If the foam is heavy, judging by the color, it looks like there is a lot of extremely finely divided metals in it. Primarily lead, tin, aluminum, zinc, iron, and possibly even some traces of silver, copper and gold. There will also be small traces of palladium and polonium as well. Pretty much any metal that might be in those boards as well as dirt/rock/sand particles that get mixed in with the mix. Anything that is in the nanometer scale. The foaming is caused by the dish soap you add, plus the electrolyte from the capacitors in the boards. It's causing it to emulsify and froth. You might try dishwasher soap, as it does not foam nearly as much as regular dish soap. Look up froth flotation. It's been used to recover metals for quite a while. You should take the foam, and let it sit in a bucket and let it settle over time and smelt it. I'd be interested in what you'd get.
i wonder if an extra process can be added right after the crushing... some static electricity sort of thing that collects the plastics cause they have a lower electrical capacity (like how small pieces of paper will stick to plastic) or even a wheel with an induced magnetic field, cause even though they arent magnetic - copper and aluminum will respond to an induced charge because of lenz's law - how when generating electricity or propelling a motor there is resistance from the induction itself
Yes, those are older motherboards with BGA cards. The BGAs you tend to want to collect and process all by themselves. They have a lot of gold in them. The mid-grade boards can have relay switches in them, with thick copper coils and little contact buttons with silver or gold, sometimes just a layer, but sometimes solid.
Jason, I love the videos as always! But a friendly recommendation especially when it comes to the higher grade boards with chips etc. Either rerun the material and get it to about 200 mesh (incredibly fine) and you’ll be surprised to see upwards of 50% or more PM yields out of it. The tiny gold bonding wires are stuck in the plastic of the ic chips and majority of your gold will be there usually. Once it’s down to consistency of flour, you’ll actually be able to see beautiful lines of flour gold when running on the shaker table with lower flow rates etc. try it just once, trust me :)
I was thinking about this but you explained it nicely. If you turned the plastic to fuel, then you'd only have carbon and metals left, then you can easily perform a acid extraction.
I had been wondering about weighing wet. Your explanation satisfies me. A simple experiment where you weigh a sample wet, dry it in the oven, then weigh it dry and compare will shut down any trolls who can't let it go.
Love water shaker table. Some 70 yrs ago my dad took me through a beach sand mining concentrating and separating plant here in SE QLD, AUS. I remember that their table was separating all the individual minerals into separate buckets with the plain sands going to waste. Rutile, Zircon, Ilmenite, Monazite and others I cannot remember - all from the one table.
So, the sludge like material is the foam insulation glue they use on the boards. That white cream stuff you see on boards w/ batteries, wires, etc. And looks like glue but it's foamy. The stuff you got, put it in buckets to air out and settle. Once it's powder again, run a magnet through it. Once that's done, the rest of the process is either sifted through and roasted or sifted through and runned through a chemical process to sort out the metals and melted down later. And once the foamy stuff has been officially sorted out from all metals, it gets tossed in the trash because it's not biodegradable. As for the board info, you're just about spot on. As for dry or wet weight, do both and see the difference. I personally don't know, but that's how you settle an argument. Do both. 😉 As for heat sinks, they're best to be pulled off or taken off the board and just set aside for resale or melt. Steel and cast aluminum will definitely bust up your equipment and get stuff stuck into said equipment. Don't want/need that. Like hey, you wanna stick an engine block in there? Uh, no...! Why? Self explanatory. 😁😁😁🤣🤣🤣 Good job though! Love seeing you do this. 👏👏👏💙💙💙😁😁😁
I believe that the first TH-cam content creator that promotes the actual process of transacting in gold and silver will go viral. To completely change the mindset of the average American, they would need a reference point (price) for everyday objects. Ex. "Steam clean entire house 7 ozt silver" "Couch for sale 5 ozt silver" "Babysitting service 1/2 ozt per hour" Every silver / gold stacker should RIGHT NOW go list something they own for sale priced in silver or gold. EVERY TH-cam content producer should throw this idea into EVERY video they create, until it becomes the norm.
There are various defoaming agents as well as surface tension controllers used in farming! Your nearest Ag chemical supply might be a good place to look for solutions.
Some of the big Al heat sinks can be resold if you remove them intact, especially those with the steel latch bars and if they're branded with a product number. Some of them sell for dozens of dollars each! I sold 4 large anodized heat sinks for $25 each some years ago from a piece of broken lab equipment. That was 20x the value of the scrap Al weight!
Sure, but probably not worth the effort, if you have to sort drough the material, if you spot them randomly it is worth it but paying a worker to spot them is not, depending on the kind of boards you process.
In my experience, dry ore that has been sitting for a few days can be 0.5% water by weight. Wet ore that has been drained can tipically be just under 20% water by weight. Drained black sands concentrate can be in 7% or so. I'm gessing drained metal concentrate from a table can be 2 or 3% or so? Interesting experiment (and an easy one).
Ore also contains porous rock and sediments. This is mostly pure metal, which is effectively NON-porous in comparison. I am still curious to see a real test/example on this though, since there could be other contaminants in that slurry which could be an unknown variable that might change the outcome.
There are several types of defoaming solutions, some for ponds, some for pesticide sprays to put in spray tank, certain chemical type defoamers. Just make sure you find a good safe one, some require PPE equipment usage.
@@SkewToob, there is a lot of different types of defoaming solutions, I was just naming a few examples. If he can break the ionic bonds most of the heavy materials might fall out into solution. Or he can make a paddle wheel skimmer to help remove the foam.
That would be, I wonder how expensive and time consuming, it would be to do. Fascinating content. Reminds of some of those shows on the discovery channel about gold miners but better and there’s no drama lol
@@willw7743 thats what I was thinking LOL in the #1 bucket he might have $20 of copper (right now at $2.80 a pound clean) $8 in silver and $2 in gold (maybe) and $50k in equipment to do it, we need a bigger truck :) we stop at the step before this, I turn in about 1000 Lbs a month of high grade boards, 50 Lbs of Ram and 100 lbs of CPUs, we are happy enough with the outcome and equipment cost of a screw driver and hammer LOL
Foam? Good question. It looks a lot like the foam I have seen on the ocean beaches at times, and it was VERY oily and sticky . I think it may contain a lot of oils, surface coating materials from the boards, and such. If you think about it, fiberglass resin (Boards are fiberglass) is a petrochemical product. I know from my decades of electronics repair that some boards do feel greasy. Also one must take into account the electrolyte used in the capacitors. In some capacitors it felt "oily" when it leaked out. Possibly it is a chemical reaction to all the different materials being mixed together. Just guessing.
