Extracting Gold from Old Hardware?

[Thedreadlord]

Hey. I had a broken and old laptop. I managed to remove all the good working parts. Such as the battery and the ram and put them on sale. And removed everything that looked like Gold from the motherboard. I went to the Gold Shop and he told me it's just a metal that looks like Gold. 

 

Did I do something wrong? I'm gathering money to upgrade my pc.

 

Also are old motherboard's from Pc any good?

[Cheeki]

The amount of physical gold on top of some components is either thin or too negligible to even warrant wanting to break down using chemicals and other means. Most of the time it is simply plated to ensure a better more corrosive resistant and wear resistant connection to the real internal hardware. They most likely have told you that as it is true somewhat, they probably don't have the ability to break it down for something so small

[Kilrah]

It is gold, but only a plating... There will only be a few micrograms of it.

[Heliian]

There are people who harvest gold from old tech. 

 

They usually buy skids full of old junk then cut off the gold parts.  After that they use mechanical and chemical separation to remove the actual gold.  

 

It's not cheap or easy and requires some nasty chemicals so I don't think a lot of people do it.  

 

Couple the difficulty with newer tech having less and less real gold components and it's probably not profitable. 

[whm1974]

3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

It is gold, but only a plating... There will only be a few micrograms of it.

Didn't use to use gold alloy pins for Microchips? Might still be in use for Spacecraft but I wouldn't know.

[Kilrah]

5 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Didn't use to use gold alloy pins for Microchips? Might still be in use for Spacecraft but I wouldn't know.

Some yes, and bonding wires

 

 

But chips with large-ish amounts of gold haven't been a thing for 20 years or so.

 

I've seen some videos about recovery from modern electronics, the amount was significant but only made sense at industrial scale. 

[whm1974]

6 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Some yes, and bonding wires

 

 

But chips with large-ish amounts of gold haven't been a thing for 20 years or so.

 

I've seen some videos about recovery from modern electronics, the amount was significant but only made sense at industrial scale. 

Was an Elrutim alloy ever used? I keep forgetting how it is spelled, but it is a alloy of Gold and Silver. It has some advantages with less wear then either parent metal among others.

[Mark Kaine]

tldr: dont bother unless you can get tons of scrap and know what youre doing, because its actually quite  toxic and dangerous.

 

 

[Thedreadlord]

22 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Was an Elrutim alloy ever used? I keep forgetting how it is spelled, but it is a alloy of Gold and Silver. It has some advantages with less wear then either parent metal among others.

I don't know. I don't have expertise. They said some name similar to Titanium.

[whm1974]

3 minutes ago, Thedreadlord said:

I don't know. I don't have expertise. They said some name similar to Titanium.

Sorry it is called Electrum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum

[Thedreadlord]

6 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Sorry it is called Electrum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum

The one on right looks exactly like gold.

[whm1974]

5 hours ago, Thedreadlord said:

The one on right looks exactly like gold.

Depending on the mixture it can be shades of many colors. Plus whatever trace elements are present

[trag1c]

7 hours ago, Thedreadlord said:

The one on right looks exactly like gold.

A lot of it does contain gold due to the malleable properties of gold as well as the fact that it doesn't really oxidize and the surface can be made extremely smooth and level. However, this is all plated gold, a lot of times it's ENIG which electroless nickel immersion gold. So it's nickel plating and then a very thin plating of gold. 

 

The problem you're running into is the fact that the base metal is not gold and as such you cannot accurately measure the weight of the gold. The gold has to be extracted from the other metals before it can be weighed or sold. 

 

Due to the fact that it's all plating your may only get like one or two dollars worth of gold from a single laptop. It can be lucrative to extract gold and other precious metals from electronics but only in bulk as there isn't enough material in a single pcb.

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, Thedreadlord said:

The one on right looks exactly like gold.

[airborne spoon]

its both easy and not easy at the same time.

I had 3 old laptops, 5 cell phones and a few other odds and ends the i broke down and got the gold from. it was a fun experiment but it involved some basic chemistry knowledge and proper safety equipment.

 

The hardest part was getting the nitric acid that crap is not easy to come across and not cheap, i ended up getting 1L from a company in CO and it took about 9 days to get it to NC because its hazmat and cant fly.

 

Also the getting rid of the acid after the fact is something to consider. Where I was at the time the hazmat dump was free for normal citizens to dispose of waste because if it wasn't free its likely people would just dump shit on the ground or down the drain.

 

Obviously it needs to be done outside, and one day i was making aqua regia and it makes a thick dark orange/brown cloud of smoke as it dissolves everything and its super dangerous so i had my full face chemical mask and gloves on and my neighbor walked by with that WTF look and i told him it was science and i was extracting gold from old computers and he was chill. (some people aren't chill so do it out of line of sight of Passersby)

 

So after all the different forms of acid and chemicals used what was my result? a BB sized piece of 99.99% pure gold which has a value of about $15 which doesn't even cover half of the cost of the acid. But it was fun and a good learning experience of chemistry.

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, airborne spoon said:

So after all the different forms of acid and chemicals used what was my result? a BB sized piece of 99.99% pure gold which has a value of about $15 which doesn't even cover half of the cost of the acid. But it was fun and a good learning experience of chemistry.

Unless the old laptops no longer work and so old to be useless anyway, you could have gotten more on Ebay then the ~$15 Worth of Gold you gotten from doing that.

[airborne spoon]

5 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Unless the old laptops no longer work and so old to be useless anyway, you could have gotten more on Ebay then the ~$15 Worth of Gold you gotten from doing that.

I didn't sell it due to the low value, it's around my house somewhere I saw it a couple months ago. Unless the price of gold skyrockets I'll prob never sell it.

 

All the stuff was broken and taking up space which is why I decided to scrap them down.

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, airborne spoon said:

% pure gold which has a value of about $15 which doesn't even cover half of the cost of the acid

which is why its really only worth it with *tons* of scrap… at some point it becomes profitable, but also needs to be done as efficiently as possibly…. and yeah, obviously its quite dangerous especially long term… idk much about chemistry other than watching almost all neilred videos lol, but hes doing  quite a good job showing what equipment you need, which is generally not cheap, and also that some basic knowledge is required, otherwise you'd basically go nowhere just randomly mixing highly toxic oxiders and stuff ; )

 

 

2 hours ago, airborne spoon said:

it's around my house somewhere

did u melt it? definitely should make something funny with it : p