How I sort Gold, Palladium, Silver and Precious Metals after depopulating boards

gidday scrappers thought I'd do a bit of an update on how I sawed my gold palladium silver and other precious metals from items that we remove from circuit boards and other electronics so for now I'll start off with the various kinds of IC chips how and why I saw them in two different categories it's mostly got to do with the value of them especially when it you know for some of you or for a lot of you you might depopulate stuff off circuit boards but not to go for your own precious metal recovery you're looking for more to sell them and it's a good idea to categorize them in different areas rather than just throwing the whole lot together and you'd lose a lot of value on the higher end stuff if you're mixing in a lot of the lowering stuff so probably start off with the BGA's they're probably most of them are a very good for your gold recovery and except for one type of VGA and that's these silicon top BGA's so your standard BGA's down the bottom but all that's up here is a silicon top and basically inside it's just pretty much mostly aluminium and and maybe a little bit of silver but these are very low as far as so your gold recovery or any kind of precious metal recovery really and I recommend not even bother taking these off circuit boards because the only the only time I would take them off a circuit board is if they're like that so they're still got the silicon in the center but there's four BGA's are on the outside so all we basically want is the BGA so I wouldn't even take off this really I will just take off the BGA's from straight from the board so you've got a standard reasonably late model the board and you can see that the your Northbridge kind of chip here is a silicon chip so on this particular motherboard it's not even worth depopulating this especially these late model ones with these kind of CPU sockets there are much lower value than the older style and so with this silicon chip it there's really nothing to go for as far as precious metal recovery apart from obviously you've got a flat pack here you've got little bits and pieces no doubt you know crystals for low-end silver recovery very low grade pins in there for gold recovery so and basically nothing on the other end so I really recommend you sell your motherboards from PCs complete as they are don't remove anything off them to get the best value because the only way they can really get value from this is to totally shred this motherboard up and start extracting a you know a whole bunch of different kinds of metals from it predominantly it's it's copper so that's what our silicon BGA chip looks like on a circuit board and yeah as I said it's not really worth going for even these kind of IBM ones that they've got the blue silicon chips sometimes they can have gold bonding wires inside but overall they're the only ones that are not worth taking off the boards and devaluating your boards and then we're going from so virtually no letter no value and up twos are higher values so you've got these kind of BGA's you know there must be thousands of different kinds like this they're all got a heatsink top could be aluminium it could be very heavy bah heatsink a much lighter Cisco type of heatsink very thin and these very in gold recovery a real lot it you know there's so many different types and so usually like in these Cisco ones it's got a its that that's actually a tinned copper heat sink on top but it's very very thin it's just under this black mask here where you will have your gold bonding wires you know your round circle of bonding wires will be some running through there these are a pretty good but because they have these heat sinks on them and some of them like this one here it's 95 percent of the weight is all in this heat sink so there are lower value because you're paying for basically base metals in this case it's copper other cases it could be aluminium and and so there you go so I put these in you know your first lower category that do have precious metals in their gold now here's these Hitachi ones are quite large they've got a looks like it's it's it is a could be a copper or aluminium heat sink but as you can see underneath you got your arm you know you lines of gold around the edge so we still got silicon in the center so that's pretty much useless and we've got all these little gold pads here but they're not a great deal that little line that runs around the border that's more like what we're looking for when it comes to gold recovery but still so once you've removed this heatsink you've exposed all this area probably get rid of these silicon stuff break it out so it doesn't contaminate and yeah but if you're selling chips complete to other refiners then obviously you you just want to keep them complete and like that so first category silicon's second category BGA's with various heat sinks like this Broadcom once again underneath here we're going to have your god bonding wires but you know in this case you can see all those bonding wires running out now whether they're because it's a yellow sort of plastic they could well be just aluminium bonding wires leading into gold yeah so the next one pretty much the same as these as far as value of these larger BGA's with the the green fiber around and the heat sink in the center and once again in that underneath that black thing is where most of your bonding wise is going to be so a lot of it is dead weight copper weight and you find these on your slot CPUs so we don't get slot cpus very often anymore and that your main one on there some people have mentioned that they do get good gold recovery on them I think it varies like all chips they all vary depending on the actual manufacturer what they put in it but yeah so slot CPUs usually have these sometimes slot CPUs just have a silicon chip and so therefore a very low value compared to this one at least where we know we're going to get some gold out of this this one most likely not but that's them so that's your second category pretty much heatsink BGA's and then your third category which are your North self of type bridge BGA's with the external you know sticking out plastic piece these ones here you see the round silver top that's actually a copper top so these are value these more obviously than these ones because these are a lot lighter but they still do have a copper top and sometimes they don't have any gold in them whatsoever this little gold piece here that doesn't lead to anything that's just a basically a marker for where they put put it on the circuit board in which direction it goes to if you take this part off you'll find it is it doesn't lead to anything else but basically underneath this copper top is still we've got your gold sort of ring around the outside there and that's basically what we're looking for here and nothing else he's were a smaller one that I've half opened up and as you can see it's a it's a copper heatsink you can see the copper underneath there that's not gold and then in this case inside these the plastic there is a bonding wire gold bonding wire that runs around the outside might be pretty hard to get but that's the main sort of stuff we're looking for in there and that's the goal and you can see this this tag here it might lead to this gold bonding wire underneath the green but it doesn't really make much difference but we're still going to get this because we're going to remove this whole top and you know they process you know this green fiber which will get that gold off say anyway dunk I'm trying not to ramble on too much but this is basically going to mostly designed for newer scrappers they're looking at precious metal recovery and looking at the populating circuit boards and so that gives them a good idea on what they can actually what they should be looking for and getting so we're going to lead onto a whole lot of other things but here so we've got three now silicone heatsink and North self bridge type with heatsink as well and then there's two more BGA's lifts that we're going into higher value and reason being is they're only got a plastic top so a lot less weight compared to this because there's no copper obviously so you know copper makes up for quite a lot of this whereas these are light as feathers and so same deal here BG a BGA ball grid array you see all the little balls