Tear-down and scrapping of electronic equipment to recover gold

The world is up to its eyeballs in electronic scrap. What seems like a blight to many is an opportunity for some. Electronic scrappers know how to recover gold and other precious metals from old electronic equipment. Here is a photo of me pulling a bunch of gold-plated pins out of an old ethernet switch.

It goes by a lot of names: E-Waste, Electronic Scrap, Electronic Waste, E-Scrap, etc. It consists of things like old and unwanted computers and laptops, servers, cell phones, telecom equipment, gaming systems, televisions, military electronics, and lots of other things. The one thing they all have in common is that they contain precious metals. They have silver, gold, platinum, palladium, etc., within their inner workings. With a little knowledge and some basic equipment, you too can extract the precious metals from e-waste.

This collection of videos should help you get started.

A Viewer Request Special!

Tearing down Diane's Satellite TV Boxes
I viewer of my channel, and fellow scrapper, named Diane sent me a couple these Dish Network satellite TV boxes. She said she had access to lots of them and was wondering what sort of good, gold and other precious metals they contained? Which parts are worth keeping and which parts aren't. So I did a very thorough teardown of the two boxes for her. This video might come in handy if you find any of these boxes. Somewhat surprisingly, the smaller and more basic looking boxes, pound for pound, contain more precious metals. Check out the video.

If you have any items you'd like me to teardown for you, let me know and maybe we can work something out. Email me at astronomermike @ gmail. com (remove the anti-spam spaces).

Bringing home the scrap

Big e-scrap pickup and a day in the life of a scrapper.
Out of the blue the other day I got a call from a former employer of mine. They had a load of scrap electronic equipment and wondered if I would be interested in it. I worked for them as an engineer for over 25 years before I (semi) retired. I am still friendly with my former boss and former co-workers. We'd all go to lunch together about once a week before Covid. We are hoping to get back to it soon. Anyway, they are a big operation and they generate a lot of electronic scrap. They had a regular scrap guy who would pick it up while I worked there (maybe that's where I got the idea to do it too?). At our lunch get-togethers I put a bug in their ears about my hobby of extracting gold from e-waste and my willingness to take their scrap. Finally that has paid off. This is just the first of what I hope will be many pickups from them.

Tearing down and scrapping out two Dell desktop PCs from the above scrap run.
In this video I scrap out a couple of Dell desktop PCs that are pretty representative of the bunch of computers I got in the above scrap pickup. There were several dozen each of Optiplex 760s and Optiplex GX620s. Here I scrap out one of each to recover the gold they contain. Personal computers are built in such large numbers that the manufacturers have found ways to keep the costs down. One way is to limit the amount of gold used in them as much as possible. Computers today contain far less gold than a few years or decades ago when gold was less expensive and manufacturers used it much more freely. There is still some gold to be found though. I point out the parts worth salvaging in these sorts of computers. On the whole, it is hardly worth the effort to scrap out only one or just a few computers. However, if you have a truckload of them like I do in this video, the gold can add up.

Teardown and scrapout of a SATO CL412e Industrial label printer to recover gold and other useful bits.
From the above scrap run I got a bunch of printers. Some of them were just HP laser printers which are mostly plastic and have little to interest anyone looking for gold, or even aluminum or steel. However, there were also some large and heavy industrial label printers. There were a bunch of Zebra label printers. They were built like tanks and are a metal scavenger's dream, but contain very little in the way of gold. There was one oddball printer in the bunch. It was a SATO printer. I'd never seen this particular brand of printer before. Though built similarly to the Zebra printers, it contained much more in the way of electronics and gold. Here I scrap out that SATO printer. I also scored a really nice stepper motor and some toothed belts, and a few other bits. Check it out.

Another scrap pickup (Bins of hard drives!) and lots of other stuff, for gold and PMs recovery
In this video I show all the stuff I got on an e-waste scrap pickup run today. There were bins full of hard drives, some old PCs, some printers, some flat screen monitors, some Cisco boards and lots of other stuff. Some of this stuff will be the subject of future teardown and scrapout videos. All of it will have the gold and precious metals extracted.

