Gold Recovery From Cell Phone SIM Cards COMPLETE PROCESS

hello YouTube welcome back to my channel today what I'm going to be doing is trying to extract some gold off of some cell phone and SIM cards here that I ordered on eBay and want to get right to it here are the two lots of cell phone SIM cards that I purchased on eBay for this experiment this one down here this tells me I'm gonna get 500 cards this one up here says I'm gonna get two pounds of SIM cards so we'll open the packages and see exactly what we got okay in this bag here there was uh it was an order for 500 SIM cards and I placed three orders so I should have 1500 SIM cards in here what I'm gonna do now just open them up here and form on a scale and William okay and this speaker here I've got three hundred and twelve grams of SIM cards that's what they look like they've just had the tops trimmed off of him which was nice this box here was advertised weight was two pounds of SIM cards and this one's got about 944 grams that's including the bag but that's pretty close a pound is uh I believe 454 grams times two is about 900 so this is a little over I so it should be good to go here all right trying to figure out which way to go with these SIM cards here here I've got a little hydrochloric acid and some hydrogen peroxide and I'm just trying to see what this will do in this beaker I'm gonna put some hydrochloric acid and a little bit of bleach and we're gonna see what that does criminal household bleach by the grocery store and we'll just let those set for a little bit to come back check on them here a little bit and see what happens okay I'll let these two experiments in the back set up a third one here where I used us some 3% hydrogen peroxide in hydrochloric acid here's the bleach and as you can see I can see some little specks of gold in the solution there but there's some precipitate down there that's formed and the solution looks real dirty so I don't think I'm gonna use that method I don't think I'm going to use the leech and over here with the concentrated hydrogen peroxide which is this stuff that I get from the beauty salon would be 40% but I don't think it's that high something one of the viewers wrote and said it's only about 12% but it's still higher than the gun you get the grocery store but as you can see it's made a real dirty solution and I can see some tiny gold foils in there but I don't think this is the way to go either now if you look over here at my third experiment I'll let you set all night by the way they've been sitting here for about 24 hours and this one the solution looks dirty but I can see some nice gold foils down in there the biggest chunks and that's what I'm after is those gold foils so I think what I'm gonna do is go ahead and set up and use three percent hydrogen peroxide with an air bubbler and so I pour gas go ahead and set that up break okay I've assembled all the necessary components here for the further extraction of the gold I've got a five-gallon bucket here just over the old five-gallon bucket inside of it I've got a smaller bucket that I've drilled some holes in and I've got to point out this is not my idea I've seen someone else do this and so I'm just copying their idea here but what I'm gonna do is I've got my bubbler over here I'm gonna sit - there - down inside the bucket underneath the smaller bucket down inside there and then I'm gonna pour the SIM cards in add hydrochloric acid and add 500ml of hydrogen peroxide get this thing rolling right now okay what I'm gonna do is take this tube here I've just got it bubbling through some hydrochloric acid there just to show you that there's some air going through it I'm gonna disconnect this tube here and what I'll do is I'm gonna put it down inside the bucket underneath this bucket so that the air will bubble up through those holes in the bottom of this bucket into my SIM cards all right there it is centrally located there and then now what we're gonna do is going 40 SIM cards in carefully it's like you just one-handed on shorty on the camera alright there's all our SIM cards and now what I'm gonna do is add some hydrochloric acid here until I can just cover them up hydrochloric acid I'm gonna watch this stuff we've got a we're a math to do this with proper ventilation because that hydrochloric acid fuse will put a hurt on your nose they got about three quarters of a gallon of acid in the bucket there had to open up a new bottle go ahead and add some more I'd port until we get all them circuit cards covered with hydrochloric acid I took about another three quarters of a gallon so buddy Gallagher come on I'm gonna add the rest of this horde hydrochloric acid here that I had the bubbler tube going through I just had a public through there to show that there was some air movement through that hose you can add that right in and now I'm going to pour in about 500ml or one half of the bottle I've got a one liter bottle here 3% hydrogen peroxide before about 500 ml into the SIM cards now [Music] it's about half the bottle and we'll just let those bubble now until those foils release and then we'll we'll harvest the gold foils and refine it into pure elemental gold the nice thing about using that perforated bucket is you can you can use it to