Shredding & Melting Recycled Computers: Gold, Silver, Copper, Scrap Metal Recovery
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- Опубліковано 6 січ 2020
- We shred and grind up 25 PC towers then melt down the metals recovered from our shaker table and pour a large dore bar. The goal was to find out what type and percentage of the different metals are in PC towers. The experiment didn't go exactly the way we hoped, if you guys have any suggestions or tips for what went wrong on the smelting portion of the experiment please let us know.
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Jason I think you deserve credit for doing an experiment that is interesting your audience regardless of its success or failure...
Watching this just reinforced why I buy refined .9999 silver /gold from APMEX. Less work and my insurance company is not canceling me for handling very flammable & dangerous material in my garage.
Great! Thanks!
experiments dont suceed or fail they produce date to support or refute a hypothesis
@@fuzzzeballs Indeed , knowledge is neutral and knowing what not to do can impower you when people ask if it can be done . Sometimes being able to say definitively that wont work to a customer makes you look like a rock star
I used to do this for a living as a chemist. Stopped and learned to program to live longer. First step after removing junk by hand, band saw, clippers is to strip exterior gold using the Crow cynation process. This is a hot water wash with dilute potassium cyanide solution in a cement mixer with addition of ml at a time bits of H2O2 to catalyze the reaction. Go slow I saw this run away once and put a guy in ER. (Then filter off solids wash and crush solids and do like you did in the vid) Sprinkle powdered zinc on the cyanide / gold solution to get the cyanide chelate to grab the zinc and let go of the gold. Filter and wash these solids in a vent hood. Remember cyanide and acid is DEADLY. Next mix with HCL to dissolve excess zinc and filter that off in a fume hood. Then refine the remaining gold precipitate / filter paper like streetips does. From about 200 lbs of good electronic scrap and pins we got 0.5 to 2.0 oz of gold. The material after the strip we washed and sent to a smelter. The button from the smelter varied on yield.
Awesome. Thanks for the info!
That magnet just removed half your gold at that crush size.
(Plated items, chips with steel pins, micro capacitors)
Also the micro-capacitors held all the more valuable 'rare earth' metals as well.
i 2nd that.
I've been thinking that for years (since I saw the first video on the machine). Most of the precious metals are plated onto magnetic surfaces.
I do hope that someone is collecting all the magnetic content and processing it. It's all metal now, so most smelters/refiners will accept that to process (while most won't accept crushed electronics).
majority of pc components are plated in 3 to 4 layers, Magnetic Zinc inside layer metal Copper Layer over that then electroplated gold or Silver or Paladium over, very magnetic, yet valuable due to extra thick layers of plating, yes, he lost most gold
Sorry to burst your bubble but gold is not magnetic
I have watched several of your videos now and I have to say how impressed I am that you share your knowledge with us. And really well explained
Great experiment There was gold plated items in the ferrous that was pulled off in the first crushing. Next time break down the towers to reduce the plastic and steel.
The client is probably going to process bigger masses. Therefore it might not be possible to process it manually. The test wouldn't be representative.
Teun lll a full break down does not make logical sense in this scenario, but a removal of the case/tower would take a few minutes and would drastically reduce the wear and tear.
@@ursamines7643 true, but try processing several tons of the product manually. The man cost would be high. Besides this is way more ergonomic. But I think we both mention different strategies that are both used in the recycling industry. Interesting discussion though.
Great, thanks for the tip!
obviously you missed the point of the experiment.
You should also be seeing Tantalum and some other Platinum group metals such as Palladium and Platinum itself. Your precious metals are still bound up in their ceramic and plastic tombs. That's why pyrolysis (to get rid of plastics and weaken the ceramic bonds) and the ball mill to finish off the ceramic into dust. That will free up more of your precious metals and avoid some of the Carbon driven reactions.
Thank you for your tips! If we do this kind of video again we'll definitely be thinking about your suggestions!