I would like to see you try a shower curtain thickness plastic it's weight should help with the bubbles. IDK but if the lighter plastic works until the bubbles get under it then to me it says you're on the right track just needs tweaking ie a ripple mat like the start of my sluice box. Love seeing what you are doing thanks for letting us come along As always good luck and God Bless you
Jason, you can try spraying the foam with a high alcohol content mister. Separate the foam first of course. That should dissolve a lot of the adhesive and epoxies that can cause a lot of the foaming. But I can promise there are some valuable metals caught up in that foam. Skim the foam into a separate bin, lightly mist with alcohol. Mix it up a little and do it again. You should end up with a thick sludge after a few repetitions. Let that dry out, break it up and run it through the smelter. I know you always wear a respirator, but WEAR A RESPIRATOR when cooking it. You should end up with some ash, maybe a few small metal beads, and a little “sand” afterwards. Run that over the table again and you’ll not get any foam, as well as a pretty decent metals return.
Brand: EcoClean Solutions Anti Foam Defoamer Concentrate works to prevent the formation of foam without disturbing the water chemistry or leaving behind an oily residue. Amazon Prime Excellent video and very interesting.
Generally, you don't want to grind up boards like this. What's your focus? Are you going after the copper or the PMs? These boards should be broken down more. At very least remove all the electrolytic and tantalum capacitors but if you can remove ferrous and all aluminum it will help. If PM recovery is priority then all the items rich in PMs should be removed and processed separately. What's left can be hammer milled and sorted on the shaker table for copper recovery. Some gold will be lost here as it's bonded to the epoxies and washed away in your #4. If you remove ICs, and transistors first you'll greatly reduce the gold loss in the end. Do you have plans to assay the four fractions to see where the PMs went? I think you'll find some gold in #3 and #4 Also, don't forget there will be plenty of silver in these boards locked up in solder and components Great videos, I'm sure you'll figure out the magic process, you certainly have the right tools to do it
Yes, those are low grade(no chips), medium grade(low concentration of chips) and mother boards(I see they are mixing PC and server motherboards(the ones with 2 processor slots) that are uasually 2 different grades).
First a quick overview of what is in a naked PC board before components are even placed on it. From the middle out a PCB is a series of thin layers of a special fiberglass-like material and epoxy. The PCB is built from the inside out in layers, each with copper traces or large ground planes (the layers where you see large portions of solid copper visible through the epoxy. Often, the first layers laid down are the ground and power planes. Most motherboards are made of between six and up to 8 or more such layers. On the final outer layers on both sides of the a solder mask is silkscreened on (simplifying this part). The board is then dipped into a bath of solder to coat all of the visible surface mount pads and through-hole components like large capacitors, etc. Here’s the next important thing that may be causing this this foam is next. A tacky form of flux is screened onto the two sides of the board. This is used to hold surface mounted components placed by a “robot”. Once this is done, the mother board is heated up to liquify the solder placed earlier. That’s a little long winded I know but few people really know just how much work goes into just building that mother board. When the motherboard is crushed all of those carefully laid chemistry are suddenly turned into mud and water added to them you will get chemical reactions. This includes gasses, adhesives released from the manufacturing process and who know what. The fact that after the tailings settle down, you essentially have made a concrete slurry. And I forgot to mention, to make electronics more “green”, water based solvents are incorporated into the production process whenever possible. Exposing those solvents to water again can’t be good. Assembled circuit boards are an amazing piece of engineering, they just aren’t designed to be disassembled by bludgeoning them into mud. My $0.02 keep or discard.
Cool video! I've seen a couple of other ones and like I particularly enjoy watching old electronics get crushed up and properly recycled instead of getting burned. Could the bubbling up come from chemical reactions between electrolytes in capacitors and pure metals from the rest of the components? Some sort of gas getting released when juice from crushed caps joins the party? I did not see any in the video but if a rogue coin battery or two on a few boards made it to the shredder that would add to the gas problem. If that happens lithium reacting with water will release a lot of hydrogen and steam. What the gross stuff that keeps the foam up I have no idea, maybe the products of the reactions precipitate from the water solution. Maybe it would be possible to mitigate this by adding some kind of anti-foaming agent to the water (idk if you'd need a lot that it changes density of the liquid enough to mess up the physics) That's my wild ass educated guess anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk lmao
This is just a theory about the foam I almost wonder if you could use some high proof alcohol in a spray bottle to break up the foam, my theory is alcohol drives off moisture and the foam is just bubbles but i have no real clue if it could work
The Foam. I have an idea it is a mixture of oils and liquids contained in the electronic capacitors: PCB powder, component adheasives (like the glue used in transformers to separate the plastic and paper sheets of the windings), many adheasive residues from insolating tapes, even some soldering flux, and rosins. I am sure amounts of all would be present in the mistery foam when analyzed for its PH and chemical makeup. As you encounter older E-Waste industry-resolved hazards of the past, they will find their way into your processing work environment. Modern samples will not contain substances like Pb 207.2 {lead} and asbestos, so proper PPE should be employed when the hammer mill is in operation and handling dry consentrates, as the dust could cause a number of health problems. Older e-waste LCD TVs and PC monitors that are black-lit with micro-floresant lights will all contain meurcy (a super small amount, but it would bond with gold in your recovery process, leaving the operator liable to disclose this contamination to customers and employees so proper handling of contaminated materials can be utilized). You could do a control presort, removing any of the elertolitic caps, and see if the foam is still resistant. Also, a detergent like Extra Strength Dawn might preswade the oils from the caps to bond with the deturgent instead of the PCB dust, leaving the dust in the water solution to precipitate out of the solution. The dawn will also help release the surface tension of the water in the system.
I've watched a few shaker table videos now. But I still don't 100% know how it works. If you have time could you do a basic video on table angles, water flow/ direction, show it with the shake off and on. Thanks.