agitate these circuit cards or the sim cards shake off the gold foils down into the big bucket and then pull off the blank pieces of plastic up out of there use this thing like a strainer so like this all righty we're just gonna I'm just gonna loosely cover this thing up just so nothing falls in there and remember I'm working in a fumehood here or the fume hoods drawing the vapors out so you don't want to try to do this inside an enclosed area you'll fill the room full of hydrochloric acid fumes to start gagging on them the time right now is about 1:30 we just started the experiment and we'll go from here I want to get a shot of this aquarium pump I bought this at Walmart but you can buy the any pet supply store places that sells fish aquariums it's just a standard air pump it pumps the air into my into my solution here to keep it moving okay the experiment has been on now for about six hours at 7:30 p.m. and see them cars it's like some of the gold is being stripped off of those sim cards are loosening up I'll pull this up out of here so you can see anything underneath I don't see a whole lot of boils down in there yet so we'll just drop this back down and let it continue to bubble yeah reach down in there and got me one of the foils or one of the circuit cards or SIM cards here you can see it's stripping the gold off pretty quickly too so we just let this go ahead and stay in here for a couple few more hours anyway we'll come back and check on the here in a few hours it is 7:30 the following morning we've been on for about 18 hours now and I just want to check and see what's going on oh yeah I see some foils coming off there we're getting some oil to come off these sim cards now just a matter of but that bubble a little longer who gets our kind of yield the experiment has been on for about 40 hours now and it's gonna look in here and see we got going I can see some gold foils coming off of there so this is gonna suck it's gonna work and it's gonna take a while I'm just gonna leave these up Bob in this container until I see all the gold foils have been now removed from each of those sim cards we started the experiment on Saturday today is Tuesday so it's been on almost three days now about 10:00 a.m. just want to look in here and see we got going on I can see some gold foils coming loose there there's still a few pieces that don't have the coils lifted off of them yet so I'm just going to let this sit there and bubble it's more to let get all the gold soils off of here I've had these SIM cards on bubblin an acid frost and acid peroxide solution now for about nine days and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and pull them out of here now and replace these in another bucket let this drain out [Applause] and I can see some gold foils floating around in our solution down there looks real dark almost black set this in another pocket alright I'm gonna rinse the sim cards off with some tap water here this is tap water rinse them off I don't see a whole bunch of gold foils down in that rinse so what I'm going to do is set this aside for right now [Music] and I'm gonna go ahead and pour this off into some beakers here [Music] [Music] both of the solutions in these beakers now I can see some by tiny gold foils floating on the top above solutions and I've got some fine with gold specs down in the bottom settling out on both beakers what I'm doing now is go ahead and do a quick stannous chloride test here being with this and I'll see a bunch of golden solution there that status test looked negative to me but just in case I'm gonna go ahead and add some sodium metabisulfite to each beaker and precipitate out any gold that might have went into solution [Music] now we're going to filter out the solutions [Music] here's a look at the foils that I filtered out now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and transfer the solution back into this beaker psych make some more room to get the rest of the solution filtered out [Music] here's our gold foils looks like a very very small yield here plus they're sticking to the side of the Buchner funnel there and I'm gonna go ahead and transfer it into this back into this big beaker now and try to dissolve it and get a yield force [Music] we got a piece of filter paper now I'm going to wet it and wipe the gold foils off the inside of the funnel here and add it to the beater [Music] I've tested both of these solutions with stannous chloride there's no gold in solution in either one of these they're just straight waste and so what i'm doing here is pouring it into my waste buckets that are located outside and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna treat this waste with some sodium hydroxide lye that's sodium hydroxide and I just add it to the acidic solution until the solution becomes neutralized and then all the the metallic solids will precipitate out as metal hydroxides and then I'll filter those out now process the white waste the rest of the way for disposal [Applause] judging from the amount of foils that I got from the acid peroxide I'm gonna think there's still quite a bit of gold left in these circuit cards or these sim cards here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put them in a pan and incinerate