I melt a lot of mixed metals and recovery metals. One major thing is to try to get your metals as clean (less excess junk) as possible. Also, stir it a lot. The more metal, the more stirring is needed. Aluminum likes to stick to thinks in liquid form, and the steel/iron will float on top of liquid copper and aluminum. As will the carbon from the trash. Stir, let it settle a little and lightly scrap the dross off the top. Stir some more, then scrape again. Do this until you have a clean pool of metal. Then add borax (about 30 grams per kilogram of metal, extra won’t hurt) stir again, then scrape once more. After that then try pouring. Also, check the temperature of your foundry often. You’ll want at least 1100 C before you start scraping. For something as mixed as you were running, 1200 would probably be better, but keep it under 1500 unless you want an aluminum fire.
What I would do is run the dross through the hammer mill again, then cut up the ingot (don’t try to melt it whole, because that would be a waste of fuel and time) and melt all the metal you recover the second time around again. Scrape the steel and dross after all the other metals have melted, flux it, scrape again, then pour.
And in case you were wondering, I do this as a side hobby and extra income. Where I live the recycle centers won’t take cans, but they will take aluminum ingots and extruded aluminum. I melt it all because it pays the same, and is easier to transport in ingot form. I also melt copper, brass, and all forms of bronze. Steel/iron is only worthwhile in large bulk so I only take that in about once a year. An average month will get me between 150 and 200 pounds of aluminum, 200-250 pounds of pure copper and 100 pounds of mixed copper (bronze/brass).
Great, thanks for the tip!
All i can say is i am a big fan.
Every video i have watched so far is going straight into my knowledge library and so are many of the great comments i see posted on said videos you share.
Awesome work and thank you.
Alot of people say to dissasemble & seperate etc but i think your demo is great from a perspective of the whole product not dissasembled as where do you stop in dissasembly process. Very intetesting over all. Thanks for sharing your results & ideas, good & bad.
Thank you for your comment and for watching our videos!
I learn so much from these videos. I know absolutely nothing about this stuff. I really enjoy watching your videos. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and doing these experiments to show us what is in these products!
I appreciate you not just filming an experiment that you've already done it is a real experiment with the option of unexpected results I've enjoyed your videos and makes me glad that I'm not doing them. I do like your shop though
Remove as much of the aluminum from the PCs as possible before grinding. The aluminum oxide is never going to melt in your setup it seems you dont want it around trapping other metals in that sticky slag.
ya, remove the bulk plastic front face plate, steel casing, power supply steel case.
Great, thanks for the tip!
when you just shred it to the 1/4 in minus size it is really staying too big if your wanting to collected the values in my opinion. Take it down to a smaller size, either by passing through another mill and or ball milling the collected metals from the end. You can then pass the "dust" or slurry with very fine particles over the shaker table again and then separate the aluminum out very easily, because it has a density of only 2.7 g/cm3 compared to copper of 8.9 as well as other metals with higher densities than aluminum.
Aluminum you could set up to go to the first drop off after the waste, then the heavier metals including the gold to the last bucket. After you have your two buckets I'd recommend either melting the aluminum or ideally selling it as the dust (dried) to a refiner. the copper and heavy metals bucket I'd recommend passing a magnet over it to remove iron and then if you wish you can melt into another dore bar and then zap with the XRF at the very least this way you are keeping the aluminum out of the future steps as aluminum in gold refining is a huge headache. *edit Aluminum and Iron*
you will still have metals that will cause you headaches but for different reasons. eg. tantalum (from tantalum capacitors), tin from the solder which if you're planning on wet refining the metal bar will cause you headaches because it will cause metastannic acid to form which will clog your filters. The best bet in my opinion is to get it to the two buckets like mentioned above of the powders. sell the aluminum( xrf first to make sure you arent missing anything), the copper bucket dry out and save. once you have say a 55 gal barrel of the stuff or more have samples taken from that (ball mill everything, sift, mix, then sample) have those samples fire assayed and then sell the barrels to a refiner who will pay you for the gold, silver, and copper. if they are willing to pay out for other metals (any PGM's) great!
but also just tossing a whole computer into the first shredder is not the way to do it. gigo, garbage in garbage out try to cut down on the unnecessary and easy to remove items first eg. cases, screws etc. ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure :)
@@CoinSilver800 What would the flux mixture need to be to make all the metals drop to the bottom the the cone leaving just the silica & carbon on top? More SO2 or Bicarb?
Great, thanks for the tip!