I always check high-grade boards for the occasional ULTRA-HIGH GRADE board, where the traces are all gold-plated underneath the resin. Those will have 10 to up to 50x the gold recovery of a typical high-grade board, depending upon the thickness of the plating. Old scientific equipment often has these.
Collect the foam into a 5 gallon bucket and let it settle out. What I think it is, is the adhesive used within the board layers. I wonder if any metals stick to it and need to be rerun as a result. If you get anything to settle out in the bucket, it might give you a partial answer. Think of it as the "drost"? You skim off when casting. Just my thought.
There is a very simple way to answer that question on water weight...preweigh a beaker, put a known amount of the wet copper in it and stick it in the oven for 6 hours...reweigh. No more wondering.
I would guess that the foam is from the gell filled capacitors it's not mixing well with water and catching fine dirt maybe running water at a hotter temperature
@@DuncSargent I only cherry pick the good stuff and recover gold I've been just stock piling the boards for years my pole barn Is packed however it's getting harder and harder for me to get stuff these days and the stuff is being made cheaper with very little Precious metals being used
if you must use liquid soap, use dishwasher rinse aid as that does not foam, but bar soap also does not foam and will kill any soap bubbles instantly, in having bubbles you inadvertantly start bubble separating the waste products
I agree with you with the weighing of it wet/dry. But I think you should do a small video weighing it wet then drying it out and weighing it dry just to show people how small the difference is.
An object has 4 sides of surface and at a small size the ratio of surface to volume gets quite high. Also he was weighing plastic in other samples. How else do you think he was getting more than 100% recovery rates by several percent? On a 1kg sample you can easily add in 100gr of water and be off 10%
20:16 sorry to say, but skimming that junk it your best bet because then it is removed from the system. I recommend a simple kitchen strainer for ~$5 24:28 have you considered modifying a vortex dust seperator for sorting the metal & bplastic from the tailings?
Might be worth testing a 'wet' bucket. Dry it out and re-weight to know for sure, but I believe you're right about it not being a significant difference. Appreciate your content!
I would like to see what "sreetips" could process out of the #1 and #2 gold wise ..I think about 1 to 5 pounds ..it would make an interesting video for him
Try silicone defoamer. Anti foam additive for cutting fluids will work just fine. Silicone won't hurt seals or table rubber which makes it the best type for this kind of job
The foam could be worth processing again, but because you add soap and I saw a lat of caps on those boards, it's probably highly basic. My guess is that it'll contain mostly plastic, paint, and solder dust, but considering the cap juice can be quite sticky, it could well contain a decent amount of finer metal particles.
Foam could have silver and gold. That's a bit how froth flotation foam looks. Interesting! Foam if removed with revolving paddles in froth flotation cells.
That foam stuff looked like chocolate whipped cream!! Maybe you can try a carpet cleaning Defoamer. I used to have a carpet cleaning truck and I would sprinkle a little Defoamer in my dirty water tank to keep it from foaming up and and pushing the "tank full" cut off float up and shutting down my system when the tank is only a quarter full with water and the rest of it foam. And since you use a recycling system and use the same water you probably only need a little bit every time you change the water out.
It's the contents of the inside of the chips any of the powders and ceramics that surround the metals it's coming down there in that my buddy has the same problem but he made a board scraper that depopulates both sides of the boards and then they run the straight green board with copper in its own run and they run the rest separately
jason , are you only looking for the copper and gold from e waste? the list of metals and minerals used is impressive platinum palladium and many more exotic substances are in there. silver and lead will be there as well tin aluminum just off the top of my head and i am aware there are more,,, it has to be higher concentration/ tonne than mining. thanks for the videos....
While he is doing this for a customer all those extra metals will be caught in the #1 & #2 buckets. They will then be extracted in the refining process.
I would say if your goal is to smelt for an accurate weight and presmelt is just a round about figure then it does not matter if it is wet so that point becomes moot.
Since this is mostly experimental in nature. You should do a test. Weigh the bucket wet and then weigh the bucket dried off, and see what the difference is. Then you will know the difference between wet and dry and can quiet all the naysayers down. :) Good luck love the channel
on the wet v dry copper you are entirely right the copper is 99 percent of the weight if the water is drained off, if not it's over 95 percent of the weight
As much as I would like to agree with everyones assesment of the " foamy sludge" it is a by product of the mixture of oil and water. When run through your system with the surfactant the oil is broken down to a degree. The " spray " of water mixes it to a very fine combination of the two. Oil is denser than water but floats. Plastic is a petroleum product. thus making it more difficult. I am sure your filtering system is good to reduce the amount of particles that enter it but the oil/water/surfactant mixture still passes through. Constant recycling of said mixture will produce these results. And to further back this simple science claim you even stated in previous videos of the same shaker table the same setup, " there is a bit of oil that refuses to let the heavies sink. thats why the plastic sheet." I have no instant cure for this other than a complete purge of the system and possibly a second settling "tank" that will fill from a lower level therefore leaving said sludge in the first settling tank. I also believe that you can place a filter of some sort to further filter out the oil from the water. I'm just a simple Electrician and Gear head. When ya blow a head gasket? the water/oil mix turns to mud.
The wet vs dry weight isn't going to change your results. If they didn't see you weigh it, they wouldn't know the difference. Keep doing what you do. When they finish fighting over how it should be done, I'll get some popcorn and watch the pay per view episode! Good luck. 👍
Not sure about the phone I'm leaning towards maybe there's something water soluble on the board like a glue/paint. I don't know if foam remover for a hot tub would work that's my only thought
My favorite machine ! The metal muncher ! I have a question ... QUESTION : I have been wondering ... if lead ore has silver ? ( silver ore has lead ? ) at some point in the past lead was needed and it (for whatever reason) was not economically viable to smelt out the silver . say I had about a ton of lead , would it be worth checking it for silver? The lead is from everywhere, a couple of buckets worth was tire weights. Some roofing lead , sound dampener in amtrack floors , some ingots say pure lead . Mostly i was wondering about tire weights??? Any thoughts?
as for the wet vs dry thing. the material seemed to be pretty dry to me. I would think if you were running something hydroscopic then it would make a big difference.
