from_electronics/

Alfredo Lagravere