Idk why melting and pouring metal looks like so much fun. Wish I could do this in my apartment
You need to use chemicals to dissolve each of the metals into solution and then use other chemicals to settle specific ones out of solution in order to refine them. Its a very complicated process that I cant describe in a youtube comment but its the best way to refine the metals from ground up computers
I appreciate, and I’m sure others do also, that you are doing things that a lot of us just possibly can’t in our garage but would love to. Thank you sir, love the videos.
You made a lot of rich slag and an ingot of Aluminium bronze, which is what you should have been expecting.
Great! Thanks!
Never seen a furnace like this one before, really cool channel too, been watching the videos for a couple days now, good stuff, really cool equipment too
Just read a paper which explained that mechanical shredding of whole components leads to a significant loss of pm because big parts are seperated with the iron fraction. They recommend to remove PCBs before shredding. This is also how the big recycling companies do it. They don't accept whole pcs because the high iron and aluminium content is disturbing the recovery process. So they buy only clean PBCs. Plastic however is not an issue for them. pastic is incinerated during the melting process und the released gases are cleaned in a scrubber.
Great job on all the work you did ive refined some of this stuff for quite a few years in the back yard. Separating as much of the gold plated items first then i nitric acid the material i want to recover gold from then aqua regia it from there you drop the gold chloride and burn it into a nugget. Silver will encapsulate your gold so any silver in The mix when using this method will subtract from your gold yeild
this is why they manually strip electronics (steel frame, plastic panels, wires, PCBs etc.) then they take anything that is metal unless it is obviously just a steel frame or panel only and turn it into powder and run it under seriously strong magnets to get rid of as much iron as possible. Then they dip it in acid and chemically separate valuables like silver and gold from copper and remnants of iron/plastic (PCBs go straight to acid). Then they smelt copper into thin sheets which will be submerged in a pool of copper sulfate and serve as anode and is then purified via electrolysis (final product is electronics grade and directly sold as is to manufacturers of cables and such).
It is really interesting stuff.
Good job Jason. This is the most environmental friendly process that can be tried. Though the acid leaching gives a better result, it can be practised only with recycling nitric acid fumes for clean process. Keep it up.
Thanks for watching! Make sure to watch out for our next video!
Great video! I would really love to see one of these working in person.
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I am really impressed with your ability to pull the copper layers off of the pcb’s. I thought they would be fused or stuck better.
Great! Thanks!
A lot of the "plastic" pieces were tantalum caps. Also, you didn't speak to palladium and nickel. It was very informative to see how you reduced pcb waste to "metal bars". As a chemist and an engineer I've been thinking about a scalable process to recover individual metals. Tough nut. Lab processes are much easier, but industrial is really tough. I have some waste bars that appear to be mostly tin.
How do you refine and sort metals that are melted together? How much did it cost to build the hammer mill? I want to build one from scrap metal and use it on circuit boards, wires, etc
Grind finely. Maybe second hammer mill to grind it more fine and some way to remove the aluminum before hand like others have suggested. Cant wait to see another video on this.
Agreed, pull the hard drives, which is probably the largest single source of aluminum...take probably a minute but would save fuel and effort pouring all that extra metal.
Great, thanks for the tip!
i would love to see the same experiment with one modification ... after initial shedding run it through a roller or ball mill before magnetic separation as the chips need crushed into a fine powder first...
I question how you figured your percentage of recovery ?
Did you inspect " ALL " of you processed towers , use a microscope 50 - 100 + power to look for gold bond wires ?
Using the magnet at that early stage is taking / loosing some of your gold , maybe lots , the outside / soldered to the boards , and the main processors pin with gold are almost all magnetic - to the early magnet process will take / loose some gold .
The there are a lot of rare-earth metals and other stuff that - may have all kinds of reactions / mixing that could be problematic .
The neodymium magnets in the hard drives , CD readers etc. , magnetizing more of the pins on chips and loosing again ;(
Along with other rare-earth metals that have value in capacitors etc.
Breaking down all towers , box's till you get to circuit boards , then hammer-mills to separate steels & plastics .
I use air-chisels to quickly remove soldered in chips , mono-lithic caps .
I sell the circuit boards then , but lots of gold pins , surface mount gold coated pads visible on boards , let alone gold fingers on slot cards [ I do cut gold fingers off with sheet-metal cutters ] .
