Hi guys, Just wondering if anyone has seen that book on eBay which goes for around $20 and discusses how you go about extracting metals from scrap electronics??? Or has anyone ever tried it??? Or if it's simply too much hassle to go about finding 100 old devices just to get 1 gram of gold.. Cheers
I looked into this a few years ago. In the end, I didn't bother, and I based the decision on a few factors, namely: (1) You're dealing with some pretty dangerous chemicals, ones that can likely do some harm if the fumes are inhaled, or the liquids spill on yourself. (2) There is very little precious metal in modern computer parts (that is, those produced in the last 5-10 years). Think along the lines of micromillimeter gold plating. And there's not a lot of "surface" area to make up for the thinness of it, if you follow my meaning. (3) It's rather likely, given the cost of these "kits" that the real profit is in selling them, rather than attempting recovery of various metals from computer parts. (4) The sheer hassle of having mountains of computer parts to deal with, recover from, and then dispose (of the bits you don't want). I'm guessing that 20 years ago, such parts may have had more profuse amounts of PM's on them - but consider this. If a network card today wholesales for $3.00 (and it does), with the price of gold at $1500 per 31.15g, how much gold can there be on it to begin with? Even if we assume the whole $3.00 is the gold cost (it isn't, be sure of that), you're looking at 1/500th of an ounce, or 0.0623g of gold. And that is the best possible case. Consider too that CPU's, memory, and other components (by surface area alone) would have no more, and likely less gold component. Just my humble opinion - as I say, I haven't done it myself, but the above is the result and thinking of my looking into it a while back.
You seriously don't want to go about sawing motherboards and stuff like that. Even if you're doing it outdoors or in a well ventilated area chances are the particle dust will be left around and you'll breathe it all in... not healthy. If it was actually profitable you'd see plenty of poor/homeless people hauling this stuff off to sell, but they'd rather pick up aluminium cans and stuff like that. Well looks like I was wrong about how much Gold is in CPUs... but yea... not worth the risk of chemicals and potential health hazards associated with dealing with this crap.
Effort vs return = don't bother in my opinion. This only seems viable in low labour cost such as India where the extraction effort garners a reasonable return on effort compared to the average wage. In a country such as Australia your better of getting an hours overtime - at least that way you probably won't manage to harm yourself or worse yet your family.
only semi safe way is to put cpu's in a blender/grinder till its dust. and then melt the dust. ceramic stays gold turns into a lil nugget.not sure if it was even worth the gas though.
Wish I did...left that part of my life years back unfortunately. Must be nice to be able to find 200 CPUs... lots of history and sounds fun going through old hardware (as long as it ain't dirty!). Used to be my favorite pastime, to take apart old computer parts like hard drives and fool around with the magnet haha.
Check out http://goldrefiningforum.com/ I signed up there after seeing some old CPUs for sale and it took me about three hours to realise that (a) its very complicated, (b) it can be very dangerous and (c) there are a lot of other people out there who are waaaaay better at doing it than I could ever be.
I heard somewhere recently that the price of silver would have to be around $3,000 to make it feasible to do this.