underneath so this is a north-south bridge type BGA that's our that's what we're kind of really looking for and a lot of times when you knock them off the circuit board you'll you'll break the plastic type of stuff fear not because there's really nothing inside that plastic you know bonding wires and that it's mostly just to hold down you know to us cover it and hold down the silicon in the center so if I pull this apart and as you can see it's a much nicer piece of gold then on these ones as well so that's why these are so much higher less weight and very good for gold recovery you can see the the outer rings and also in the center we've also got some nice little bits of gold there so that's what we're looking for them so so don't worry if your depopulating boards of chips of a circuit board and this stuff breaks very easily don't worry about that that's what you really want if you're going to do your own gold recovery you might as well you know continue on with the process and remove all of these plastic stops and just leave your chips like that just a green fiber circuit board still a lot to clean up you know you want to put it in some solution to get rid of all the little ball grid arrays and the little solder kind of things the little sticky stuff on there but there you go that's what we're getting and then finally in the BJ's we've got your very similar to this kind of stuff the only thing is where this has got the outer plastic sticking out these are just very clean and there is no there's no out of plastic so they're a little bit higher value because there's less rubbish but yeah the whole thing is pleasure usually the best things are in this category are the RAM memory BGA's so you can see there they're tiny little BGA chips and I've just so here's a ram stick to already had the gold fingers removed up but you can see the little BGA chips on on there so these are a higher grade simply because they're got no rubbish on them no excess rubbish like these ones was to grow a lot of green excess rubbish and and yeah so mostly off ram but they come off pretty much everything slot cards circuit boards pretty much a lot of circuit boards and modem boards telecom boards server boards all kinds of things you'll find these tiny little BGA's and so they're what I value at the highest so there's our pretty much our five categories of BJ's then you standard old-school kind of IC chips you've got your regular dips so two sides of legs either plastic or ceramic that she you your first level second is your eeproms now you've got two types of eeproms you got your your silvery looking ones which is most likely the silver or aluminium just depending on the manufacturer could even be some palladium in there but I doubt it so these ones are quite low value because we we're not getting any gold out of there maybe silver and then you've got the the gold eproms where you can see the gold where it's really clear you can see the gold around the outside of the die and so these are pretty good so they're they're pretty much these silver ones pretty much go with these but I like to keep these ones separate because we know for sure that there's gold in there there's no guarantee that there's gold in an IC chip some of the most obscure herbs IC chips from really cheap stuff can have heaps of gold and then you can get ICS from really high-end stuff like telecommunication stuff and there's no gold in there it's just aluminum bonding wire so they're pretty low value these sort of stuff regular ICS but these ones actually are a memory IC chips so once again you'll get these on RAM sticks as opposed to the BGA's on Rams in the modern RAM these are the older style and then there's an older version again so there they are they're on a ram stick usually if you're lucky you got them on both sides and so I keep these separate simply because we know what they're from and it's a nice uniform way of keeping him so if you were to sell them or even process them you could just process these in one go when they're you know very uniform in shape so this is my standard working tub and you know they do build up after a while of removing him from a the ranch chips but so many circuit boards have I'm just trying to get myself one have these these kind of chips so he's a standard from a whatever it was a telephone or something so there's your your memory flat IC chip there same deal so that's that's where they come from there's a BGA that I showed you probably the second-best BGA and and then we go on to flood packs all right so that's your ram and then finally you got wellalmost finally you've got your flat packs flat packs basically what we call flat pay these four-sided legs anything that's got you know legs on four sides and there I sees their flat packs I value them a little bit you know more than your regular eye sees and about the same as these but probably sometimes you can get they're worth a little bit more in some cases so you know you'll have your standard kind of flat pack now that might not have any any precious metals in there at all it might just be aluminum bonding wires and so on but then you do have the reason why they're they're a little bit worth a little bit more to me yeah because then you've got you know almost like CPU kind of chips you know so this is your IBM PowerPC chip come in various sizes so you know this good chance they're going to have you know a better chance to have precious metals so PowerPC you've got these Intel little PCI sets yet again a much better chance that this is going to have gold recovery as opposed to say just a standard kind of video kind of flat pack and and obviously here you've got an Intel I 960 so it's basically a CPU I 960s they come in all shapes you got removable ones and you've got ones that are mounted you much smaller ones even bigger ones all kinds but it is an Intel I 960 CPU so you know again pretty good chance that it's going to have precious metals so when this comes in a mix most likely you're going to get this kind of stuff PowerPC stuff all that kind of thing these Intel ones in the mix so that's why I value them a little bit higher so that's your four main kind of IC chips that we're we're getting and then obviously you can go one step further you got the ceramic kind of ICS with gold tops just ten legs silver legs huh I won't be sore but just tin legs gold top ceramics so obviously they're going to be worth a little bit more than that because it's showing us you know we've got this gold kept there we can recover and within there there's going to be quite a bit of bonding wires you know and then the next step or another version is this is a white ceramic one but again it's got a gold top a bit of dead dead weight on there but it's got gold legs instead of tin legs so so obviously we're getting more gold recovery from those legs and remember each leg is going to be a bonding wire leading into the main die so that's your second step and then your third step is when it's a clear gold cap and gold legs at the same time a lot of motorola stuff comes like this and yeah so they're very high-end stuff obviously when you see these on circuit boards you know you know you're going to keep that kind of stuff separate from your regular ICS but that's it that's if the first stage anyway guys I see chips and that's how I keep them another thing I wanted to mention on the ICS is okay say well the BGA's with the silicon chip is another where you'll see him as well is on CPUs so this is a laptop CPU and you know looks like a standard CPU now this will go as a CPU a green fiber CPU we're not looking at the value of the silicon that's obviously useless to us but it's only because we're going for the gold pins so that's what we're looking for in a green fiber CPU so here is a green fiber CPU and you can see again a worthless silicon chip on the top we're not going for that all we're going for is the actual gold pins and this one might actually be a it was probably a regular CPU green fiber CPU with heatsink but once you remove the heatsink you got your tinned copper here where you can sell that to a scrapyard or whatever and then we've increased the value by turning this into just a green fiber without the heatsink so much lighter gold pins that's all green green fiber ones are all about and brown fiber same thing it's only about the gold pins black fiber a little bit