those burn it to ash and then try to extract the rest of the gold from these sim cards okay I've got a nice hot fire going here I'm gonna go ahead and set these SIM cards in a steel pan on that fire see if I can burn everything off and just leave the gold behind I'm gonna add a little bit of charcoal lighter fluid here see if I can get him to burn a little quicker you okay the SIM cards have completely burned there's no more material combusting no smoke a completely ash I take them off the fire here and go ahead let them cool I've got the incinerated SIM cards here everything's cool back down I'm beginning to think that the the acid peroxide step in this process was a waste of time I should have just went straight to incineration I think anyway we're gonna go ahead and get this stuff into this beaker and then hit everything with some aqua regia the filters with the with the gold foils is still in the same beaker here down in the bottom it's gonna add all to one beaker and then process everything with aqua regia [Applause] okay I've got the filter in here I've got the incinerated SIM cards I'm gonna go ahead and cover everything up now so some hydrochloric acid am l level I'm gonna cover it up set it over here on some medium heat [Music] I'm going to add some nitric acid concentrated nitric acid I'm gonna put about honour'd maybe 150 ml in here and we'll just let this cook for a while all righty I'm all set up to do a filtering here we'll put a little sharpie in my dish the beaker on it so it tilts to beat her towards me [Music] now what I'll do is I've got a tube here I'll cite from the solution out of the beaker and down into this filter funnel that I have set up here for vacuum filtration [Music] got a too full of water here put my thumb over one end of it put the other end down in the beaker and then let my thumb off in the filter funnel that [Music] we're bowed down to the end of the filtering on this and what I'm gonna do is I've got the liquid filtered I'm gonna put it up here in another flask or another beaker and the reason I'm doing this because this liquid came through real easy when I pour this fine particulate matter into that funnel it's gonna take probably several hours to filter through because it's gonna load the filter paper up and slow the filtering process way down so rather than running all the liquid through that I got the EZ liquid out first and I'm gonna go ahead and harvest that put it in this beaker now I'll filter the rest of the particulate matter out of that beaker this will be here filtering quite some time this is all of that particle matter that I had in the beaker it's gonna load the filter paper out slow the filtering process way down so it's just going to come out drips at a time here using a little hydrochloric acid here to rinse the beaker out it took about six hours for the vacuum to pull that solution through that filter and now here what I'm going to do is transfer both solutions to a large 4 liter beaker so I can precipitate it with some sodium metabisulfite before I go any further I'm gonna test the solution with some stannous chloride make sure I've got gold in solution you have got a purple stain there confirming that I've got gold in solution based on this test it's not going to be very much I suspect less than maybe a gram gram and a half is all I'm going to get out of this now I'll add sodium metabisulfite to precipitate the gold in solution here you can see the gold coming out of solution when I add the sodium metabisulfite nice and brown just like you should but then if you watch it all goes right back in the solution the solution goes back from brown back to green that's probably due to a bunch of excess nitric acid being in that solution it's Rida's all v''m the gold just as fast as its precipitating the gold out of solution the gold started to precipitate then it went right back into solution so I'm gonna add some more sodium metabisulfite see if we can get it to come out of solution and stay out of solution [Music] I have the solution to settle overnight and I came back out this morning and I don't see any gold settling down so I think I still might have gold in solution but add some more SMB sodium metabisulfite in the drop [Music] i'ma check it again with some stannous chloride I don't see any metals in the solution with that status test see a little bit of a particulate matter floating on the top of the surface there that might be the gold coming out of solution I'm gonna add some where s and B and hope for the best here I've tested the solution with stannous chloride I've got a little bit of gold down in the bottom of this big beaker but it sure isn't much I'm real disappointed with the amount of gold that I'm seeing down in the bottom of this beaker I'm gonna go ahead and proceed to see if I can get it out and get it melted into a little button our bead here I've got a spot plate here some ammonium thiocyanate from a little bit of this in the spot plate used to Chris loved it or so and now I'm going to draw out some some of this liquid if it turns bright red or blood-red looking and that means that this solutions got iron and that's what I suspect is here this turns red this means iron see that bright red blood red stain there that