Too many things to get into in this format , but some suggestions .
Wish I was closer , would like to , a hole lot of things ;)
Thanks again
He makes the numbers up. That's how.
Send us an email and we can send you the white paper we have on grinding up mother boards. info@mbmmllc.com
@@mbmmllc Jason and the gang, could you send me the white paper on grinding up motherboards/electronic boards. Please send to jzstorm@yahoo.com
awesome video thanks so much for sharing!❤
Thank you for your comment and for watching our videos!
Also a water separation for the plastic might be worth while salt could be added to get high density plastics to float.base metal recover needs to pay for the rest of the recovery both to reduce heavy metal environmental contamination and it is also lost money :-)
It might not have come out like you wanted but the cone is pretty neat.
To extract the gold from that you have to take it apart and separate everything by hand and then chemically extract the gold let the gold go into solution and use metal bisulfate to drop it out of solution which is a whole chemical process
Great, thanks for the tip!
What happened is that it classified itself by density. That's why the big industrial operations separate stuff further before smelting. Eddy currents for aluminium, etc.
Nice lump of "nearly" nordic gold! Was interesting to see the result thanks!
Great! Thanks!
Great video.Thanks
Great, thanks
Just a fyi if you didnt already know.....there are iron bonding wires in a lot of chips that have gold wires in them.....no idea if your iron removal pulls those chips into the trash instead of running them up for further processing.....and where did the gold go?? It wasnt listed on the xrf.....
bottom line is there is no easy solution ( or everyone would be doing it) there are only steps to be taken you can grind it all down to workable size not using magnet separator as stated because of plated stuff to be classified and dealt with accordingly
12 lbs of #2 lmao
Haha
that's awesome. I do this on a smaller scale. I thought you would wear a respirator with smelting metal. I don't like the smell bc I feel like it's dangerous but I don't know for sure.
Very interesting! I’m also curious why the entirety of metals weren’t collected, and at least why they were seemingly unsorted in the goop. Weird.
Great! Thanks!
Palladium is magnetic so you probably throw the Palladium in the bin, it been best if you separated the board from the pc then just grind the board down
Could you mix the #4 waste with concrete aggregate? would the fiber and plastic help with shrinkage and cracking.
Dismantle the towers first. Then I would just incinerate all of the boards. Take all the ash and precipitate the metals out using aqua regia and other acids. It is the best way for the most recoverable materials. The lead (if any) eat up you gold content. I hope you removed the batteries out of the mother boards before crushing them. If not you also would have some mercury in the mix that would also eat up the gold.
That would be my approach as well. I missed what others posted about the Gold bonded to steel being taken by the Magnet but it is logical. Definitely would not curch everything together-waste of energy and resources plus one would end up with a large hunk of Mixed to them have to Chemically separate.
The lead could be separated in a calcium hydroxide/ash Cupel
Great, thanks for the tip!
That's a lot polluting and an environmental hazard.
Saving up one my computers!
Crazy thing that those PC are worth more being sold on ebay that you will get for gold out of them. The old PC market is booming I have sold some PC's up over $500.
Thanks for the tip
Jason, I greatly appreciate what you do! I know you have experimented with depopulating and not. I think you may be missing the gold in the ceramic IC chips. It will look like plastic but contains gold inside it. It is microscopic, if you are refining the ceramic chips by themselves you are missing much of the gold!
I'm hopeful that you will follow up on this video at some point. Very entertaining!
Yes Jason, I'd like to know what you did with this pour. What your next step was and so on. I'm enjoying all of your videos
Looks like you got way too much aluminum in your concentrate which is going to alloy but it's really pretty! A finer mesh grind and more mechanical separation is probably the most economical way to go short of doing an incineration run before you smelt.
Great, thanks for the tip!
@ 18:57 it looks like you can scroll down on the xrf display to show hiden rows , is there a reason you didnt scroll down on the xrf gun display ?
then in the next shot with the slag we see there is no more info to be seen so you cabt scroll down
Hi, How many gram gold did you recover? I didn't see the XA symbol of gold . WHat is the recovered metal weight?