Tearing down and scrapping out Hard Drives for gold, aluminum and other metals.
In this video I show how I teardown and scrapout old hard drives to recover the precious metals they contain. I show the internals of a variety of different hard drives, the tools needed, how to disassemble them, what is worth keeping and what isn't worth bothering with. These drives came from my above scrap run where I got three big (and very heavy) bins full of old hard drives. Taking them all apart and sorting the pieces has been keeping me busy.

Notable scrapouts and teardowns
Which were home runs, an which were wastes of time?

Teardown and scrapout of a Brocade Fastiron Edge 12GCF to recover gold and precious metals.
In this video I teardown and depopulate a Brocade Fastiron Edge 12GCF 12 port gigabit managed switch to recover the gold and precious metals it contains. I got a pretty good haul from this unit, including 13 big gold corner BGAs. It's worthwhile if you can get them free or really, really cheap.

Teardown and scrapout of two Alcatel OS7800-CMM modules to recover gold and precious metals.
In this video I teardown and scrapout two Alcatel OS7800-CMM module boards to recover all the gold-bearing components they contain. I also got some other neat stuff out of them. check it out.

Teardown and scrapping of Enterasys 5G102-06-G Gigabit Ethernet Switch Matrix to recover gold.
In this video I show the process of tearing down and recovering all the gold containing components of a scrap Enterasys 5G102-06-G Gigabit Ethernet Switch Matrix module. A really nice little module with lots of gold corner BGAs and gold pins.

Teardown and Scrapping of 3Com Super Stack II Ethernet Switch.
In this video I tear down and scrap out a 3Com Super Stack II 24 port Ethernet Switch. I depopulate the board and recover all the gold-bearing components. Not too bad at all, once I figured out how to get inside.

Tear-down and scrapping of an Enterasys 72-Port Platinum Distributed Forwarding Engine for gold.
In this video I show the Tear-down and scrapping of an Enterasys 72-Port Platinum Distributed Forwarding Engine and the recovery of all items containing gold on the unit. This is what the good stuff looks like. Rows of Broadcom BGAs for the taking, plus lots of gold pins.

Teardown and scrapping of Cisco Catalyst 2900 Series XL switch for gold recovery
In this video I teardown, scrap out and depopulate a Cisco Catalyst 2900 Series XL ethernet switch to recover the gold bearing material and other valuables it contains. A difficult to get into case hides a really decent board and lots of gold pins.

Teardown and scrap out of a Cisco 11500 Series Content Services Switch to recover gold
In this video I tear-down and scrap out a Cisco 11500 Series Content Services Switch to recover the gold bearing components it contains. There was not an over-abundance of good stuff inside, but if you can get them for free it's probably worth the effort.

3 Cisco module teardown and scrapout for gold Triple Feature
In this video I teardown and scrapout three Cisco module boards to recover the gold-bearing components they contain. These modules contained a lot of good stuff. It was a fun teardown.

Results of tearing down and scrapping out a bunch of old barcode scanners for gold
In this video I show the gold-bearing parts and interesting mechanisms recovered from tearing down and scrapping out several different models of old hand-held bar code scanners. There's not much in each scanner, but it is good stuff. If you can get enough of them it will add up to a nice payday.

Sorting out all the parts

Sorting components from depopulated telecom boards for gold recovery
OK, you've depopulated some nice telecom boards. Now what? Now it's time to sort out all those parts.

An "easy" way to deal with gold plated parts

Stripping gold plating from e-waste using Eco-Goldex E-Series stripping agent.
In this video I show how to use Eco-Goldex E-Series stripping agent to take the gold plating off of electronic waste without having to dissolve the underlying base metal. it just strips off the plating almost like magic. Getting the gold back out of solution though is a bit of black magic.

New scrapout and teardown videos appear on my Youtube Scrapouts and Teardowns playlist before they show up here. Check it out to see new videos.

Check out my Urban Gold Mining web page to see how I actually extract, recover and refine the gold on the pieces I pull out of the equipment I teardown. It's not terribly hard to do.

You can also visit my main Youtube channel. I have lots of videos on many different techy subjects. It's a bit of a nerdfest I must admit.