Jason, just wondering, if I take the gold plated pins off the boards before running them thru the system, is it possible to cupel the pins to remove most of the base metals to recover the gold? On the foamy substance, might it be the glue between the layers of the boards?
the problem with extracting the gold is that the gold components are only tin/nickel wires plated with gold, it is so fine that the hammer mill would grind it off as dust and the shaker board would wash the gold straight straight into the number 4 tailings. the only accurate way to collect the gold is with acid using sreetips methods
Would there be any benefit to rerunning your #2 and #3, separately, on larger batches? Doesn't seem like there's much to save from the #3, but maybe that #2 could use a better separation of metal type and plastics removal. Edit: Hah, guess I should just finish watching the video before commenting.
1st off , I agree with you " the water is not much of an issue ". Guessing foam may be chemicals from the capacitors reacting with everything else ? Thanks again Oh what are doing running out of equipment - too many sales , not enough production ? ;)
Almost certainly. Those canister aluminum caps have lots of different chemical electrolytes in them. I pop them all off and burn them in a tube furnace made from a cast iron pipe. Many of the electrolytes are non-aqueous hydrocarbon-based compounds, and they burn like rocket fuel once super-heated! You can hear the caps pop and roar like little rocket engines as the stuff burns off.
Well that might be a video in the future. Before threw the system then wet weight then dry weight and if you can turn it into a bar with slag scimmed off weight
The water issue, if we had a ship worth of dirt containing water and we pay by the tonne for the dirt, we would end up out of pocket. Our assay dept weight, a sample from the ship, then dry it and work out how much dirt and water there is, we don't pay for the water :)
question. say you have ran everything through once and gotten out all the junk. can you run it a second time to further separate the metals? like pull out copper from silver?
In the previous video it was not just that the metal was damp. There was a puddle of water in it. That could easily be 2-3% water. Why not be accurate? Dry it. Or weigh wet then dry and find out for yourself. Besides, as a matter of professionalism, I think your clients (and future clients) would think better of your work if you weighed dry. It might get you some customers that are particular about that, and you would not lose any for doing it. Worth thinking about.
Ahoj Jason, this looks to be good for base metals recovery, not much for gold recovery. No idea, how this helps to recover gold from high grade boards. #1 is lots of base metals with a bit o gold, for gold recovery you want the oposite. I suspect, that burning #3 from highgrade could free some gold bondwires from plastic. May be, I am wrong, but that was my first idea as I saw the # 3 bucket filled with black plastic - let's burn it and smelt the ash...
At the end of all of the capacitors on the high grade board there is palladium some of them are pretty large considering how much palladium is worth. I would not want that together in with copper you can get so much more for it. What I used to do is I used to pull the capacitors from the board and the processors and heat sinks and then I process the boards.
Well.. obviously weighing wet slightly overestimates the amount of valuables. Properly dripped off through a strainer makes that almost irrelevant. I'd go with 2% here. Try it! This is for ballpark numbers anyway. Good enough in my opinion. You can suppress foam by adding silicone oil. Very effective for small scales, but I doubt it's viable for here. Probably have to go with it and change the water every now and then...
Gold plated parts are easily done with chemical methods. As the percentage is low, it seems to me the gold bearing elements could be efficiently processed separately.
That's the best way to do it. There is a TON of tin in E-waste, along with tungsten and lead... and that will all bind up the PMs unless it's separated first physically, them chemically. The single-stream method is to melt it all into a 'brass' bar, and then use electrochemistry to separate the metals.
Looking at the #4 from the low grade I'm wondering if that contains the ceramic dust from the mlcc and various smd components. If so there could be a decent amount of silver and palladium in there. Not sure the best way to get it though. Dissolving in nitric acid would work but would be very expensive. Perhaps smelting with lead as a collector metal and then cupelling, or copper and then pouring into an anode bar and then running through a copper elecro cell. The slimes collected there should tell you what you've got.
If the foam is heavy, judging by the color, it looks like there is a lot of extremely finely divided metals in it. Primarily lead, tin, aluminum, zinc, iron, and possibly even some traces of silver, copper and gold. There will also be small traces of palladium and polonium as well. Pretty much any metal that might be in those boards as well as dirt/rock/sand particles that get mixed in with the mix. Anything that is in the nanometer scale. The foaming is caused by the dish soap you add, plus the electrolyte from the capacitors in the boards. It's causing it to emulsify and froth. You might try dishwasher soap, as it does not foam nearly as much as regular dish soap. Look up froth flotation. It's been used to recover metals for quite a while. You should take the foam, and let it sit in a bucket and let it settle over time and smelt it. I'd be interested in what you'd get.
Or use jet dry, no sudsing
I use laundry detergent, dish soap makes suds
He was saying he would go through gallons of dish soap in that recirculating system so that's why he uses the sheet.
i wonder if an extra process can be added right after the crushing... some static electricity sort of thing that collects the plastics cause they have a lower electrical capacity (like how small pieces of paper will stick to plastic) or even a wheel with an induced magnetic field, cause even though they arent magnetic - copper and aluminum will respond to an induced charge because of lenz's law - how when generating electricity or propelling a motor there is resistance from the induction itself
@Nimble
It's not sludge it's foam insulation glue.
One of these days I really wanna see you empty the sludge tank and run it back through the shake table to see what it picks up.
Yes, those are older motherboards with BGA cards. The BGAs you tend to want to collect and process all by themselves. They have a lot of gold in them.
The mid-grade boards can have relay switches in them, with thick copper coils and little contact buttons with silver or gold, sometimes just a layer, but sometimes solid.
Jason, I love the videos as always! But a friendly recommendation especially when it comes to the higher grade boards with chips etc.
Either rerun the material and get it to about 200 mesh (incredibly fine) and you’ll be surprised to see upwards of 50% or more PM yields out of it. The tiny gold bonding wires are stuck in the plastic of the ic chips and majority of your gold will be there usually. Once it’s down to consistency of flour, you’ll actually be able to see beautiful lines of flour gold when running on the shaker table with lower flow rates etc. try it just once, trust me :)
I was thinking about this but you explained it nicely. If you turned the plastic to fuel, then you'd only have carbon and metals left, then you can easily perform a acid extraction.
