This was refined from server midplanes made around 2002-2004.

I still have more of the connectors from the same batch sitting in AP, as well as other batches for different pins, and gold fingers / gold plated PCBs.

They were sold to a local refinery in Belgium.

Since I was curious about how much aqua regia followed by SMB would improve the purity, I decided to do 2 beads with AR, and for the 2 last ones, I simply melted the foils I got after Acid Peroxide.

The refinery did an xrf test on each bead, unfortunately, they forgot to print the report, so its only hand written on the sales receipt, but I'll make sure to get my report next time, for my records.

Purity was 994 and 991 for the 2 beads made after one step of AR.

And I was very surprised to get 986 and 984 for the two beads that were melted straight after Acid Peroxide without any further refining.

They offered 90% of spot (and adjusted for my purity), that's the same price they would offer for stamped jewelry or "old" coins.

I will probably still try one bead with 2 steps AR to see how pure I can get my gold, but I won't bother doing AR on anything else I'm going to sell immediatly.

This is an extra step that won't make any difference when reselling to them.

I will still probably do at least one AR step for the gold I will stack, just because I can.

Now, I need to find a cheap way to "hot stamp" some custom tokens for the gold I'd like to stack.

Hi everyone,

I’ve never in my life used a kiln before and I would really appreciate some help.

My neighbor gave this to me for my refining endeavor. I got 2x 4 KG graphite crucibles off Amazon, rewired the kiln because the wiring was subpar and added a type N probe with a digital PID.

I set the kiln to 500 C and put the crucibles in for about half an hour. The next day I set it to 1100 C and melted about half a kilo in each crucible and poured it into shot. A lot of slag was left over and when I tried to peel it, it took some of the crucible with it.

How did I possibly destroy these crucibles from one melt?

Are they too close to the elements? Did I set it too high?

I tried stirring with a graphite rod, hoping to get rid of the slag before I poured, but very little stuck to the rod. It seems that no slag got into the shot anyways so that’s nice. But the crucibles were bubbling and making a little bit of noise when they got hot enough. Oxidizing? The slag is very light compared to the same volume of silver.

Thanks!!!

I must have washed this 30 to 40 times until it reached neutral and the amount of waste water that now I have to deal with is insane! Total of 3127g, all stuff that I’ve accumulated through out the years!

Hey Guys i recently came across some old semiconductor components that i wanna possibly get melted down. Does anyone have experience doing this? I don’t scrap for a living so i have no clue. My friend that knows about gold says these could be 18/24k plated.

update on my previous post. so most of you said its probably tin plated. but do they contain gold inside?

Hi everyone, I was drying some cemented silver overnight on a hot plate (130C - 160C range), and when I came in this morning I see this oxidized copper and some black stuff. This is my second batch of silver cement, and it looks like impurities pooled and processed themselves in the center of the casserole on, I guess, the hottest point?

What is this stuff? Looks like copper and slag. Thanks in advance!

Not sure what this group is about yet. Do we enjoy all parts of this hobby? I call it a hobby. I enjoy doing this on my spare time and try to have FUN while i do it. I enjoy the hunt and opening up a new item to see the innards. Can i post this? I’m new ha ha ha so I’m sorry if I’m out of line for posting such things and delete my post i guess. Hopefully I’m not alone and we all enjoy seeing what others found. Like that one guy that found all that from a semi conductor! Wow what a find!! But yea i got this from one tv that weighs as much as i do! Crazy! And all them ribbons are gold plated. Any one know about them ribbons? Are they gold all the way through? Thanks and happy hunting !

Every connection on this thing looks to me like gold flash!

So I had a bar that I poured from silver contacts and wanted to refine it into purer silver to run through my silver cell. Ran it through a bunch of nitric boils until everything was dissolved. Added a bar of melted silver plated stuff to use up the rest of the free nitric before I added pure copper. It used up the nitric but then it turned into this thick milky blue substance. Is this silver chloride? I didn’t add any hydrofluoric acid so I don’t know how it could have formed

these look shiny, are they silver plated?

I melted some fine Silver and jewelry scraps and I got this gray, green, and brown layer on top of my silver bar. How do I fix this and what is it? I also have these big pits at the bottom of my bar. How do I prevent this next time? The graphite mold was glowing red when I poured. I’m assuming not all of the silver jewelry scraps weren’t .999 fine as I assumed or maybe there was contamination on my crucible.

I have 15ish lb of concentrated flour gold material that spins out at 70ish% gold in a centerfuge. Despite the fact that it shows some other material with the gold it melts into the nuggets in these pics with no visible trash left in the crucible. I have attempted to contact multiple refineries that actually work with the general public and nobody seems interested in this material. Garfield told me I needed to find a smelting service. If anybody knows of a good one or the right direction to take from here I would greatly appreciate it!

So I have these pure gold electrodes that have solder on one end. Will the solder contaminate the gold if I use a solder wick? The solder type is unknown, want to make a ring with no lead in it. Apologies for the potato quality photos