Nice experiment... 👍
I would try a Eddy Current (1st) to separate some of the plastic & ceramic; from, the metal.. Then, the magnet.. And maybe a Rare Earth magnet for the stainless steel.
Heat the metals upto 600F to 800F... Only to melt the solder & burn off the junk.. (possibly, rehammerimg it smaller to 1/8; but, a 3/16 hole seems ok general pass..)
Use an Air Shaker table to separate copper & aluminum from other metals
Great, thanks for the tip!
Привет, Джейсон, спасибо за видио!!!
Was the slag tested for metals, seems like that’s where the study should go. What can it be mixed with for supply and demands, is it carbon?
Can it be used for carbon nanotubes? It’s the waste we need to costly utilize to keep out of landfills.
Thanks for video.
How will you extract the high precious metal from that chunk of metal
Saw vido when it first out try shaker each out let to refine each of the 5 out let gold copper steel alum at leest 15 more ingredents big table 5 smaler ones too finish what does mill destroy?
like most have said, pull the pcb from the tower and all the wiring too, then run just the pcbs though the small mill and float table to get metals out, you could still save the slag and run it in the float mill and see what you can get, put the heavies and some lead into the mix, the lead will pull the gold and the rest into it, then put it in a bone ash cuple to recover the expensive metals aka gold and silver
Great, thanks for the tip!
I don't know enough to comment BUT:
You Have created a Space Rock!!
Try doing a collaboration with the UA-camr sreetips. That's the best advice I can give you. Best of luck.
Great, thanks for the tip!
@@mbmmllc Another youtuber you should follow is ewaste ben. He is an expert at breaking computers down.
Sreetips is lab and chemistry. Yes its probably the highest recovery but these vids answer questions many of us have so props jason
Next time please, please, please wear respirators when you pour the molten metal. The fumes billowing off likely contained zinc and who knows what else. I love these type videos and don't want to see you poison yourself.
lead, bismuth and zinc based on the XRF but could also end up with cadmium
Great! Thanks!
Some of the slag crap is likely very high-temp metals like platinum, tungsten, and tantalum.
Older computers had more of those.
I know when I do an aqua regia dissolution of old 1990's circuit boards and smashed chips (especially from old lab tech stuff), after bringing it to a boil and letting it cool, fine grey dust simply drops out of solution, which is all the platinum-group metals.
Здравствуйте! Хочу поинтересоваться. Если прибор показывает 350ppm, то сколько это из тонны в граммах?
I want a hammer mill and a shaker table. This seems like such a lucrative business.
If you would like more information on the cost of our products, you can email us at info@mbmmllc.com or call us at 360-595-4445. Thank you for watching!
pc recycling is all about getting the best bang for the buck witch will almost always be physical, electrical, then, chemical thermal last. the thing here is each step you remove a high purity fraction is separation that does not need to be repeated or cause waste. so striping the steel case and as much plastic as possible before further processing may not pay for itself but will save cost later on both plastic and steel are at least potentially salable if low value and will be most of the weight as well as the reason for being very careful in the order and purity of each fraction removed is that there is a lot more than silver gold lead and tin in this stream and some of it is worth a lot. you also have palladium in the mlcc's worth $2000 an oz indium at 1 dollar a a gram or 1000 dollars a kilo tantalum platinum electrolytic copper can be worth 12 to 20 dollars a pound instead of 2 or three . in the end you want a very small portion of unfinished material that you can a) glean more value out of or b) is the irreducible waste, and o ya back when you were processing the boards if you can get long enough glass fibers and a millimeter is a good size bigger is better you can sell that as a strengthening amendment for concrete. you need to find value in each part i would love to see weld up kits for well designed flail mills and or shaker tables for urban miners. just remember just because you can doesn't mean you should you can destroy a lot of value or run cost up excessively by doing things in the wrong order you should always be learning more and better ways .
Great, thanks for the tip!