I had been wondering about weighing wet. Your explanation satisfies me. A simple experiment where you weigh a sample wet, dry it in the oven, then weigh it dry and compare will shut down any trolls who can't let it go.
Love water shaker table. Some 70 yrs ago my dad took me through a beach sand mining concentrating and separating plant here in SE QLD, AUS. I remember that their table was separating all the individual minerals into separate buckets with the plain sands going to waste. Rutile, Zircon, Ilmenite, Monazite and others I cannot remember - all from the one table.
So, the sludge like material is the foam insulation glue they use on the boards. That white cream stuff you see on boards w/ batteries, wires, etc. And looks like glue but it's foamy. The stuff you got, put it in buckets to air out and settle. Once it's powder again, run a magnet through it. Once that's done, the rest of the process is either sifted through and roasted or sifted through and runned through a chemical process to sort out the metals and melted down later. And once the foamy stuff has been officially sorted out from all metals, it gets tossed in the trash because it's not biodegradable.
As for the board info, you're just about spot on. As for dry or wet weight, do both and see the difference. I personally don't know, but that's how you settle an argument. Do both. 😉 As for heat sinks, they're best to be pulled off or taken off the board and just set aside for resale or melt. Steel and cast aluminum will definitely bust up your equipment and get stuff stuck into said equipment. Don't want/need that. Like hey, you wanna stick an engine block in there? Uh, no...! Why? Self explanatory. 😁😁😁🤣🤣🤣
Good job though! Love seeing you do this. 👏👏👏💙💙💙😁😁😁
I believe that the first TH-cam content creator that promotes the actual process of transacting in gold and silver will go viral.
To completely change the mindset of the average American, they would need a reference point (price) for everyday objects.
Ex. "Steam clean entire house 7 ozt silver" "Couch for sale 5 ozt silver" "Babysitting service 1/2 ozt per hour"
Every silver / gold stacker should RIGHT NOW go list something they own for sale priced in silver or gold.
EVERY TH-cam content producer should throw this idea into EVERY video they create, until it becomes the norm.
@3:11 - Whoever maintains those blades is going to love you. Fiberglass is no joke on blades and bits.
There are various defoaming agents as well as surface tension controllers used in farming!
Your nearest Ag chemical supply might be a good place to look for solutions.
Maybe you could mix the tailings with aircrete and make construction blocks out of the waste??
Some of the big Al heat sinks can be resold if you remove them intact, especially those with the steel latch bars and if they're branded with a product number. Some of them sell for dozens of dollars each!
I sold 4 large anodized heat sinks for $25 each some years ago from a piece of broken lab equipment. That was 20x the value of the scrap Al weight!
Sure, but probably not worth the effort, if you have to sort drough the material, if you spot them randomly it is worth it but paying a worker to spot them is not, depending on the kind of boards you process.
In my experience, dry ore that has been sitting for a few days can be 0.5% water by weight. Wet ore that has been drained can tipically be just under 20% water by weight. Drained black sands concentrate can be in 7% or so. I'm gessing drained metal concentrate from a table can be 2 or 3% or so? Interesting experiment (and an easy one).
Ore also contains porous rock and sediments.
This is mostly pure metal, which is effectively NON-porous in comparison.
I am still curious to see a real test/example on this though, since there could be other contaminants in that slurry which could be an unknown variable that might change the outcome.
There are several types of defoaming solutions, some for ponds, some for pesticide sprays to put in spray tank, certain chemical type defoamers. Just make sure you find a good safe one, some require PPE equipment usage.
I don't know if it would work in this application, but hot tub defoamer is a thing. I assume it's pretty safe.
@@SkewToob, there is a lot of different types of defoaming solutions, I was just naming a few examples. If he can break the ionic bonds most of the heavy materials might fall out into solution.
Or he can make a paddle wheel skimmer to help remove the foam.
Can you do video about extracting gold and other precioues metal from #1 and #2 container? It would be very interesting in these quantity!
That would be, I wonder how expensive and time consuming, it would be to do.
Fascinating content. Reminds of some of those shows on the discovery channel about gold miners but better and there’s no drama lol
@@willw7743 thats what I was thinking LOL
in the #1 bucket he might have $20 of copper (right now at $2.80 a pound clean)
$8 in silver and $2 in gold (maybe)
and $50k in equipment to do it, we need a bigger truck :)
we stop at the step before this, I turn in about 1000 Lbs a month of high grade boards, 50 Lbs of Ram and 100 lbs of CPUs, we are happy enough with the outcome and equipment cost of a screw driver and hammer LOL
Thank You for finally dealing with the wet weight issue.
Foam? Good question. It looks a lot like the foam I have seen on the ocean beaches at times, and it was VERY oily and sticky . I think it may contain a lot of oils, surface coating materials from the boards, and such. If you think about it, fiberglass resin (Boards are fiberglass) is a petrochemical product. I know from my decades of electronics repair that some boards do feel greasy. Also one must take into account the electrolyte used in the capacitors. In some capacitors it felt "oily" when it leaked out. Possibly it is a chemical reaction to all the different materials being mixed together. Just guessing.
I would like to see you try a shower curtain thickness plastic it's weight should help with the bubbles. IDK but if the lighter plastic works until the bubbles get under it then to me it says you're on the right track just needs tweaking ie a ripple mat like the start of my sluice box. Love seeing what you are doing thanks for letting us come along
As always good luck and God Bless you
Jason, you can try spraying the foam with a high alcohol content mister. Separate the foam first of course. That should dissolve a lot of the adhesive and epoxies that can cause a lot of the foaming. But I can promise there are some valuable metals caught up in that foam.
Skim the foam into a separate bin, lightly mist with alcohol. Mix it up a little and do it again. You should end up with a thick sludge after a few repetitions. Let that dry out, break it up and run it through the smelter. I know you always wear a respirator, but WEAR A RESPIRATOR when cooking it. You should end up with some ash, maybe a few small metal beads, and a little “sand” afterwards. Run that over the table again and you’ll not get any foam, as well as a pretty decent metals return.
Brand: EcoClean Solutions Anti Foam Defoamer Concentrate works to prevent the formation of foam without disturbing the water chemistry or leaving behind an oily residue. Amazon Prime
Excellent video and very interesting.