different so there we go guys BGA's IC chips let's go onto something else okay so next up is crystals and crystal oscillators I basically sort these into five different categories just to make it easier when they go to process this kind of stuff and also you know as with a lot of items that you might stockpile for precious metal recovery you might not get to process every thing that you pick off the boards you know you might start off with the easier stuff and decide not to process the stuff that's evil lower value or more difficult to process so if when you sort into into nice categories then it's a lot easier to sell these kind of stuff if you ever chose to go that way because sometimes people like to buy items for precious metal recovery because they want to do the process as more of a hobby rather than trying to get the actual precious metals value out of it so in a lot of cases people will pay a lot more for the actual items rather than the precious metal value in them just so they've got the the the product that they can actually process for their own hobby so that's something to keep in mind when you're picking stuff off circuit boards is you don't necessarily have to process everything to get the value sometimes you get more value just having the items and just selling them as they are so anyway the five categories here I've got two crystal categories so you've got your your very common little crystals and these what I do with these is I like to when you take them off boards you you'll notice that there's two legs and a piece of plastic I like to take the plastic off just so I've got nice clean product here and if you do the same and take off all your little legs and as many as you can and the little plastic bits then you've got an even better product to sell if that's what you're going to do but if you do go to process them then at least that's one step out the way here's one here that I've missed so you can see it's got two legs and the piece of plastic so if I just you can just sort of jiggle off the legs and they're rubbish anyway and then this little piece of plastic you can get rid of that and now we've got a clean crystal so these are what they call crystal some people get these confused and just call them crystal oscillators crystals they've got their two legs mounted to the board basically just for silver recovery and this is your second style of crystal the long ones that you also see on circuit boards and it's basically the same thing but I noticed that the actual crystal inside usually is a lot bigger obviously and the silver tab within that crystal is also a lot bigger so I like these ones as well and I try and do the same thing by removing the the as many legs as I can because that's just dead weight and it'll just speed up and help the process off as well as adding value to the actual crystals by not having as much rubbish so there are two crystals the flat ones they're lies keep separate to the long ones and then after that we've got crystal oscillators so crystal oscillator is basically got four legs so they can be rectangle little squares and some of them might not be crystal oscillators but I just you know put them all within the same category because most of them are like that's a crystal oscillator and again it's basically silver recovery so I mean Silver's not worth a great deal so I don't get too carried away with trying to get every crystal I like to get these ones because they they easily pop off a circuit board just by bending it over with your thumb and here they're reasonably easy but yeah I don't get too carried away because it is just silver recovery but the thing you'll notice is occasionally on these long ones and even sometimes on the small ones but definitely on a lot of crystal oscillators are gold base crystal oscillators so again they can be in all shapes and sizes and you get a lot of these especially these oblong ones from very old circuit boards the the low grade from televisions and stuff and so they're really no different inside as far as what's inside inside this kind of like a tiny little circuit board almost and they can have say like these bigger ones they have like a couple of mlcc's within Ehrman and all kinds of things the resistors but yeah just try and find a variation so but predominantly it's it's all about silver recovery and so in one of my categories I keep the gold based ones separate now if you you you actually take off the the backing get one that looks a little bit nicer alright so yeah if you take off this backing which is gold plated on this side it's also usually gold plated on the other side but everything else from there there's no rule gold-recovery it's it's it's more still silver but still we can keep these gold ones separate and I tend to do that and even you know all these kind of things you know whether they're I come in what they are resistors can't remember but you'll see these ones they're not only got like a gold base on them and these ones can actually have gold inside they also got gold legs so what I will do later is I'll removes these God legs at least and keep these in just gold pins fully plated really good quality gold pins keep it separate from the base you know here's a really big one and again that's all gold-plated and once we pry this open the back of this will also be gold-plated and then it's from there it's silver recovery so that's the only thing I do with them is I like to separate any that I remove off boards with the gold just to keep them separate and then obviously the rest of my crystal oscillators and anything that kind of looks like the crystal oscillators that are silver I just leave them separate and they're just basically the same deal as these they're going to go for silver recovery now I stockpile this because one day I'm I'm basically speculating on this sort of stuff so it's it's not for silver recovery anytime soon for me to process these kind of things for silver or anything for silver yet silver has to really jump up in price and so I'm basically speculating on this sort of stuff and if silver never jumps up you know like some of the speculators suggest you know it silver could one day just go up to you know a thousand dollars an ounce or something crazy like that then sure of course silvers going to be something that we're going to really look for but right now while it's only worth like 4050 Center a gram it's really you know for me it's it wouldn't be worth my time to even try and study how to process this sort of stuff I'm just going to I just in the end I'll probably just end up selling all these and I'll have really nice clean stock for them to sell so so we've got one too without the gold three and with the gold four and then our last item of crystal oscillators are my favorite thing from anything apart from really good gold fingers I love these these are what I call gold band crystal oscillators and they've got a ceramic base I'll get a big one give you a closer kind of look so we got the ceramic base there it's a really big chunk of ceramic you can see these legs lead into little gold parts there there's and then you've got a gold band around the usually a silvery top so and underneath this little cap usually the cap is in gold aside from that band that runs around it but you take off that cap and you've got yourself a really nice little circuitry there we've got plating I'll try and break this up and before I forget with these crystal oscillators when you take them off boards sometimes they can crack and it's not really the cap that we want the cap will come off and sometimes it will leave the ceramic underneath obviously it's the ceramic and you'll see there's a there's actually gold and silver in each of these you see a tiny little silver tab just like in the regular crystals and then you'll see your circuitry and a little dye of gold and so when you take them off boards and they break make sure you get all the little crumble stuff like here you know it's a tiny little crumble but you can see that's you know virtually that little piece is covered in gold on one side and also your little silver tabs so for instance on this board here not sure what this was off us looks like a switch you can see let me just get a little pointer you can see it the gold band crystal oscillator there right and and there's a couple of crystals on there as well so and they're