I would remove pcb from towers. Remove aluminum heatsinks with air chisel. I would also remove any batteries. Shred with 1" ×3/8" screen. At that size the ferrous is easily separated from the valuable material by magnet. Shred with 1.2mm screen and run on shaker table. At this point incinerate(but don't melt) in kiln/furnace to burn off all plastic, epoxy, etc. Shred again with 1.2mm or 0.8mm screen and run on shake table again to remove ash/trash as possible. Use a handheld magnet and sift material to remove any ferrous missed. Melt and cast into bars. Do copper electrolysis with 10% Sulfuric acid by volume of solution to speed up process. Melt pure copper into bars. Collect slag which contains noble metals. Perform wet process on slag. If concerned about aluminum use hf. Then hcl to remove any tin remnants. I would also incinerate again to remove any lingering hcl as to not get silver chloride in solution when going to next step. 2nd dilute nitric. Last aqua regia. Can use sulfuric acid during aqua regia to precip any lead remnants. Going strait to hcl or nitric would be way to expensive.
Great, thanks for the tip!
Should always remove the little stuf first two maching station base metel and precious metals?
Knowledge dictates some metals never get smelted together for good practical reasons you experienced.
I would of run the material through the shaker table to separate them to a higher level and run magnets over the gold, silver and copper lines to remove as much magnetics as possible. Then smelt them with more SO2 to burn off more impurities individually if possible.
Great, thanks for the tip!
Very interesting video - thank you for sharing. New subscriber. I'll spend some time going over your videos.
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so how much stuff do you get out of a anerage pc?
Didn't I see a zigzag air separator and some of your other videos? Isn't that for separating the plastic out?
You know those hydraulic press crushing and small motors running plexiglass heads vids? If you could get a cam behind some plexiglas and show the destruction from inside would be heroic!
Great, thanks for the tip!
have you considered using the plastic waste to make diesel through pyrolisis?
First off, since you know which metals are in which devices. It would make sense to do some preliminary separation to help minimize the copper, steel, and aluminum/zinc fractions. I.e. disassemble them a bit more and put the wire in one bin, the steel in another, the plastic in another, and the aluminum in yet a fourth. That way you arent decreasing the precious metals percentage.
Especially since copper will pull so much precious metals into the cupel.
A agree the aluminum and a good part of the iron were oxidized when you started heating it with no flux initially. You wont be able to melt aluminum or iron oxides. For sure do a stem where you extract all the iron, then melt with flux to prevent oxidation. I am not sure what to do with any left over ceramic in the mix. Thanks for an interesting experiment.
Great, thanks for the tips Chris!
You can use a magnet to separate magnetic metals but I would also use the desert fox gold panning wheel afterwards to separate the gold and silver from the other metals
Great, thanks for the tip!
What about setting up a sluice mat in the sluice? You would get the gold and lead right away, and still get tailings to be further seperated.
Yes this is sick
@mbmmllc I am a single operator scraper with the want to process all my own pcb material, I have about 3k lbs of boards and gold plated computer plugs. Do you have a solution for a hobbyist like myself who wants to start getting larger?
Hey if u ever get an answer to this question here or anywhere please hit me up via email. I'd love to pick your brain a lil. alikensu2@gmail.com
Yea go bury it in about an acre of 4" deep holes, spread it everywhere and let people come metal detect for $20 / hour.
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mbmmllc called and talked to Forest. Nice guy, as I assumed there is not a solution that fits a hobbyist scrapper. Keep up the videos
Go to The gold refining forum and read for a couple of months, then start asking questions. Best advise I can offer.
Magnifique!
I have never tested this myself, but would it be possible to start the melt at a lower temp, first extracting the lead, then raise the temp more to extract the alum and again to get the brass, copper silver and gold?
Great, thanks for the tip!
You should have grounded the particle finer, that would allow getting out more of the fiberglass that don't burn or melt, (board are designed to resist high temperature for soldering) Personally I would have used an induction furnace so I could inject MIG welding gas inside to prevent oxidation.
Great, thanks for the tip!
circuit boards, brass standoffs, aluminum heatsinks, copper wire, lead and tin solder on galvanized cold rolled steel.
Was pretty damn cool. Where do you sell your metal bars? Scrap yard won’t take them in ca.
Scrap yards take them here, bummer not in CA
Pyrolize what you dried out, ball mill the results to dust. Then thoroughly mix with plenty of flux. That should help reduce SOME of the slag.
Thank you for these tips as well!
would a propane tiger torch be good to Pyrolize?
