I thought that I’d share a little hobby refining that I’ve been doing. While I am by no means an expert on Precious Metal refining, I have done my fair share of it over the years.
About a decade ago, you could actually make a living off of scrapping computers and vintage telecom units if you had a good source for them. Well i never had a great connection but did manage to get my hands on a decent amount.
This is the first time in many years that I decided to give it a go again.
I got a hold of these ram chip boards for what I believe to be a good price. I paid $80 for two bundles of 150 pieces.
Here is a picture of a sealed pack.
One board taken out.
Close up of the gold fingers.
I first cut off the gold fingers to process them. Then I put them in a large beaker and add the chemicals to remove the gold from the board. There is a chemical that does this very quickly which is nitric acid. I do not use this as it is extremely toxic to breathe and expensive as well. I’m not in a rush so I use the old school method of hydrogen peroxide and muriatic acid. A gallon of muriatic acid is about $6, and you can get peroxide for a $1. That is more then I needed for this double batch.
After letting the fingers soak, I strained the liquid through a doubled coffee filter. Here’s what it looked like.
After recovery this is what I ended up with from half the batch. First I did tared out the scale.
Now for the moment of truth.
While the gold is still not 100% pure, after final refining for .98-.99 purity I will have between 1.2-1.4 grams of pure gold.
So at the end I’ll end up with roughly 2.5-2.8 grams of gold for around $88 of my cost. Not much time in labor is used doing this, it’s mostly waiting for the chemicals to react.
Hope you enjoyed this little experiment....