the flat crystals and this one actually it also has a long crystal and these long ones as as I mentioned easy to take off because you just bend them over with your thumb and they usually pop straight off so they're and they're usually hardly ever you know one in five hundred will be heat gold underneath on there months sang with the little ones but that's what we really want is the gold band crystal oscillator and they're reasonably easy to take off I've showed this before I just don't have a pair let me just while I'm here and if you're curious a nice long flat screwdriver is what you want and you just put it up against your crystal oscillator and basically what you're going to do is you want to push from right to left so sort of twist the screwdriver and let it kind of do the work for it so if you get a nice long screwdriver it gives you a good leverage so this time I just need to push it one way twist one way and there we have it we've got a complete crystal oscillator that's your ceramic you tiny little gold band and the metal cap and so but it's it's what's inside in between the better the cap and the ceramic that is really nice and that's what we want so these are basically like you know little CPUs as far as when it comes to precious metal yeah they're they're as good as a ceramic CPU then say here you can see a really flat one and it's the same deal and you've got your ceramic shorts you know it's got different legs this one had like ten little legs on it but look to it and this one here another nice one you don't usually get nice big chunky they almost always are around this size right as a comparison but you do get very tiny ones and a lot of times on modem boards so this is off a regular household modem and you know easy to miss if you if you're not having trained your eye to find them but I I know these boards are know exactly where they are all the time and that is right there and so they're very very tiny but it's the same deal it's a gold band crystal oscillator with ceramic and little bit of gold underneath so even though they're tiny pamper foot-pound they're just as good as the bigger ones and and because it is so small you take this off a board and even if you're going to sell these boards you take this off no one's going to notice that and bang there you go so with these modems these ones are very common modems the few things that I take off here is I'll remove the crystal oscillator or get these four mlcc's usually I pluck off this little BGA here sometimes sometimes I just leave them and also you can get some copper as well so I just put this kind of copper sometimes I just throw it into brass but you can also throw it into copper I don't use this stuff to melt and it doesn't weigh much but it all adds up hey so there we go we've got our five different categories of crystal and crystal oscillators I just want to see if I can pop off this cap just to show you on one of these real big ones so even the cap with the gold band you obviously want to still keep that let me just try and pop it okay yeah really hard to get off unless I actually crush into it and it doesn't really matter because I keep all the crumble within the tub so I'm not going to lose any stuff but I just don't know if I'm going to yeah so we've just removed a little bit of ceramic there's still a little bit of gold on and ceramics I'll keep that so pretty much keep all the crumble that comes out of this sort of stuff okay and well this one here you can see it's got little circuitry you know you've got keep the cap with the gold band you got the ceramic with that you'd want to crush up to get the gold bonding wires for Finn and this one's a you know because it's so bigger this probably a little bit different it's got tiny little what look like mlcc's in there as well very much like a regular crystal oscillator don't know if you can see this little tab with that's the silver tab on top you probably can't see it wasn't a good example that one but yeah I just wanted to show you you know just how how beautiful the gold is in a lot of these and maybe in a smaller one yeah see so we've taken the top off not much left apart from that gold band so we still want that gold here's the and with all in that ceramic there's gold very fiddly but you can see there you know all that goal that's really good quality gold and like I said pound for pound they're as good as any ceramic CPU that you'll get like say a pentium pro they're as good as them pound for pound because yeah they certainly do pack quite what a gold within them so that's crystal oscillator section five this is the the best stuff I love this stuff when I see him I've trained my eye to spot these on circuit boards everywhere and you get these on slot cards a lot of server boards so especially your Cisco type of switches and all that kind of thing sometimes you can get five or six on a board you know even from server just your backplane board this is where all the hard drives slide into and so on okay I always check these ones out and there's usually always a crystal oscillator somewhere right there so that's a gold band crystal oscillator and really nice and yet so that's crystals crystal oscillators five different categories my ultimate favorite these ones silver recovery encase silver goes up really high same as your crystal oscillators unless they're got gold caps on on the bottom of them then one day when I do go for gold recovery I'll just remove these caps like this one here that hundred percent would have been off of an old TV just off a brown circuit board so just something very basic like that and you know you'll see them sitting around on a circuit board like that and you won't know until you pop it off whether it's a silver one or whether it's gold when I say silver it's not silver it's only gold when it's gold but yeah so definitely keep these separate that'll be for gold recovery one day all right there we go let's go on to there's something else right so the next thing is mlcc's probably the most controversial item that we pick off circuit boards because a lot of people say that there's no palladium and anymore and well there still is a lot of circuit boards with noble metal mlcc's so they contain both palladium and silver but I have to admit that a lot of mlcc's these days especially our base metal mlcc's so they're mostly based on copper and well mostly on nickel and you've got copper and but they also will have some silver a in a lot of them for some reason but they can have all kinds of things but what we're really looking for is Palladium in mlcc's and yeah we're just not unfortunately they don't make as many mlcc's we've palladium especially now with palladium you know sky high you know if it was always a lot less than the price of gold and now it's palladium is worth more than gold so if you're lucky enough to have gotten old boards not necessarily vintage but you know boards from say 10 years ago a majority still had noble metal mlcc's but we still get them today and like this is my current working tub and you know I can see this one here this giant one this one a lot of times these brown ones are definitely noble metal so this one definitely contains palladium I can tell just by looking at them we'll get a smaller one and that too when they're really brown like that will most likely be a noble metal ml/cc and but as I said even you know very modern electronics especially from telecommunications and stuff like that they do still use the class one and two Nobel medal mlcc's okay not everyone uses the cheap stuff so there's still four as far as I'm concerned so it's still well worth going for it's just there is one way to sort them out if you want to be more sure on what you're actually holding on to and if you go to process your own mlcc's which is quite a complicated thing so but here's an example if you get a magnet the hard drive magnet is probably a little bit too strong actually it's it's it is too strong because even some of the noble metal mlcc's will have traces of nickel which will be picked up you're best off using a magnet from a cheap a weak magnet like from our speaker something like that which will definitely pick up the real heavy nickel mlcc's but will also leave the base metal or so the noble metal mlcc's alone whereas i put a hard drive maggot in them in amongst mlcc's and it's going to pick them up and