Dummies Guide to GOLD bullion refining at home as a long term precious metal investment - made EASY

what about platinum? is there any in a computer and is there an easy way to get it out like the silver and gold?

btw 2 really good threads and i might give it a try if i can get enough old computers gathered up.

reply to post by NISMOALTI


I don't think there is Platinum in computers but there is in cars in the catalytic converter.

great plan lets get some un registerd gold get it confiscted because they can and will then you get a free say at gitmo,you even get free toucher if i had them daid materials there would be one pupuse that is drink the acid and leave pergatry,the hassel of all that would be easyer getting platinum from cat convertes/legaly btw
en.wikipedia.org...

Why you wanna piss in the fruit loops haven? Big gov doesnt give a rats about individuals harvesting platinum from converters, only local gov.
The hard disk drive inside a computer is coated with paladium/platinum though.

Originally posted by Pigraphia
reply to post by NISMOALTI

 

I don't think there is Platinum in computers but there is in cars in the catalytic converter.

that might be what i was thinking about, i wasnt sure if it was in computers. its still cool seeing that this could be done. any one know how much silver might be in a computer?

This is very interesting. I have a good few computer parts, old sticks of ram and such kicking around, and from what I've been reading, Canadian coins from 1920-1968 contain anywhere from 50% to 80% silver, the rest copper.

This is all something to definitely keep in mind. Depending on what I find or what is suggested to have gold/silver content, I may just do this in the summer and see what I can come up with.

reply to post by tauristercus


It has seemed I have started a trend here. Your on the right track and your trying your best to live in this chaotic world the best your can. I salute you in your indever to live and scrap what you can't use and turn it into something good.

Thank you for your hard work on trying to prove that Alchemy is real and that everyone should practice it.

Thank you tauristercus for one of the most thought provoking threads I've read on ATS! S+F to you!!! I've been looking for an easy to follow guide on this procedure for a LOOOONG time, and you made that search much easier.

I ripped apart an old cell of mine, and I'd say I pulled at least .3 grams of gold pins out of it. All those pins look like they're (for the most part) 24k gold.

There's just one question I have. There is quite a bit of gold printed on the circuit boards from the phone. Is there a way to separate that printed gold from the PCB (printed circuit board)?

I thought of one possible way to do it would be to immerse the pcb in flame, and then separate the metals from the remains. Is this a worthy endeavor, or would it just be a waste of time?

Dear ATS community.

Thank you for those Silver and Gold smelting recipes. Sadly doing that in Russia is strictly illegal. One needs to pay the Government over two hundred thousand rubles and open one own's company to be allowed to reprocess valuable minerals and re-sell them. No silver/gold bullion can be legally sold in Russia without the Governments mark on it. And you can't get a mark without paying a lot of tax and showing papers that prove you own a jewelry business. But I still saved both threads in case I leave this country to a more free place.

From Restrictive Russia with Love.

PS! Star and flag for the Original Poster for taking the time to explain everything so nicely.

reply to post by tauristercus


You should build a PDF of all of this and publish it here for others to download for future reference.

I just wanted to say thanks to the OP for both his posts, the silver and gold threads. I was thinking I needed a small furnace for this type of small operation. I have read a lot of alchemy and this is just the sort of task I can start with.

Thank You.

ps. I also agree with above post, consolidating this info is a great idea!

reply to post by tauristercus


Thanks for the reply mate, Much appreciated.

As before a very interesting process. As a ChemOps in a precious metals refinery we used a some what different method for refining gold. This process would not be practical on a small basis like this. However it is capable of producing gold of 5-9's of purity. This level of purity is suitable for electronics,and the company I worked for used it for that very purpose. We supplied machined disc's of this material for use in a vapor deposition process. This process involved playing a beam of electrons over the disc in a vacuum and passing a product like CD blanks through the vacuum chamber where the gold vapor would be deposited in a thin layer.

Now as to the process that we used. The raw metal with it's contaminants would be melted and then poured into a large vat of water where it would harden into Irregular flakes with a large surface area. The gold moss as it was called would then be sent to the refinery where we would place it into a glass lined process vessel and add hydrochloric acid and heat it. We then had a large graduated cylinder with a glass tube attached by an acid resistant rubber tube. This was placed into the vessel through a hole in the vessel cover for that purpose.

The cylinder contained nitric acid. The nitric would be added when the hydrochloric had been brought to temperature. We bled it into the vessel very slowly and watched the feed rate by using the graduations and timing the feed rate over time. Slow was better as the large surface area created by the melting process would allow the reaction to run out of control If done too fast..This was continued until the plastic tray the gold was placed in at the bottom of the vessel floated, indicating that the metal was all dissolved.