confirms what we've got iron in solution iron in solution looks just like gold in solution in some cases and can be very deceiving it's an iron institution I hope I'm getting down to the bottom of the beaker now and the material in that bottom of that beaker is mostly chemical probably some SMB that I added because I added so much to it so that's just mostly chemicals in there with a little bit of gold interspersed with it I'm just gonna go ahead and filter it all out and get it all in the filter paper and then try to burn it in a milky [Music] I've got all the liquid out of the beaker now and what we can see down here is crystallized chemical probably some SMB from where I added so much to precipitate the gold there's gold trapped in that SMB and what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and get it all into the filter and then put it in melt dish and try to burn it all off and melt up a gold button see if we can get us a yield on these uh cellphone SIM cards now what I'll do is go ahead and try to get those crystals rinsed down out of that beaker and into the following boy this to be fun [Music] I can see some gold dribbling down in the solution there as I rinsed these crystals down [Music] real fine brown powder a little bit of the crystal with some of the gold and it flicked out of the beaker there when I was adding it to the funnel so I'm just gonna tear this off put it right in the funnel so we salvaged that little bit there [Music] here I rinsed the gold down into a central mass at the bottom of the filter with a load of distilled water got a milk dish that I used for melting gold it's not absolutely clean but I don't expect this gold to be high purity so I'm going to go ahead and put it in that melt dish there's the contents of our filters still got a little a little bit of crystals in it a little bit of gold clinging to the side of the filter there I'm gonna put the whole thing in the melt dish and we're gonna put a flame on it and melt it I'm not going to take the melt dish with the filter and a little bit of gold good we recovered put it over here on my melt table cover it liberally with some borax here trying to keep that paper from flying out of the out of the dish as I put some heat on it now I'll start my torch here and go ahead and put the torch on it start the milk okay the reason for the large amount of borax in that milk dish is to act as a glue to hold the bits of filter paper in the milk dish as I do the milk small amounts of gold cling to the filter paper and if there are allowed to fly out of the dish it will create a loss the borax acts as a glue - and holds the filter paper in the melt dish and as I do the melt you can see tiny balls of gold being rendered from the bits of filter paper as it burns away the filter paper will completely burn away during this process okay here what I'll do is there's a large amount of molten borax in that Bella dish so I just pour it out on the brick there and kill a heart and I can scrape it off later but I just wanted to get the borax out of the dish so that I can reach in there with a pair of tweezers and get the small gold bead out of there [Music] [Music] here's our little gold bead from the cell phone SIM cards during the experiment I thought it was gonna be a total failure it's not that great of a success it's a very small amount of gold see how much it weighs here we got 1.7 1.8 grams of pure gold from the from the cell phone SIM cards okay this will conclude the sim card gold recovery experiment I was able to extract 1.7 grams of pure gold from those cellphones SIM cards I've been working on this one for about a week so it took a long time I wasn't quite sure what process to use I started with the acid peroxide and I didn't get very many foils at all off of that and then I went ahead and burnt the SIM cards in a metal pan trying to extract them extract the gold that way either way I was able to at one point seven grams of pure gold from the cell phone SIM cards it's probably 99% and what I'll do is I'll just throw that in with my next batch of karats crap and we find it again inside some high purity gold anyway yeah I'd like to take a moment here to invite you to look at my my ebay channel my eBay store I've got a lot of nice things for sale on there some nice gold jewelry with genuine gemstones in that in them it's a lot of nice stuff that vary a fraction of the price you'd pay at the jewelry store my eBay user name is baffle Asst ba fel owe us and I need to point out that I only shipped to us a location so if you're looking for me in a foreign country I probably won't come up because I don't ship internationally I only ship to USA locations but for folks here in the United States take a look at my view eBay store see if there's some stuff on there that you might like to buy it'll help support me so that I can make some more of these videos that'll conclude this video thanks for watching coming up soon as my platinum group metals from automotive catalytic converters coming soon

Channel: sreetips

Views: 250,820

Rating: 4.7212586 out of 5

Keywords: aqua regia refine precious metals escrap ewaste electronic scrap

Id: cHQxyBCX1lA

Length: 47min 39sec (2859 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018