even though it's probably picked up noble metal ones in amongst the the nickel based mlcc's so but yeah like I said even if you do have a majority and nickel based you will still get silver and occasionally a little bit of palladium as well but mostly it's yeah it's going to be obviously nickel and if there is precious metal in there it'll only be silver so anyway so a grabbed out of bunch here and like I said if I had a better magnet a weaker magnet it would be much better but one way to try and do it with a hard drive magnet is to just skim over and not the mlcc's and straight from there you'll pick up base metal mlcc's that contain nickel right because they've just sort of jumped up onto the the actual magnet and so there we go so it's definitely picking up a lot and so what we've got left is this kind of stuff now there will be still base metal in here and nickel based mlcc's but to give you an example say this big one and maybe say that small one even if I tap them with the hard drive magnet very powerful it won't even the budge they won't pick up so 100% there they're got palladium inside and they're a noble metal so it's just palladium and silver they won't pick up but sometimes some of them again if you've got a hard drive magnet and you pick these up now that one definitely won't pick up so that's what I would sort I would sort the non-guaranteed non-magnetic separately to the magnetic obviously but even if you pick them up if you shake the magnet a bit and some drop off most likely they're they're going to be a noble metal one that just happens to have a bit of nickel so these ones won't shake off so they're definitely based metal we've possibly silver okay so these little ones here non-magnetic palladium good these ones that have stuck right the only one that shakes off is this one so that'll be good the rest base metal so this is basically what I do anyway and so eventually I haven't really done it yet with all this but this is the ID or anyway is to at least you know as far as when you're sorting this stuff if you do want to go through this trouble at least sort out the non-magnetic to the magnetic and that's a good start so you'll have you know one bag of non-magnetic one bag of magnetic and then you can you can then determine at least what you've got and you know obviously if you go to sell this kind of stuff you can sell it as magnetic mlcc's which are probably not going to get much for it because a lot of work for probably a tiny bit of palladium and bit of silver it's mostly nickel but this stuff you know this is where your plating comes out and if you can get a big bag like this of palladium stuff non-magnetic you're in for a winner so that's it for very basic this one mlcc's i still take my mlcc's but knowing full well that majority are going to be magnetic so that's all I do but hey with the price of palladium the way it is very high and who knows they're probably going to keep going very high it's it's it is running out you know so like these two chunky ones except for that one they fall off even though they're magnetic if I shake them they shake off very easy so it's a very low amount of nickel so there definitely will be silver in these but if I pick them up with everything else like that and said ie this is all magnetic you know they're in amongst their so that's why I hard drive Meaghan is just too strong so get yourself a weak magnet from a speaker or anything like that and you'll be in business that's all I could really say about mlcc's it's up to you if you you choose to pick them off but yeah it's just a another thing another part of a waste that we get some precious metals out of I like them and I'll keep picking him and you know and stumbling across the nice brown ones this one's more of a gray yeah it barely sticks so you know for anything to fall off a hard drive magnet when you shake it there's not much there to be magnetic so that's definitely I would put that in the non-magnetic category for palladium okay so I think the next thing would be your gold pins and gold plugs and gold fingers well golf fingers are pretty straightforward so there's no way need to sort them in anyway as long as you trim them reasonably well your gold fingers will all get processed in the same way sometimes the the fingers aren't cut enough of the green and on the green you'll also have tin solder and all kinds of stuff on there so you want to make sure you get closest to the fingers as possible so you don't have any excess or any foreign metals that you don't want to be dealing with when you're processing gold fingers um yeah I mean probably your second best kind of fingers are your gold RAM sticks but you can't be your vintage type fingers because you can just see that it's nice and orange gold there that's about there about the best thing things like this maybe from a server power supply a little bit you know they're quite less but things like this they're really shiny gold and sometimes they're so faint it's barely even yellow they're they're quite low they're about the lowest kind but but they're still it's all still all gold plating and so therefore it needs to be reasonably good gold plating because it's you know slots in and out of a slot so if it was just flashing flashing would wear out straightaway as soon as you put it in but so that kind of speaks for itself gold fingers sit on their own but gold pins and plugs well huh you know there are so many bits and bobs of things that you can find on anyways that have got some gold on there you know and it's just how to categorize them and even I don't know what to do with them I just put her all into a what to do one day and sort it out pile and probably electro refine it with you know using that I can't even think of it now like even even this this is a gold spoon it's gold-plated and just one of those collectible spoons and the sort of thing you could probably find at garage sales car boot sales that kind of thing see a collection of spoons you know you pick up all the the gold-plated ones and and you can also go for the silver ones too you know things like gold pens these are yeah just basically gold-plated old gold-plated pens things that that kind of look like gold but I'm not sure you know if it's just brass polished brass it's really hard I mean you know you wouldn't think that this would be gold plated but you know you don't know and it doesn't harm anyone keeping it even something like that that's most likely brass but you know I don't know what it came off and it could have been a decorative thing gold plating very light yes I really oddball stuff like a little locket the top of a locket like I can see on top there that's that's gold-plated things like this you know could be just brass it's really hard to tell sometimes and yeah then you got the more dirty stuff like this you know obviously like an audio jack or something or a video jack yet you know most likely gold-plated so that's all put into the too hard basket and one day you know once you if you are refining yourself once you've mastered the art of recovering gold from the more simple stuff you can you know if you still got solution left use your old solution and try and recover gold from oddball stuff but anyway grading pins really hard because they come in so many different grades and like these pins here they're off an old accordion and they do have some gold on the tips not much but so that's about as low-grade as you can get same as these IDE pins so your main plugs that we get from a way so you have video these kind of printer port plugs the new style video you've got USB plug and from pcs you get these these ones with pins inside got these little SATA plugs and a lot of pins come from these IDE type plugs or or whatever they're called that's one thing about scrapping and gold recovery and all that kind of thing we don't need to know the exact termination of every every component we you know as long as we know where the gold is that's all that really matters but these ones here in particular really do vary and a lot of times they're very low in gold recovery so here's a good example of IDE plugs pins and you can see well it would be very hard to see if there's any gold there you can't really see anything there are a few that are fully plated but majority it's all they are is just trying to get a bit more of a look it's usually just the