I’ve got mixed thoughts on this .. part of my thinks the gold and some of the other precious metals should have been hand picked out of all those pc and not mixed together.. but damn the machine is badass .. very interesting video 🤟🏻🤟🏻🤟🏻
With pyrolisis you get diesel and ash, i think it might be easier to get the metal from the pyrolisis ash or pyrolisis chamber maybe?, run the waste from it through the system too..? that and you could crush up the slag with the metal bits from the pour too..
do the math for a lot, say 100 to 1000 towers estimate 100% return, multiply by high, low and average amounts for each metal.
remove the towers and run the "guts" in a micro crusher, and go from there. then run past the 'cross belt magnet' go from there. also watch nerd rage and codys lab on similar experiments.
Great, thanks for the tip!
what do you do with that toxic water waste pond?
In electronics much of the precious metals are plated onto another metal. In the case of connectors and integrated circuits, those metals are magnetic. So I suspect you lost much of your precious metals into the magnetic bin.
Preheat your triangle steel pouring thing and your metal will cool slower and your slag will have less metals in it !!!!
Holy cow. First? Last time I was this early Ricky Gervais hadn't eviscerated Hollywood. Love the videos. Great content. I have a question. PC circuit boards and mercury in a tumbler, what do you think about the efficiency? Thanks
With a steel contaminated pour, would a steel screen hold up to strain the pot?
Mercury have no place in modern refining. Anyhow, it would probably just alloy with the copper and then you have super toxic waste and some super toxic copper.
Not sure, but I want to stay away from Hg
I've heard all the horror stories from the use of mercury but it seems safer to handle than said. Also, can an Hg/Cu amalgam be separated by stilling off the Hg?
how do you dispose of the water? That water is now contaminated with some heavy metals and toxic substances.
1melting , easy metals. 2nd run. Put the slaggy leftovers through the hammer mill then seperate on the shaker table. Then melt what’s left.
Thank you for the suggestion! We'll be sure to try it out :)
That was cool, I'm by no means even a low grade professional, I have watched alot of refining videos and I could make myself look stupid but wouldn't it be better to somehow separate the precious metals from non-precious metals better? Or have someone employeed even if only temporary to chemically recover some of the easier to recover precious metals? Just the first things that came to mind!
Have a GREAT Day!!!
Great, thanks for the tip!
I think those chunks at the end was a build-up of the components of the motherboard, slot cards and plastics.
Great! Thanks!
You should really seal that kaowool in some sort of refractory like fireplace sealer. The glass fibers that come off that stuff especially when at smelting temps are very dangerous to breathe.
Thank you for the safety tip! We make sure to wear respirators when doing anything like this, but your idea is definitely something we'll look into for extra safety precautions!
Running a magnet through those five gallon bucket should be favorable to scraping crucibles.
Thanks for doing it, but it does not seem to have Gold and Silver amounts like you said in the beginning?
Yes, it was a disappointing recovery
@@mbmmllc I want to see your successes. The black sand was sad too. I was really hoping
So I’ve been thinking about this and I wonder if you could put the slurry after the shaker table into a bucket and shake it there is a chance that the different materials will differentiate.
Its hard to separate 100% by different densities on a shaker table
Yeah but what I’m thinking of is how soil samples are separated. They put them into a jar with water and seal it and shake it. Then the different densities separate. I realize that there are some variables that won’t scale with metal and you might need a higher density liquid and more aggressive shaking. In the end it’s just an idea I’m thinking out loud about and you have way more experience than me.
@@pyredynasty I see your point. Yes, good idea. Thanks for the tip!
Just as i would expect to be honest. Alot of the copper alloy will end up at the bottom of the cone because its denser than everything else. The metals that readily alloy with it like tin, gold and PGMs will go with it. The rest ends up a horrible mess of oxides (along with a percentage of the above trapped in it). As others have said i dont think crushing whole towers will ever work well. Too much good stuff is getting lost at the magnet. You really need to crush finer than the finest components then do the magnetic separation too make sure you get everything you need with minimal junk. Not practical for whole towers but doable for boards, phones and laptops etc.. The magnetics from the boards alone may be worth refining in a lead bath. The copper alloy can be electrically refined. Might not be economical but its the only way you will account for all the metals imo.
Great, thanks for the tip!