Generally, you don't want to grind up boards like this. What's your focus? Are you going after the copper or the PMs? These boards should be broken down more. At very least remove all the electrolytic and tantalum capacitors but if you can remove ferrous and all aluminum it will help. If PM recovery is priority then all the items rich in PMs should be removed and processed separately. What's left can be hammer milled and sorted on the shaker table for copper recovery. Some gold will be lost here as it's bonded to the epoxies and washed away in your #4. If you remove ICs, and transistors first you'll greatly reduce the gold loss in the end.
Do you have plans to assay the four fractions to see where the PMs went? I think you'll find some gold in #3 and #4
Also, don't forget there will be plenty of silver in these boards locked up in solder and components
Great videos, I'm sure you'll figure out the magic process, you certainly have the right tools to do it
Yes, those are low grade(no chips), medium grade(low concentration of chips) and mother boards(I see they are mixing PC and server motherboards(the ones with 2 processor slots) that are uasually 2 different grades).
First a quick overview of what is in a naked PC board before components are even placed on it. From the middle out a PCB is a series of thin layers of a special fiberglass-like material and epoxy. The PCB is built from the inside out in layers, each with copper traces or large ground planes (the layers where you see large portions of solid copper visible through the epoxy. Often, the first layers laid down are the ground and power planes. Most motherboards are made of between six and up to 8 or more such layers. On the final outer layers on both sides of the a solder mask is silkscreened on (simplifying this part). The board is then dipped into a bath of solder to coat all of the visible surface mount pads and through-hole components like large capacitors, etc. Here’s the next important thing that may be causing this this foam is next. A tacky form of flux is screened onto the two sides of the board. This is used to hold surface mounted components placed by a “robot”. Once this is done, the mother board is heated up to liquify the solder placed earlier. That’s a little long winded I know but few people really know just how much work goes into just building that mother board. When the motherboard is crushed all of those carefully laid chemistry are suddenly turned into mud and water added to them you will get chemical reactions. This includes gasses, adhesives released from the manufacturing process and who know what. The fact that after the tailings settle down, you essentially have made a concrete slurry. And I forgot to mention, to make electronics more “green”, water based solvents are incorporated into the production process whenever possible. Exposing those solvents to water again can’t be good. Assembled circuit boards are an amazing piece of engineering, they just aren’t designed to be disassembled by bludgeoning them into mud. My $0.02 keep or discard.
Cool video! I've seen a couple of other ones and like I particularly enjoy watching old electronics get crushed up and properly recycled instead of getting burned.
Could the bubbling up come from chemical reactions between electrolytes in capacitors and pure metals from the rest of the components? Some sort of gas getting released when juice from crushed caps joins the party?
I did not see any in the video but if a rogue coin battery or two on a few boards made it to the shredder that would add to the gas problem. If that happens lithium reacting with water will release a lot of hydrogen and steam.
What the gross stuff that keeps the foam up I have no idea, maybe the products of the reactions precipitate from the water solution.
Maybe it would be possible to mitigate this by adding some kind of anti-foaming agent to the water (idk if you'd need a lot that it changes density of the liquid enough to mess up the physics)
That's my wild ass educated guess anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk lmao
This is just a theory about the foam I almost wonder if you could use some high proof alcohol in a spray bottle to break up the foam, my theory is alcohol drives off moisture and the foam is just bubbles but i have no real clue if it could work
The Foam. I have an idea it is a mixture of oils and liquids contained in the electronic capacitors: PCB powder, component adheasives (like the glue used in transformers to separate the plastic and paper sheets of the windings), many adheasive residues from insolating tapes, even some soldering flux, and rosins. I am sure amounts of all would be present in the mistery foam when analyzed for its PH and chemical makeup. As you encounter older E-Waste industry-resolved hazards of the past, they will find their way into your processing work environment. Modern samples will not contain substances like Pb 207.2 {lead} and asbestos, so proper PPE should be employed when the hammer mill is in operation and handling dry consentrates, as the dust could cause a number of health problems. Older e-waste LCD TVs and PC monitors that are black-lit with micro-floresant lights will all contain meurcy (a super small amount, but it would bond with gold in your recovery process, leaving the operator liable to disclose this contamination to customers and employees so proper handling of contaminated materials can be utilized). You could do a control presort, removing any of the elertolitic caps, and see if the foam is still resistant. Also, a detergent like Extra Strength Dawn might preswade the oils from the caps to bond with the deturgent instead of the PCB dust, leaving the dust in the water solution to precipitate out of the solution. The dawn will also help release the surface tension of the water in the system.
I've watched a few shaker table videos now. But I still don't 100% know how it works.
If you have time could you do a basic video on table angles, water flow/ direction, show it with the shake off and on.
Thanks.
Maybe the foam is the dish wash detergent that you used for your previous experiment with the wires and it remained in the settling pond.
I was wondering about weighing wet myself. Thanks for taking a minute to address it.
I always check high-grade boards for the occasional ULTRA-HIGH GRADE board, where the traces are all gold-plated underneath the resin. Those will have 10 to up to 50x the gold recovery of a typical high-grade board, depending upon the thickness of the plating. Old scientific equipment often has these.
Collect the foam into a 5 gallon bucket and let it settle out. What I think it is, is the adhesive used within the board layers. I wonder if any metals stick to it and need to be rerun as a result. If you get anything to settle out in the bucket, it might give you a partial answer. Think of it as the "drost"? You skim off when casting. Just my thought.
You could try agriculture defoamer for your foam issues. We use it at the golf course when mixing chems. Does a great job keeping the foam down.
There is a very simple way to answer that question on water weight...preweigh a beaker, put a known amount of the wet copper in it and stick it in the oven for 6 hours...reweigh. No more wondering.
or call it less than 5% of the total and probably less than materials not recovered...
I enjoy this channel. No BS, lots of information.
I wonder what’s the PH level of the water after running 🤔
I would guess that the foam is from the gell filled capacitors it's not mixing well with water and catching fine dirt maybe running water at a hotter temperature
I agree. Have you ever tried cooking/"coke-ing" the boards first to burn off the volatiles?