very tips on one side that they got gold plating and it's just a tiny speckle amount so this is you know would be this is what I call low-grade gold pins you can't get much lower than that because there's very little and still got a deal for this base metal and so I'm not sure how they process this whether they put it in some solution just to lift the gold from the base metal or whether they actually eat away the base metal and leave the gold or reverse for electroplating which is the word that I was looking for before how they do it I don't know are they worth keeping I'm not I don't really know but there is gold in there so what do you do we keep it so I've got my little this little tub here I'm starting off and with what I'm calling obviously very low grade gold so there's even more of these pins now and I do know that there is gold plating on this so we'll just deal with that but that's all I'm doing the only thing is with those IDE plugs when you're taking out the the pins a lot of times there's a central part like this and this there's you know usually they're silvery in color and I just throw them into brass because they're not magnetic but you know some people that sell me these kind of pins throw in all these with them and I'm just not sure that these would be gold-plated you know I'm pretty sure that these are just brass but who knows so I mean if they were gold-plated then they're fully gold-plated and therefore they wouldn't really belong in this because they would be on a separate process but anyway so that's well like what I consider you extreme low gold plated pins where mostly from ID plugs and you can you can only see a tiny little dot a little bit of sometimes a little bit more but they're they're about the lowest grade there are higher grade from the ideas but they're about the lowest so I'm having a tub here just for the very low now I've got I've you know probably got thousands of these that I need to process one day and pull that all those pins yeah it's it's probably going to take me a year to process them all but it's just something that I'm going to do when I retire certainly not right now same with all my gold recovery but still even if they're low-grade I know that there is some goal there you know things like this once again extremely low grade there's only a little touch of gold you probably won't even see these ones at all and I can barely even see so i'll from--in but i don't even think there's any anything in there alright so that's pretty much your your base real base gold plating there just see fog bigger here so even these ones that come from like server power supply units you pull them out of the plugs they're you know on the tips yep there is some gold plating there but majority of it is not so yeah all right so that's low-grade anyway and then then they're probably the most difficult one is your mid grade stuff is here's a mid-grade what I call mid grade anyway well yeah this is still heading on to low so you can obviously see that there's much more gold to it but at the same time there's still a lot of base metal visible so it's it's kind of a MIDI grade but the process of this will be exactly the same as the low grade anyway so it doesn't really make much difference once you put it all together to go for your gold recovery but to value them you know if you were to sell stuff like this this would be what you would call low-grade gold plated pins and this what you'd kind of get to call a mid-grade pin but still on the low side now so in this case I'm happy to put that into the low grade because it's yeah once you mix it in doesn't really look much different and then you've got your you know kind of higher grade but for certain reasons they they're still a mid and in this case you know we've got pins but we've got like why are attached to them and and so you know this copper in in there as well so you know more of a mid grade that that's about as low as it gets as well as you can see just on the tips there's gold but on the base it's just base metal so yeah this one is kind of mixed in and it probably has to go into low grade but the problem here is these pins are fully plated so there's no real access point for when you go to recover that for the solution to sort of eat into that gold and either way you know it would be a like more of a reverse electroplating or put it in like a echo a regular to to dissolve the gold and get down to the base better I'm not really sure but this one's quite a complicated one but because there's higher you know they are fully plated pins if they weren't so dirty we fall that wire I'll probably keep them separate the same goes well here we've got well yeah that's about as low as it goes it's a very big mixture of stuff so gosh yeah so see they've putting the silvery ones now obviously there's no gold and they're knots over so I'm I just throw me to brass and yeah but again we've got very lightly plated gold pins here so once again I'm gonna have to obviously sort of pick out sort of the rubbish you know like people that sell me eye pins you know putting this sort of stuff and I'm not really sure what they expect from it but yep so we're still on the low-grade gold gold recovery this is you know the bottom of the barrel stuff so at the end of processing good stuff this is probably the stuff we're going to be doing but I dare say there's going to be a hell of a lot of it once I start processing these ID pins plugs yeah but still overall it's still a low-grade gold plated pins that if you were to sell you're still going to you know you're going to be able to sell it for something anyway if you weren't going to recover the gold yourself so anyway and once again just going through various bags that have accumulated so once again IDE pins buy a slightly better tinge of gold within it but it's all just low low-grade okay yep but still Gold is gold and even though it's low-grade there is gold there and you know it doesn't take long for this weight to add up and you know price of gold these days it's all worth it I reckon so I guess what I'm kind of trying to say with the your gold plated pins as far as sorting is is try and keep it relatively in the same kind of category where you're getting them from say for instance pins like that these come from you know mostly they're just long pins they would come from actually I can't even remember what these come from but because they're all kind of uniform in in what they are that's probably the best way to keep your gold-recovery stuff sorted so and keep tabs of where you're getting them from so that way if you do you know decide not to recover gold yourself it's a lot easier to sort of define on you know give a good description on what you're actually trying to sell people so these ones here again are our mid grade because they've got some kind of contamination they got they're only partially plated mostly plated but still got a base middle visible so still a mid grade but I'd like to keep these separately and when I get more of the same kind of thing I'll just keep putting these ones together these ones here they're obviously fully plated but they well they almost they've got contamination on the end here so they've got a bit of solder and base metal said they're these are a mix between and that one should even be there between fully plated and you know sort of dirty fully plated I suppose you could call them because they're all got a bit of whatever they were taken off they still got some of the the sold are in the the pin that's got base metal on it so but still because they do have a bit of base metal most of them it might be an easier thing to process or goes in the solution where yeah kind of eat away that base metal you can get under that gold and and start eating away at that gold not really sure but yeah probably another one keep separate so depending on how how how much contamination is on them would really depend on what you how you would sort them so these ones here once again well this one's a a real mix icy trip so here we've got predominantly fully plated pins but there are some that are not I'd imagine that this stuff yeah would go in with you know just fully plated hope for the best but I would still clasp this as there wouldn't be a high grade it would be somewhere between mid and high yeah probably still mid because it does have you know it's it's not