Now that you have a few old computers collected up, just go ahead and start taking them apart by opening them up and looking at all the stuff inside,,
Lets look at the graphics card and audio card.. you might notice the end that plugs into your motherboard have a bunch of little fingers on it , beleive it or not they are gold.. there is gold in those fingers,, so what i do is cut the row of fingers off of the cards .. 1. that makes it a little easier to see the gold 2. thats what i mostly collect from the P.C.
I also grab the processor chips out of the motherboard , You know the little thing that has the Intel or AMD logo on it.. It has gold in it as well .What i am telling you now is just a quick way to see what you are doing here . Next i get 2 buckets one a little smaller than the other one,, i take the smaller bucket and drill some small holes in the bottom sort of like a strainer , this is where i put all of my cut off fingers and processors . in my bigger bucket i put a mix of Muriatic acid and peroxide,,This is a 2 to 1 mix, 2parts muriatic to 1 part peroxide ---example,, 1 cup of muriatic is half a cup of peroxide,,got it ? now take the smaller bucket with all of your parts and submerge into the larger bucket. i always keep my buckets tipped to the side so i can agitate the parts in the mix.. it takes a little time to do this process .. it is called the poor mans aqua regia.. while your parts are soaking in the acid you want to constantly agitate the parts kinda like a washing machine does clothes,, back and forth. after a little bit you will start to see the flakes of gold in the bottom bucket. after you feel they have soaked long enough ,trust me you will know when this is . just take a spray bottle and spray all of your parts clean of the gold flakes and rinse them all into the larger bucket .this mix is water soluable, so just rinsing the mix off with a spray bottle is safe, it is a 4to1 ratio on the dilution of the acid.but remeber this has now got alot of metals dissolved in it,., so please for the sake of our EARTH do not dispose of in the storm water sewers.. there will be alot of copper in this acid,, you will see that it turns green almost instantly.. the purpose of this process is to dissolve all the base metals that had the gold plating on it. thus leaving the gold floating around.. so the next step is to filter the gold from the acid... I like to use large coffee filters and a strainer,, preferably plastic since we are working with metal dissolving acids...Pour off the acid in to a safe container.. I like the Big pickle jars for this. once you have the gold in the filter you want to rinse it clean with you spray bottle of clean water.. rinse it back into a small bucket . just rinse it about five times from the bucket to the coffee filters ,, i mean repeat the rinse 5 times,, sorry.. every time you put the gold on the coffee filters you notice the first rinse turned the filters greenish color where the gold touched it. thus the reason for 5 rinses you should basically have no discoloration of the filter,, then you know you have gotten it good and clean and ready for the next step.
