Refining Gold

Leave refining to the pros.

there is a fun way to gold" dig " learn to recognize gold plate on circuit boards and computer cpu.older ones have more,
edge connectors look very golden! watch out for( lead )where gloves,glasses, be careful,have fun, sell bulk on ebay Really not much gold there but it doesn't seem to matter high prices for say 10 ,,20 lbs lots

Tokenmast brings up good point, as did all others that it is a bad idea....

But the old keyboards. O.K., the dirty jobs guy (this is my specialty, worthless information, lol)....

He did a show in a full scale factory recycling plant, which is set up very organized which may surprise some. Each item for example that is obsolete and discarded, is organized in large containers. They pulled out some old monitors and televisions, and the worker showed Mike the little tricks of the trade to break one of these down, and place the recyclable items into other sections. Some of the larger scrap metal gets placed on a treadmill, which runs the parts through a machine which grinds it down into much smaller chunks of metal. Like metal topsoil kinda, lol. I imagine it gets melted down and sent on its way to make new things....

Well, I imagine they probably collect much gold and silver as well, from many of the discarded old electronics....

Like anything, to do it on a big scale you would have so much overhead in it, and it would be hard to turn a profit. And it is hard back breaking work, until you learn some of those crow bar tricks for removing those harder to break down pieces and have a place to recycle your finds, even though on a smaller scale, home garage perhaps would work just fine....

Funny, those computer monitors had Mike struggling and he was frustrated. The guy who does it for a living, could break one down blind folded....

In order to do the recycling on scale, you need some big contacts in the industry. For example:

My computer store friend was selling a relatively new HP inkjet for $20, just a little more than most places got for the transformer. He got them from redemtech for $8 and sold dozens of the. They had 20,000 from an insurance company that replaced their whole system's.

Once, he sent his wife to pick up a $5 box of wires and a few other things he bought. She called to tell him he'd need a truck, not a minivan, for two bins. The wires were in a Gaylord container, over a half ton of them, and the rest of the stuff filled another one. We unpacked some of it, and there were some little components on plastic rolls like TP. Close to 200 of them, selling for 30 bucks a pop on ebay.

They got good prices for tested computers, but there were a few that didn't fit their category breakdowns, so they were "misc" for $1. He sold dozens of them for $100 and up.

His best buy was two $5 computers. They had some weird card he couldn't even test. He sold these $5000 new cards "used as is" for over $1500 each on ebay, and got good FB!