really deep gold plating deep yellow whereas this one here from what it looks like it's a little bit uh it's still mixed this kind of thing here would have to be sorted like a very tedious job but because I can see like nice pins here that are fully plated I'd like to sort those fully plate it out from stuff that may have some base metal on it so this is getting close to a higher grade but still a kind of like a mid grade but yeah like this one here it's got a big chunk of base metal there just put that in the mid say yeah that's still a mid-grade board but so it's sorry a mid-grade pin but it's not really about necessarily grading gold pins into low-grade mid grade high grade it's more what's on them whether they got contamination whether they've got base metals visible like here we've got this is all what looks like fully plated stuff so when it comes to sorting you have you kind of better to sort fully plated separate to stuff that has got contamination unless in these like in this case there are a lot of pins that are fully plated I'd like to separate them out and just take out any of the contaminated bits but majority is fully plated so yeah these two would basically be together as fully plated mid to low grade so kind of stuff here fully plated well not quite see again not it's got base metal on the ends of them so they're going to you know you're going to have to get that they might help not really sure what to do with this I'm going to put it in with the fully plated stuff and we'll take it from there so it's pretty much low-grade is obvious it's really low grade you can barely see the gold on them your mid grade is pretty obvious you could see gold even if if it is slightly contaminated with base metal visible and then you got what I would call more of a high grade where it's just pure clean pins and these ones are a nice deep orange screaming gold and recover me they're nicely packed in there so again fully plated deep orange if anything was high-grade in this kind of stuff this is what I would call high-grade and yeah you probably get more gold out of this high-grade box right here then the gold that you'd get out of this whole tub full of this kind of stuff that's the difference there so yeah this one so that's what I call high-grade gold plated pins clean fully plated deeper orange it says almost about as good as it gets probably the only thing that gets better than this as far as gold pins I don't have them with me right now but our milspec so military type of gold pins that go into military plugs you can see the gold in there it's you can almost you can almost bite into them and create teeth marks that's about as that's another level altogether and the only other thing that would be classed as high-grade as good if not better than this kind of stuff would be the gold pins that we get from CPUs okay especially ceramic CPUs there are really nice deep gold plating and got a Pentium Pro here you know same deal really nice and you can see that there's really no difference in the deepness of the orange on either of these CPUs they use a very high-grade gold plating on these when you remove these pins or in ceramic cases you wouldn't even remove the pins you were just process them as they are but what I did want to mention was here we go all right the same deal here these are the same pins but they're processed differently because they're on a fiber so what we do with these usually they use a heat gun and they heat up and remove all these gold pins the problem I found with people that have brought me pins like this from CPUs that they've used the heat gun is you can see all these little like I look like ml/cc some point out they're not mlcc's that they're you know a resistor or something so here I've got a little baggie that someone dropped off to me and that's what they've done they've remove them from your your fiber CPUs using a heatsink but here's the problem is you can see it's it's you've got dark speckles all through it and what they are is there are all those little resistors because when they're heating it up not only do the gold pins fall off but these little things fall off as well and sometimes they're IML CeeCee's just depends on the CPU so the whole lot drops in and so now we've got a contaminated batch even though we've probably got the highest grade pins they're mixed in with all those little little resistors and little contaminants pretty much anything that falls off the CPU is within this mix so once again yeah this is probably the biggest problem you kind of gotta sort it out and they're stuck because when they would have been heated up some of the plastic comes off as well because it melts and then as it dries it sticks together and forms a little clump the plastic isn't so much of a problem it's more of those little tiny resistors and whatnot that is more of a problem so I'll keep these separate but just something to keep in mind it's probably a good idea before you use a heat gun to remove these cob is to remove these little chips or little things and resistors or whatever they are first so there's none there when you go to heat and so the only thing that can drop off are the gold pins and that way we keep them as just as nice gold pins yeah there's I thought I was there was going to be that you're more to talk about with gold pins but yeah as you can see it it sort of turns out that they're all it's all pretty much assimilates just depending on how you how they they get processed in the end is how you sort them whether they've got base metals exposed whether they're fully plated or whether they're just pure low low grade that are in a category of their own and probably the only other thing that I haven't mentioned they're things like your gold Jack's and stuff I don't rate these too highly because they got a lot of contaminants but it's probably a reverse electroplate situation here to get all this kind of stuff I have my too hard basket tub for anything that I see gold plated I just throw it in here actually he's a good little example of I mentioned the milspec gold pins well that's not necessarily milspec but pretty close and yeah very high-grade gold pins so again you want to keep these kind of things separate I'll fix that up later but yeah so anything oddball like this you got kind of chips there with really nice gold pins there so I'd process this like I would this fiber CPU just with a little heat gun and drop all those beautiful pins as good as the the CPUs but things like jacks contamination I'm thinking reverse electroplating it's something you know and some of these like I mentioned don't even know whether they're gold or not but most likely yeah but there is the difference like yeah you can kind of see the this ones are much flatter much nicer gold plating than this yeah you know things like this oddball things gold plating around the end so I just put all this stuff that doesn't really have a category in its own thing like all this this kind needs to be plugged and then there's ones that I don't really bother with the jacks that are you know just got a little bit but you can you know they're not so bad if you don't build up to bigger pile and you just process these as you get them as quickly as possible see if I can do it with this sort of I give it a crush to kind of separate from the plastic it might work it might not but I'll just show you what I'm trying to do obviously we want to get rid of all this rubbish and there we go so we've we've gotten rid of all the rubbish we don't want that and what we're left with it's got a copper wire on the end and throw that in your copper but yeah at least now we've got a more manageable size and you can keep cleaning this up remove this plastic stuff at the end bit of base metal okay actually can get this whole pin out and cut off the part that's got base metal in this case it's kind of fully plated but there you go so at least we're you know we've got something there this is I can see it's a very low grade gold compared to say something like that but this is my too hard basket basket and but that's alright it's just yeah anything that I don't know what's how I'm gonna do it so if it's still got gold plating it's still gold plating bits and you know I could end up you know little gold plated Springs fully plated you know so later I would separate these Springs put them in with regular gold plated