@@DuncSargent I only cherry pick the good stuff and recover gold I've been just stock piling the boards for years my pole barn Is packed however it's getting harder and harder for me to get stuff these days and the stuff is being made cheaper with very little Precious metals being used
if you must use liquid soap, use dishwasher rinse aid as that does not foam, but bar soap also does not foam and will kill any soap bubbles instantly, in having bubbles you inadvertantly start bubble separating the waste products
I agree with you with the weighing of it wet/dry. But I think you should do a small video weighing it wet then drying it out and weighing it dry just to show people how small the difference is.
An object has 4 sides of surface and at a small size the ratio of surface to volume gets quite high. Also he was weighing plastic in other samples. How else do you think he was getting more than 100% recovery rates by several percent? On a 1kg sample you can easily add in 100gr of water and be off 10%
20:16 sorry to say, but skimming that junk it your best bet because then it is removed from the system.
I recommend a simple kitchen strainer for ~$5
24:28 have you considered modifying a vortex dust seperator for sorting the metal & bplastic from the tailings?
Would love to see you run the number three on one of these tests just to see how much copper is actually in it
Might be worth testing a 'wet' bucket. Dry it out and re-weight to know for sure, but I believe you're right about it not being a significant difference. Appreciate your content!
I would like to see what "sreetips" could process out of the #1 and #2 gold wise ..I think about 1 to 5 pounds ..it would make an interesting video for him
Try silicone defoamer. Anti foam additive for cutting fluids will work just fine. Silicone won't hurt seals or table rubber which makes it the best type for this kind of job
The foam could be worth processing again, but because you add soap and I saw a lat of caps on those boards, it's probably highly basic.
My guess is that it'll contain mostly plastic, paint, and solder dust, but considering the cap juice can be quite sticky, it could well contain a decent amount of finer metal particles.
Foam could have silver and gold. That's a bit how froth flotation foam looks. Interesting! Foam if removed with revolving paddles in froth flotation cells.
@mbmmllc You forgot to put in the link for the sawmill/wood channel... I wood certainly be interested to check it out...
th-cam.com/users/sjforestproducts
I did forget! Thanks for the reminder!
That foam stuff looked like chocolate whipped cream!! Maybe you can try a carpet cleaning Defoamer. I used to have a carpet cleaning truck and I would sprinkle a little Defoamer in my dirty water tank to keep it from foaming up and and pushing the "tank full" cut off float up and shutting down my system when the tank is only a quarter full with water and the rest of it foam. And since you use a recycling system and use the same water you probably only need a little bit every time you change the water out.
Nice work brother! Thanks
You are a great American. Keep up the fantastic work.
thats amazing realy.
36, 34 and 41% great.
well the stuff you asked is a mixture of all plastics, foams, some chemical elements and filaments used.
It's the contents of the inside of the chips any of the powders and ceramics that surround the metals it's coming down there in that my buddy has the same problem but he made a board scraper that depopulates both sides of the boards and then they run the straight green board with copper in its own run and they run the rest separately
I would love to see the pyramids that come off of the cone mold from these things, that would be awesome!
I never complain I love learning this stuff.
I would definitely check that foam for lead and zinc as Kevin mentioned.
jason , are you only looking for the copper and gold from e waste? the list of metals and minerals used is impressive platinum palladium and many more exotic substances are in there. silver and lead will be there as well tin aluminum just off the top of my head and i am aware there are more,,, it has to be higher concentration/ tonne than mining. thanks for the videos....
While he is doing this for a customer all those extra metals will be caught in the #1 & #2 buckets. They will then be extracted in the refining process.
There's also tantalum, rhodium, rhenium, cobalt, nickel, chromium, molybdenum, and then don't forget the rare earths in the doped silicon chips.
@@Alondro77 i knew someone would fill in the list for me ;] the price on some of it is shocking
@@patmccrady6063 depends on the mineral or ore and its density....lighter less dense material whatever it is or its value will be further down the #'s
I would say if your goal is to smelt for an accurate weight and presmelt is just a round about figure then it does not matter if it is wet so that point becomes moot.
I think whoever said the water was weighing copper down needs to check their synapses.
At what point does the pond need to be emptied, scoured and refilled with fresh? Has a saturation point been reached?
Since this is mostly experimental in nature. You should do a test. Weigh the bucket wet and then weigh the bucket dried off, and see what the difference is. Then you will know the difference between wet and dry and can quiet all the naysayers down. :) Good luck love the channel
on the wet v dry copper you are entirely right the copper is 99 percent of the weight if the water is drained off, if not it's over 95 percent of the weight
As much as I would like to agree with everyones assesment of the " foamy sludge" it is a by product of the mixture of oil and water. When run through your system with the surfactant the oil is broken down to a degree. The " spray " of water mixes it to a very fine combination of the two. Oil is denser than water but floats. Plastic is a petroleum product. thus making it more difficult. I am sure your filtering system is good to reduce the amount of particles that enter it but the oil/water/surfactant mixture still passes through. Constant recycling of said mixture will produce these results. And to further back this simple science claim you even stated in previous videos of the same shaker table the same setup, " there is a bit of oil that refuses to let the heavies sink. thats why the plastic sheet."
I have no instant cure for this other than a complete purge of the system and possibly a second settling "tank" that will fill from a lower level therefore leaving said sludge in the first settling tank. I also believe that you can place a filter of some sort to further filter out the oil from the water.
I'm just a simple Electrician and Gear head. When ya blow a head gasket? the water/oil mix turns to mud.
The wet vs dry weight isn't going to change your results. If they didn't see you weigh it, they wouldn't know the difference. Keep doing what you do. When they finish fighting over how it should be done, I'll get some popcorn and watch the pay per view episode! Good luck. 👍
Put rinse aid in your water. It will break the surface tension. It might make bubbles, but they should be clean.
Great video Jason. The minuscule amount of water is of little weight concern.
Don’t know if it would work but there is some stuff you put in hot tubs that stops foam
Great video Jason. Thanks for sharing. 🍻👍
Not sure about the phone I'm leaning towards maybe there's something water soluble on the board like a glue/paint. I don't know if foam remover for a hot tub would work that's my only thought
My favorite machine ! The metal muncher !
I have a question ... QUESTION :
I have been wondering ... if lead ore has silver ? ( silver ore has lead ? ) at some point in the past lead was needed and it
(for whatever reason) was not economically viable to smelt out the silver . say I had about a ton of lead , would it be worth checking it for silver?