The resulting solution was then transferred to a gassing vessel, which was also made of glass. We would usually dissolve several pounds of metal at a time. Once in the gassing vessel we would insert a glass tube with a rubber connector into the vessel and meter sulfur dioxide gas through the tube to bubble up through the solution. The SO2 would drive off the nitric acid and the gold would precipitate out of solution as gold won't dissolve in raw hydrochloric acid.


The gassing process was fascinating to watch . As the gas pushed out the nitric the gold would start to come out of solution and would create a gold blizzard in the vessel settling to the bottom. The vessel would become so hot that you couldn't touch the vessel without being burned.After the gold finished coming out of solution we stopped the gas and proceeded to drop the solution into a filter designed specifically for this process. After the solution was filtered the contaminants would be in the remaining solution. This solution was then transferred to waste tanks for further processing. The gold was in the filter and after washing with water was shoveled into glass trays for drying. At this point the metal was referred to as gold sponge.It looked just like the powder at the end of your process.

The metal , when dried, was sent to our vault to be used in the manufacturing process after assay. Different 9's of purity would be used in different processes. I can remember a day when I took about 9 million dollars of pure gold to the vault. Keep in mind that at this time gold was going for about $850 a troy ounce.

This process that you are using I've never heard of before. However it should work just fine if care is taken with handling the chemicals and byproducts involved. I have heard of a process that uses iron fillings to precipitate the gold. I'm not real sure how it works, but, I think that it would work by the iron dissolving into solution and pushing the gold out as a solution can only hold so much metal in a dissolved state. We used a similar method to precipitate waste metals out of the waste solution by adding zinc moss.

All things considered your process is wonderfully simple for use on small amounts of metal. Thanks for a great thread. As in your silver thread I would be happy to answer questions asked in a u2u if I can.

reply to post by NISMOALTI


Certain spark plugs use platinium but I highly suggest not aiming for that since it could back fire on you.

reply to post by NISMOALTI


It's mostly gold in computers.
Silver is a better conductor in fact they used silver to help refine the nuclear material for the first A-Bomb.

The reason it isn't used in computers these days is silver tarnishes and becomes a poor conductor.

What you can do is look for cheap silverware at estate sales and buy their computers while you are at it.
I'm just guessing but if you keep the computer purchase under 25-50 dollars you should be able to turn a small profit.

From what I've read these methods are mostly to supplement income you would need to become a full on picker like on various TV shows to make a full time job out of it.

Sorry if this has been covered but I will be brief but I've been following both threads about silver and gold refining. I wish to ask the question, once you created the gold or silver how do you go about selling it? I'm from the UK and unsure on the laws of selling the metals. Do the gold and silver have to have hallmarks on them? Or do they simply weigh it and compare it to the size you are trying to sell, can they determine it's real gold or silver by size to weight ratio?

Or are people intending on keeping their refined goods till the financial system completely collapses

I have a few questions...

After you've used jewelry and things you know for sure have silver/gold in them what are cheap easy ways to obtain scrap materials that have silver/gold in them? and how can you tell? For example, in your computer parts how did you know they had gold in them?

reply to post by ThePeaceMaker


Another poster may have mentioned it but the OP hasn't he is saving them as investments.

As for selling them, I don't know about in the UK.

In America you can sell them directly to an assayer if there is one in your area they typically give you 40-60% of the final value and hold the rest back until the metal is hallmarked.
The assayer gives you 70-90% of the value depending on who you use market value etc...
The part they hold back is for the cost of hallmarking and processing as well as their cut.
So if you're selling the gold the hallmarking is built into the sale.
If you just want your gold hallmarked by itself that will cost you.

reply to post by Thyhorrorcosmic


The best way to get metals I have come across is through estate sales.
The OP even said he goes to them.
To verify if it's real gold he asks permission to put a tiny drop of nitric acid on the item(a 50/50 acid to water) if it bubbles it's not real gold.
He only does this with permission though.

There are also kits you can buy most pawn shops use them they use similar methods and give more accurate results.

As far as computer components it's just common knowledge that computer chips have gold in them as they are an excellent conductor and don't tarnish/ corrode.

I hope that helps.

First thing is, great threads, this & the silver one. You certainly destroyed my Saturday, I spent most of it madly searching the net for more info on where to find these trace amounts & got nothing else done

This is apparently called Urban Mining, though that term covers just about all recycling.

I found a few websites that could be useful, including this www.goldnscrap.com...

One thing I found very interesting was this page, it gives a breakdown - Composition of a Desktop Personal Computer Based on a typical desktop computer, weighing ~27 kg

ewasteguide.info...

I was excited reading your thread when I realised I have 2 old PC's, a heap of cables, connectors, old printer & scanner, but now I'm not sure even thats enough just yet .

Any tips on mining an old fridge & breaking down a car for its metals etc ?