nice, it reminds me of Breaking Bad with the home lab
a question, does it worth? the gold can afford the cost of the chemicals and leave a gaining?

Cool, I'd di it right now but I have all the ingredients except for that cool red funnel. LOL

doesn't seem worth the effort???

very cool
but would cost more than it makes if you dont already have the stuff??

or you can just buy gold

pretty cool, but, probably only worth the effort and chemical costs on large scale production, i.e. with computer graveyards.

wow

o boy a gold BB totally worth the effort.

I work at the local chip factory at the metal deposit..
That means I do the complete opposite!!

That BB isn't worth the stamp it would take to mail it to a buyer. Even a pile of outdated mobos probably has a higher net worth, not to mention the cost of the chemicals, and your time.

Hmmmmm interesting,

Very interesting!

Seems overly complex to me. Why bother with the electrolytic cell, when the copper would dissolve in sulphuric acid all on it's own without the current, and then also without wasting an anode and cathode. Or better, use nitric. That will dissolve everything other than the gold and any platinum group metals directly. So long as the gold that was there was already pure (and electroplated gold is essentially pure), simply removing the other metals is all that's required. Any silver present (some types of switch contacts) would also dissolve, but could be recovered from the nitric acid by adding table salt solution to precipitate silver chloride. From the original nitric bath, what remains in the beaker undissolved would be non-metallics, gold, and any platinum group metals. But PGMs aren't common in electronics, so essentially, you'd have just gold there, without the other steps. Certainly, gold recovered this way would be pure enough for use in jewelry, or to sell to a refiner. Only if you needed extra high purity gold would you need to do more than this. In normal gold refining, one is extracting the gold from more complex alloys, so often more extensive means are needed. But electronics are not like that. The gold that's there is pretty much pure. Note that there are other sources of gold in electronics. Your method doesn't get the gold plated onto the boards themselves, nor the tiny gold connecting wires inside the IC chips. For that, you'd need to grind up the whole mess. Usually, the method then is soaking in dilute cyanide to dissolve the gold, then removing the gold from solution electrolytically. But that's obviously not small scale kitchen chemistry, and if you think acids are nasty, cyanides are more so, at least for non-professionals.

price of all those motherboards and circuits, chemicals and utilities to make these? a fuckload i imagine... is it really worth it?

ddd

At last,a post here that sparks intelligent conversation instead of the general mumbling banter of an idiot's idea of "sucky posts".

You mentioned at the start that this process is dangerous and should not be repeated at home. Funny enough, you are wearing safety goggles and protective gloves - what about your lungs? Got a fume cupboard to protect you from the toxic gases (chlorine)?

By the way, professionals do filtration of concentrated acids with filters made from sintered glass, not paper filters. But then you need a vacuum pump and other equipment to do it appropriate.

Not very clever to start a process without adequate equipment.

A BeBe pellet..can,t shoot a Vampire with it !

Thank you for the info.

And all of you people who think it is not worth your time... your right its not you would probably just hurt yourself anyways. So keep throwing away your old electronics I'm sure someone is thanking you for it.

@or not: not everything is sold on ebay you effin nerd get outside and explore.