The lead is from everywhere, a couple of buckets worth was tire weights. Some roofing lead , sound dampener in amtrack floors , some ingots say pure lead . Mostly i was wondering about tire weights??? Any thoughts?
as for the wet vs dry thing. the material seemed to be pretty dry to me. I would think if you were running something hydroscopic then it would make a big difference.
Do you collect the rare earth metals out of them as well. The older stuff has a lot of them
Jason, just wondering, if I take the gold plated pins off the boards before running them thru the system, is it possible to cupel the pins to remove most of the base metals to recover the gold? On the foamy substance, might it be the glue between the layers of the boards?
the problem with extracting the gold is that the gold components are only tin/nickel wires plated with gold, it is so fine that the hammer mill would grind it off as dust and the shaker board would wash the gold straight straight into the number 4 tailings. the only accurate way to collect the gold is with acid using sreetips methods
Since you recycle your water, could you use a surfactant instead of or in conjunction with the plastic?
Would there be any benefit to rerunning your #2 and #3, separately, on larger batches? Doesn't seem like there's much to save from the #3, but maybe that #2 could use a better separation of metal type and plastics removal.
Edit: Hah, guess I should just finish watching the video before commenting.
Could you please share a link to the wood/sawmill channel 🪵
It's in the description.
@@snarky_user how high are you
th-cam.com/users/sjforestproducts
@@4of20 not at all. It's literally in the description page, with the channel avatar.
@@mbmmllc Good luck. 👍
1st off , I agree with you " the water is not much of an issue ".
Guessing foam may be chemicals from the capacitors reacting with everything else ?
Thanks again
Oh what are doing running out of equipment - too many sales , not enough production ? ;)
You might be able to add a pluronic antifoam to knock down the fluff in the bottom basin.
What about the stuff you put in a hottub to stop from foaming?
This is just a guess but I think the foam is the electrolytics from the capacitors reacting with the water.
Almost certainly. Those canister aluminum caps have lots of different chemical electrolytes in them. I pop them all off and burn them in a tube furnace made from a cast iron pipe. Many of the electrolytes are non-aqueous hydrocarbon-based compounds, and they burn like rocket fuel once super-heated! You can hear the caps pop and roar like little rocket engines as the stuff burns off.
@@Alondro77 I bet there are silly regulations about disposing of the waste.
Well that might be a video in the future. Before threw the system then wet weight then dry weight and if you can turn it into a bar with slag scimmed off weight
Question: Is it cheaper to filter out 10% aluminum out of 90% copper or 90% aluminum with 10% copper?
Is the foam just flux and the part of the solder mask that's water soluble, or at least isn't soluble but is getting sanded off by the process?
I saw a lot of electrolytic capacitors, I am wondering if the foam is forming from the electrolyte.
Do you find that epoxy covered capacitors like tantalum capacitors get broken up enough to release the tantalum efficiently?
The water issue, if we had a ship worth of dirt containing water and we pay by the tonne for the dirt, we would end up out of pocket. Our assay dept weight, a sample from the ship, then dry it and work out how much dirt and water there is, we don't pay for the water :)
question. say you have ran everything through once and gotten out all the junk. can you run it a second time to further separate the metals? like pull out copper from silver?
How does the customer process the materials, after you are done with them.
Water tension will fill all the cracks and add to your weight. 100mm cube of water will weigh 1kg so it wont look much but can quickly add weight.
In the previous video it was not just that the metal was damp. There was a puddle of water in it. That could easily be 2-3% water. Why not be accurate? Dry it. Or weigh wet then dry and find out for yourself.
Besides, as a matter of professionalism, I think your clients (and future clients) would think better of your work if you weighed dry. It might get you some customers that are particular about that, and you would not lose any for doing it. Worth thinking about.
Juicing server boards! Awesome
Try a pool flocking agent to drop it out of the water and to the bottom of your container there may be heavy metals in the foam
Seemed I was always trying to get some powder to dissolve into the spray tank and not cause any foam while I was adding the water and agitating things
Ahoj Jason, this looks to be good for base metals recovery, not much for gold recovery. No idea, how this helps to recover gold from high grade boards. #1 is lots of base metals with a bit o gold, for gold recovery you want the oposite. I suspect, that burning #3 from highgrade could free some gold bondwires from plastic. May be, I am wrong, but that was my first idea as I saw the # 3 bucket filled with black plastic - let's burn it and smelt the ash...
At the end of all of the capacitors on the high grade board there is palladium some of them are pretty large considering how much palladium is worth. I would not want that together in with copper you can get so much more for it. What I used to do is I used to pull the capacitors from the board and the processors and heat sinks and then I process the boards.
After removing everything, how did you process the boards?
You need to look into thermo-roto-screeners, man. You can strip all those boards with 1/3 the work and get more refined secondary material.
Well.. obviously weighing wet slightly overestimates the amount of valuables. Properly dripped off through a strainer makes that almost irrelevant. I'd go with 2% here. Try it!
This is for ballpark numbers anyway. Good enough in my opinion.
You can suppress foam by adding silicone oil. Very effective for small scales, but I doubt it's viable for here. Probably have to go with it and change the water every now and then...
Some of those capacitors might have oil in them I wonder if that would affect recovery
It would be interesting to see the density of the #1, #2, and #3. Pretty easy to measure volume in water, and you already have weight.
Gold plated parts are easily done with chemical methods. As the percentage is low, it seems to me the gold bearing elements could be efficiently processed separately.
That's the best way to do it. There is a TON of tin in E-waste, along with tungsten and lead... and that will all bind up the PMs unless it's separated first physically, them chemically.
The single-stream method is to melt it all into a 'brass' bar, and then use electrochemistry to separate the metals.
Looking at the #4 from the low grade I'm wondering if that contains the ceramic dust from the mlcc and various smd components. If so there could be a decent amount of silver and palladium in there. Not sure the best way to get it though. Dissolving in nitric acid would work but would be very expensive. Perhaps smelting with lead as a collector metal and then cupelling, or copper and then pouring into an anode bar and then running through a copper elecro cell. The slimes collected there should tell you what you've got.