hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining and metals and this stuff here is ground up
printed circuit boards out of all computers and electronics it's mostly copper with some other
industrial metals in it and a little bit of gold and silver so what i want to do on today's video
is do some experimenting try and get this stuff melted down into a product either a block or a bar
something like this then we can then use some further chemistry and electricity
to electro-win the copper get the precious metals down on the bottom or we can then refine them to
a precious metal product and then sell the other industrial base metals so let's get
the furnace fired up here and see if we can get this stuff refined down into something usable
so i wanted to give you a closer look at this stuff and i just did a video here not
too long ago a couple weeks ago it shows how i got this stuff and i'll put a card or a little
link to it up here in the upper corner but this stuff is just all the metallic fraction
from ground up circuit boards and there's a lot of copper in here this stuff's about 85 percent
copper there's a little bit of lead there's a little bit of tin there's some aluminum there's
some steel and there's a little bit of gold and a little bit of silver but the ultimate goal
is to pour bars that are mostly copper like 98 percent copper with a little bit of precious
metals in them that we can then hang in a solution of copper sulfate electro win
the copper away into pure copper bars the precious metals will fall down to the bottom of the tub
and then we can do some further chemistry to refine those into precious metals but our first
goal is we got to get rid of all this junk there's iron in here we don't want there's zinc in here we
don't want there's aluminum in here we don't want so we're going to use some fancy chemistry and
really high temperatures to make that happen so the first thing we got to do is we had to go over
our metal reactivity series and this is abbreviated you can look for a full list online
but basically the idea here is that there are less reactive elements at the top
and more reactive elements at the bottom now most of these metals we're going to encounter
in our ground up circuit boards and these are the three that we really want we want the gold silver
and copper in the finished product in our bar that we can then electro in the copper away and
get our gold and silver we've got to get rid of all this other trash but there's still a lot of
value down here in some of these base metals so even though we're going to quote unquote
get rid of them we're still going to save them and we're going to try and recover them after
we get these in there in their final bar phase the lead tin and nickel are probably the three
that we can deal with iron zinc and aluminum there's probably not enough in there and
they're not worth enough to want to go after and what we're going to do is i'm going to the
first experiment i'm going to take lead oxide which is uh one lead atom and one oxygen atom
i'm going to put it in the furnace with borax and i'm going to add iron to it metallic iron
the iron is going to pull the oxygen off the lead because it's more reactive
so
and what i'm going to try and do is convert this lead oxide to lead metal and the iron is going to
turn into iron oxide and if we have enough left over it'll be a little bit of an iron nail left
iron oxide dissolved in the borax slag that we're going to make
and a lead puddle at the bottom that we're going to pour off and recover our lead metal
but what we really want to do is get rid of the lead and get rid of any bismuth in there so the
second experiment i'm going to run is with copper oxide and the idea is is that if i add enough
copper oxide to our crucible and fire it with this whole suite of metals in there the copper oxide is
going to react with all of these other metallic forms of metal and they're going to oxidize
all these which we can then dissolve in our slag the copper is going to go into copper metal
silver and gold which won't react with the copper oxide and we can take we can
pretty much draw a line hopefully that copper everything underneath will oxidize the copper
oxide will turn into copper metal and we'll get gold silver copper platinum palladium they're
all up here as well so that's the first two experiments we're gonna do and if we can prove
that those work then we'll start experimenting with our actual pcb metallic stuff that we have
and we'll see if we can actually put this to work well i won't bore you with all the math and the
chicken scraps and a piece of cardboard but we put in 40 grams of copper and we end up with 34
that's 85 recovery and we put in about 47 grams of lead and ended up with uh what did i say uh oh 41.
so that's 87 so we got you know right around the same percent recovery on both of them
this one was in 15 minutes the copper was in half an hour why can't i recover the last 15
of our base metals somebody answered me that well here's a little something i was
playing with and i'll show you guys this may have been where our copper and our lead went
i don't know if you can see that but these are the nails that i put in with the copper
and look they're all coated once you get the slag off they're all copper coated so i bet that is
where the rest of our copper and lead went is it stuck to these nails it can't it can't pull
itself off these nails so that's probably where all the base metals went but now let's move on to
this problem because we have proven that we can reduce the copper and lead based on our
reactivity series so in theory if i put in the right amount of copper oxide with this stuff
we should get a pretty pure copper button all right now what we need is a control and so
what we're going to do is we're going to try and smelt these down directly to figure out how much
metal we can recover from 100 grams of these parts all right there's 100 grams of computer parts
and 200 grams of borax we'll get that mixed up we're going to put it in the furnace in a crucible
melt it down and see how much metal we can recover and if we can get a nice bead in the past i've
done this and we don't have a very nice bead at the end it ends up being all kind of junky and
a bunch of stuff on top but we'll try it see how much metal we can recover and then that'll tell us
uh how much we lose during the smelting process how much we need to add to the copper oxide to try
and clean it up and get mostly copper and precious metals all right well here is our button that we
cleaned up from just our straight 100 grams of computer parts and it's interesting it's not
very dense for how heavy it is i think it's full of bubbles it's it doesn't look very good it's
all pockmarked and different colors and bumpy and lumpy so this is not what i would call a success
let's see how much it weighs here and see how much we lost so again we put in 100 grams we
ended up with 84. so we lost 15 grams from reactions with the borax you can actually
look at this stuff it's all rusty already so there's probably a bunch of oxides in there as is
and so i'm not surprised we lost 15 grams i didn't put any iron or no nails or anything in there
but that's this is our baseline this is our base mark that's what happens when you just
melt it with borax you get 84 grams of junky looking stuff now let's figure out how much copper
oxide we can add to clean that up a little bit okay so i got 100 grams of computer parts i've got
