Urban gold prospecting

[Ohiogoldfever]

Weathers cold, the creek is colder.

Anyone else do any urban prospecting to pass the time?

 

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[Ohiogoldfever]

Nobody! Holy crap. Beats waiting out the cold weather or god forbid buying gold in bags of dirt. This controller looks like it may yield 10-15 grams.

Plus who doesn’t like taking things apart that you don’t have to put back together! Haha.

 

[leadnugget]

i have been collecting for about 15 years and have a full 5 gallon bucket.
for some reason people like to take their old electronics out to the desert,
shoot it and leave it out there. i used to shoot alot and started picking up the gold parts and chips.
the old penteum pro chips had a lot of gold in them.
many years ago i refined with aqua regia a little and made this .999 fine button.
260 grains.
if your doing it for money, just sell the parts at an auction site as scrap gold.
if you are tring to recover the gold i hope you have a lab with a hood vent, scrubber and a way to
deal with the toxic waste.
ar is no joke, one one whiff and your lungs will be trash.
sell it as scrap, its a lot of work and Hassle. really think about it.
oh and also you will probably end up on a government watch list if you start googling how to make the
chemicals you need for refining. HNO3 can make some interesting things.

 

[crashbandicoot]

Try the Iodine leaching method,no acids and it does work.Check out Moosescrappers videos for some methods that only use Muriatic acid,they work too.Lots of ways to do this without the Nitric,may be a little slower but lots safer too.I don,t really care if I,m on a watch list,probably on some already,only hazard to any Govt.investigators is they might die of boredom looking at my life!

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

I agree, AR is some nasty stuff. I’m mostly collecting stuff at this point but very well may set up to toll refine as I know a guy local to me.

It’s a hobby gig just like panning the creek. Easier to find gold in electronics than it is in the creek. At least here in Ohio.

Trick is finding the right scrap.

 

[russau]

The BEST gold I ever got was from pre-1966 telephone equipment. back then they used 24 K gold and it went on heavy !! The old phone relay's were the best ! Big globs of gold for contacts. I also got a lot of silver from wore out hi-power / high voltage switch gear. That was a once in a life time find !

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

Gotta love the old stuff! When gold was cheap! Bigger the glob, the betta the job.

 

[Capt Nemo]

Naval electronics are heavy on the gold. Just be careful with scrapping the power transistors, as they use amalgam to hold the silicon die down.

I go after gold plate on ceramics with HCl and bleach. Some of that plating can be thick. I have a bunch to do, but would rather save my P100 acid filters for Covid right now!

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

I’ll have to do some digging on the naval electronics. I’m pretty land locked so that’s a factor.

Anyone know a place to look for old testing equipment? Oscilloscopes or other vintage stuff? eBay is pretty hit or miss unfortunately.

On another note. Here’s 450 grams of heavily plated pins.

 

[DDancer]

I'll see your 450g and raise ya This was part of 51 lbs of material I recently sent in and comes in at about 2g a pound. Take's a lot of work and time but it pays well.

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

Hot damn! Nice pile!

You say send in? You send out to a refiner? I’m curious to know who you’d use and what toll costs are.

 

[DDancer]

Yes I use a refiner because I'm not going to get involved in all the equipment involved, or chem's, but I have to get a lot of material up before it can be accepted. Minimum of 40 lbs of clean high grade material (my material is mostly milspec), 200 lbs if your doing circuit board stuff to be profitable. Cost's varies and is taken out of the settlement~ Assay, processing, environmental, office fee's~ then there's their cut for metals, the refiner I'm using pays for and keeps this percentage on the following metals : AU 10%, AG 20%, PD 25% and CU 25%. That's pretty typical. I'm not going to say who I use because I feel its a good idea for anyone looking to do this to do the research. Its eye opening and good to know info. My out of pocket cost has been shipping but with larger quantities I could get reimbursed.

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

Thanks for all the info. I surly understand your not wanting to pass along a name. I doubt I’ll be amassing enough to meet the requirements anytime soon anyhow.

I enjoy just pottering away at it. I may set up and refine as I get the time. Looks like a fun new hobby as long as done carefully. I hope to meet up with a local guy to do some hands on learning. He’s got more than a decade in refining so I’m sure I can learn a thing or two.

 

[DDancer]

I find it a good way to pass time as well as make a buck in the urban mines Have fun.

 

[KevinInColorado]

I’ve done a bit of this using HCl (pool acid) which is cheap and works very well if one is patient.

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

Yes sir. HCL and a little peroxide. That’s my plan to start off. I’ll deal with refining the foils once I’m set up a bit better.

 

[rolandslone]

I do the silver plate. You have to have a lot of scrap. I normally buy the silver-plate flatware (cheap) or other silver plated items. things needed are battery charger, stainless steel butter knife, salt, Hydrogen Peroxide, 2 any type of glass ware (I use canning jars). Go to YouTube and type in Silver plate removal. There are all kinds of ways to strip the silver off. I did about 200 hundred give or take did get a little over 8 ounces of the silver plate and what else comes off of it. Smelting the powder I did get just at 2 ounces of silver. I'm retired and have plenty of time to do this. Plus the fact people see that silver is going up so kinda hard to get good deal on scrap silver-plated items. Oh yes muriatic acid. No harmful chemicals. Go to Youtube it will show how to do the process.

 

[firebird]

I do this with copper. Not as cool as gold but I can get up to $100 worth of copper a day from free stuff on Facebook/Craigslist. Getting that much gold daily is just simply impossible without getting scrap electronics by the ton.

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

The gold is fun but surly nothing wrong with copper. I have been stock piling copper for a while now. Probably several hundred pounds or so.

I love the gold prospecting but really it’s valuable, semi valuable metals overall. Heck I even have a nice stack of clean extruded aluminum piling up. Like money in the bank. But money the bank can’t steal and the gov has yet to tax to death.

 

[et1955]

You guys are really missing out on true urban prospecting, I find gold, silver jewelry on the bottom of hills here in the University District of Seattle after heavy rain storms and don't forget about dumpster diving, I found a 1867 gold franc coin in a garbage can, with a lot of other coins but it is now worth over 560$ also I will add that I have hundreds of IC chips from the late 1970's and they are so full of gold, believe it or not some of these memory chips I paid over a hundred dollars for a 128 Byte memory chip.