pins but even if you just sold this stuff by the pound probably categorize them into a lower grade shiny gold what's that very shiny gray to a higher grade flat gold more orange that would be probably a way to go all right well that's enough for gold pins I think so probably the last thing I'll talk about in this video is tantalum capacitors it's a it really depends on the individual whether you take tantalum capacitors or not here in Australia I think I'm the only person that buys tantalum capacitors as a scrap in America there is a quite a large buyer but you know for us here in Australia it's just not worth posting this to the buyer in America because the postage would eat up all the value but so the reason why I collect tantalum capacitors and buy it off other scrappers is because basically I'm speculating on this this is very much like the crystals and the crystal oscillators speculating on silver whether one they silver will be you know worth enough money to make it worthwhile you know going for all kinds of silver you know that we didn't find so tantalum is the same thing tantalum well you know it's one of those conflict metals so you know if stuff happens around the world like in self every car and so on this stuff can get very expensive it's already there's been I know of at least one time when tantalum went through the roof it was just crazy prices megabucks so it's not worth as much anymore it's still worth quite a bit you know but the reason why I'm taking it is to hold on in case one day tantalum goes back up through the roof and yeah otherwise it's still one thing that I enjoy picking off boards especially the yellow ones because they stand out the surface mount ones they stand out so much they're so easy to find bang the black ones they can be a little bit more complicated because a lot of times we got inductors that look like tantalum capacitors and you know for a lot of pee that would be aware that you know the tantalum capacitor the ones with the positive simple symbol are definitely tantalum capacitor but that's not to say that this one without the positive symbol is not a tantalum capacitor now there's no way of really knowing looking at it like that but when I take them off the board I make sure that there's a positive symbol or so a/c was standing for capacitor if it was an inductor it would be an L or I think they're inductors but regardless of that or there might be diodes or whatever they are but if it's if the code next to a black one is C it's a capacitor so the only thing it could be is a tantalum capacitor if it's like that but yeah that's why you get some people they'll buy a batch of tantalum black ones and they won't all be titled capacitors because they've taken them off the wrong thing off the board so you got a can't train yourself and knowing what you're taking off in some places I'll get like a circuit board and you can see these tantalum capacitors here they got the black they've got the positive symbol so there's no questioning but other times they won't have and but I can get the same identical board like ten times over and sometimes the capacitors are black sometimes they're yellow so even if they don't have the positive symbol I know that they still capacitors because they're in the same spot that they're the yellow ones were sitting on so sometimes they alternate between yellow and black on the same board it might be just slight different configurations but anyway so basically to sort my tantalum capacitors all I do just for the heck of it I keep my yellow separate to the black just it's just something that I started doing and I just like to keep them like that so yellow and black separate but you can have these two they're both the same thing they're both surface mount tantrums and they both contain roughly the same amount of tantalum by weight usually the bigger ones the chunky ones something like 23 24 percent tantalum by weight the thinner ones the smaller ones probably around 18 percent tantalum by weight but mixed in overall you're kind of looking at about 20 21 22 % so here I've got my working batch that I need to sort out quite a lot I don't normally let it get this far but so obviously the things that I keep from aside from the the surface mount ones are all the oddball kind tantalum capacitors okay so you know we've got these these long silvery kind of tantalum 's common ones are the resin dipped and even here you can see the positive symbols they're shown that the titled capacitors probably the highest value tantalum capacitor that we find generally there are some like this that are quite high in value they've got quite good silver content but these ones here you'll find on boards they kind of look like mlcc's they've got the orange fluorescent kind of sticker over the top and these are tantalum capacitors with a very high silver content so not only are they you know they they like these ones for the tantalum but a very high silver content one day I'll be sorting this stuff and having these on their own having these on their own and then the the resin dipped tantalum capacitors on their own as well and you know a probably explained before in the older ones you'll find that there's a positive symbol on one side in some of the more new ones you'll find especially the yellow ones they'll be like an L let her l sort of big l that's how i define them anyway you know these bullet ones are tantalum capacitors there's a tantalum capacitor still on lead so that's all I do with these and the reason why I viously I separate them because if I was able to go to process them or if you were ever to try and sell this stuff it's much easier to be able to describe what you're selling when you're saying you know yellow SMD tantalum capacitors black SMD tantalum or yellow and black mixed and then you got your your resin dipped and and these kind of ones you know so you could sell them separately and I would obviously you would be processing them a little bit different than how you would the SMD well that's it that's just tantalum capacitors and these are a tiny little yellow SMD capacitors going there and that's basically how they come in strips like this and usually a machine will you know chug along and mount these on to circuit boards or if you go to buy tantalum capacitors in bulk usually they come in strips like this big round coils but that's it that's just tantalum capacitors it's up to you some people say oh you know I've got to pick up all the tails on capacitors well unless you know what you're going to do with them you might as well leave them on the board you know if you're not gonna accumulate enough to to sell it's certainly in you're certainly not going to be processing these unless you're a very experienced refiner you know tantalum alone it's requires a very high melting temperature to melt the stuff for a start but yeah I would just leave them as they are complete don't break them up and try and get the little tantalum piece out out of there because it's going to be very hard to recognize what they are later on down the track keep them as they are that's simple tantalum capacitors SMD through everything else and when you get enough you might want to separate the few different ones out of that that's all I got for you guys today I thought I'd just throw this video in a bit of an update to my old sorting precious metal video that when I repeated myself a lot I'd get a lot of flack from that one for for repeating myself so I thought I'd just do a quick fresh update video and yeah and we'll keep going from there so keep scrapping keep going for your gold recovery stuff your precious metals as you can see the price of gold at the moment it's jumped up a whole lot compared to where it was when I last done the video and so you know maybe the next time I do an update video on on sorting my stuff gold will hopefully will be twice as much again and palladium and and all kinds of things and with a bit of luck tantalum capacitors something happens where tantalum capacitors go back up to like go to like $20,000 a pound and everyone will be trading tantalum capacitors or guys keeps grabbing have fun and I'll catch you soon

Channel: eWaste Ben

Views: 340,242

Keywords: gold recovery, mlcc palladium, gold pins, ewaste ben, IC chips gold

Id: XoFDKtaCjmc

Length: 94min 56sec (5696 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020