200 grams of borax i was going to add 15 grams of copper oxide but a big blob of it came out so we
ended up with 20 grams so we got 20 percent copper oxide by weight and that's copper 2 oxide so it's
one copper atom and one oxygen atom so let's put that in the furnace and see what we come out with
well i'm gonna i'm gonna rush this a little bit this is the stuff we added with copper oxide
it's not quite cool yet but my furnace is still hot and i'm gonna reprocess the slag so
let's see if we can oh come on there we go there's our stuff now what i'm going to do
is i'm going to do this kind of quick i'm going to knock off the metal button
and then the slag i'm going to put back in the crucible with iron nails and try and reduce
back out all the metals that we uh oxidized with copper oxide and looking at our chart it should
be there's probably not any bismuth in there but lead tin and nickel should come out of solution
the iron will stay in solution as iron oxide the zinc and aluminum will also stay in solution
so let me get that knocked off of there and we'll put it back in the crucible
back in our hot furnace and see how much base metal oxides we can reduce
there's our crucible our slags in there and i just added five iron nails
okay what we have here is the slag that i've reprocessed with nails there should be
a little tiny button in here somewhere let's see if we can find it all right so this is
kind of interesting and i need your guys's help to figure out what's going on here this is the
slag it's super black on the inside reddish on the outside where i touched the iron cone mold
and i've had comments in the past that people think that when i pour that hot slag into the co
the cold cone mold that the copper in the slag reacts with the iron and forms this little skin of
red copper that comes out of the slag solution so is that what's happening because
i don't have any metal button at all and i don't know if you saw in the video i accidentally
dropped a nail in there and here's the nail it was covered in slag so it's nice and shiny and i think
you can see the head of it's a little bit smaller the shank down towards the
head is a little bit smaller i think it was sitting down the crucible head down
i think what may have happened is we had so little base metal uh oxides in that slag that they've all
kind of glommed on to this iron nail and just like we saw when we did these previous
examples with the lead and the copper here that we reduced to oxides we were missing five or six
uh grams and we had 12 nails so that's about half a gram per nail
i put five nails in this time so if you calculate that out there'd be about two and a half grams
of base metals
but we added 20 grams of copper
we added 20 grams of copper oxide got these two buttons i don't know if i've done this yet
here's our two buttons that's the first one with just borax 84 grams
here's the second one with the copper oxide 82 grams roughly about the same i added 20
grams of copper oxide in there which ends up being i think about 15 grams of copper metal
so
so we should have reduced at least 15 grams of either base metals or
copper with these nails and i don't know why we didn't
here is the xrf results from our first control button this was the computer parts with no oxide
and no iron and you can see it's mostly copper there's a little bit of nickel iron and zinc
in there silver actually shows up then you see tin makes up about eight percent of the button
and then lead brings up the bottom at two percent this is a good example of just run-of-the-mill pc
boards and the metal concentrations that they have here's the second button we did with the copper
oxide and you can see immediately that the copper percent went up it's about 92 and a half percent
now but interestingly the nickel was pretty much untouched the nickel hasn't been affected at all
the iron has been reduced effectively to zero silver is still there in about the same
concentration tin has been reduced by half and lead has also been reduced by about 75 percent
so the copper oxide did do something but i don't know if it achieved the complete goal that we
wanted it to which was completely remove all the base metals other than gold silver and copper
so help me out guys i'm not i'm not quite sure what happened we're losing base metal somewhere
we're losing oxide somewhere i don't know why the iron didn't reduce anything out of that slag that
we reprocessed when we did the computer parts and the copper oxide addition to the flux uh but
help me out why why won't this work why can't i convert the base metals the lead the tin the iron
into oxides and then recover them again just like we did with the previous chemistry i don't
know what's going on so help me out because if we can crack this nut if we can get this figured out
and i can concentrate all the precious metals in the copper eliminate all the other base metals
and reprocess them afterwards in the crucible and recover them again sell them for the values that
they have you can have this full circle complete process where you get the valuable copper clean
you get the valuable precious metals clean and then you have a base metal
ingot or door a that you can sell uh off to whoever is going to buy that if you have bulk
now another thing i want to ask you guys and this is this is you know each person's opinion about
how to do this some people they take their boards they put them in a box and they sell
them just as boards right other people we've sold lots and lots of equipment
where you can take the board throw it down the hammer mill onto the shaker table
uh just like that video i i put a card in the top corner at the beginning where the they process
the boards they get their their base metals they get all the metals across the table the
fiberglass and the plastic go down off into the tailings and they have their their metal
concentrate that they sell other people take that stuff and they process it through acids they take
it down they recover the base metals they recover the precious metals some people smelt it into big
bars and sell it as bars as mixed metal bars and i have other customers who want to separate out each
individual metal some use chemicals some other people use pyrometallurgy like i'm trying to do
what in your opinion is the best way to process these computer boards is it
sell them direct to refiners as whole boards is it process them some get the metal out that you can
off the shaker table and sell that is it process even further and refine some of the metals out the
copper the silver the gold some of the the more expensive base metals and precious metals or do
you try and get every single metal out and refine it all the way to completion and sell it that way
and remember this this whole process wouldn't be a hobby process this wouldn't be 50 pounds of
boards or 100 pounds of boards or one ton a month this would be a process where you're running tons
and tons a month and you have lots and lots of metal are you going to process it yourself
or where along the stage of processing are you going to sell it that is my question to you guys
well we're going to call it quits for this video i hope you guys enjoyed it i'm looking
for some help on this so any additional help or comments you guys have please leave me a comment
in the comment section below otherwise thanks for watching and we'll see on the next video