Need some help identifying the attached boards!!

Thanks,

Tom

Low grade
Low grade
Low grade
Midgrade

Top and bottom are fab boards. They didn’t get their parts yet. Which is different than blanks which have connectors and are used for termination and regulation.
I’m bumping the last one on personal experience. I can’t guarantee the intake person will give you that and a single board isn’t worth fighting; but it’s where I’d put it for quoting my shipment and what it should get. ;)
I can’t recall what the Rockwell boards are from but I’ve sent them (populated) before.

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Awesome!! Thank you for responding. Saw these In a dumpster behind a facility that manufactures them. Just sent them an email asking if i could buy there material to resell. Also found a latop that was missing a hard drive and another board, but decided to grab it otherwise. Cant go wrong with free money!!

Q on the pic 0373,

that looks like it has many gold laminates, veneer, flashing circles or w.e it's called; Q being, I find many boards like this and tend to believe I can refine or harvest those for gold reclaim. If I had the quantity in similar style boards, would it be something lower grade outcome like a gold finger cut off or refine?

I also cut and harvest most of those looking boards specifics like it was a gold finger board. ex: trim the circles out or the gold plated squares on some boards like these.

Thoughts?

Much love

Spence, we generally avoid home refining talk on this forum, as the purpose is to identify and price boards and materials which the owner of the forum, Boardsort, buys. Your question has a semi-legitimacy in that it pertains to the value of a board after gold value has been removed.
Some points to consider: at 15 cents per pound, you cannot pack enough pounds in a shipping box to pay even the postage. $1.50 worth of boards would $20 to mail, (just a wild guess), unless you throw some in as filler on a box of valuable boards. If you remove the obvious gold circles, you will have hours of time for pennies worth of gold equivalence, and the boards will have no value to Boardsort.
Home refining of gold for profit is like trying to fill your bathtub with water by breathing on a cold glass and scraping the foggy moisture off.
Lostinlodos has explained in posts elsewhere that the value of boards is sometimes determined more by the value of copper rather than gold content.

Oh my bad. I didn't mean to push the envelope. Just curiosity and power of knowledge. I love to soak everything up and ask general Q's.
I've gone to Boardsort for years but I live nearby : P. No mailing for me hehe. I've refined and harvested for years as well, just always come up with Qs on new materials or products maybe worth looking into when I see them.
I'm just being oblivious, sorry guys.
Much love

Maybe I should ask it this way,
How are those gold foils comparable to gold finger cut offs? Thickness, purity and what not?
Is that reasonable to ask?
I just finally joined the forum , feeling everything out trying not to be "that" guy , haha.

Let’s take this one issue at a time.
Refining has two issues.
Those who talk about it publicly are not telling you the whole story.
Those who post to defend it eventually trigger a battle of posts that does no good to anyone.
I’ve deleted whole threads many pages long that started with something like “I refined this and it’s awesome!”
You will NOT get an ounce of gold from a pentium pro. You will not strike it rich refining aerospace castoffs (like these). And you won’t be buying a 2 acre mansion after a week.
I’ve played with it for years. Sand bath in a grill. Strong bases in a convection oven. Acid baths.
So we simply prohibit discussion because it always reaches a point of tension.
RULE, and unbendable! Boardsort will NOT pay for boards treated with acid. Period. For safety they MAY refuse or destroy an entire shipment at their discretion. I’ve never been told of it happening with BoardSort but I do know other companies have done so. Acid bathing is not a game.

Now onto boards. Modern boards (post late 60s) that are assembly manufactured, are made up of layers of a substrate material and copper. Excluding short runs, prototype, and breadboard. Some boards will also add more conductive metals for higher quality uses. If it’s a full width total coverage it’s called a sandwich board. Just like adding a bun length piece of ham (gold) to your (copper) sandwich. Most however use small limited sections (like bacon) which I guess would be a condiment board but I just made that term up. It fits though.

There is a non standard but ISO accepted method for marking boards. A bare mounting circle means no internal secondary metals. A hashed circle is used for a partial layer, generally more than 25%. A solid circle means there’s a total width coverage layer. Squares with a PM in them tell us surface flashing: but they are rarely used.
Here we have a defence company so we can take the markings at face value. The bare circle and gold square tells us all the gold is surface flashing. The two squares second that premise.
We can also see why the boards were binned by looking at the flashing. It’s not bonded correctly and is pealing due to air bubbles.
This would be a very good board to use if you want to trial refining. A poor flash not properly bonded. You need enough acid to cover the board and vertical will work better than horizontal. Internet instruction on how to do it tends to be correct: just fails to tell you about the loss in expenses. Don’t bring the board to boardsort afterwards though.

As for value comparison? Flashing is the absolute lowest value per weight in electronics PM. It’s very low content gold (often below 10kt) alloy and extremely thin. With agitation this boards gold would probably all dissolve in under 10 minutes.
pins take hours. Fingers take days. ICs when properly powdered take weeks. That gives you an idea of the quantity involved. Generally for home refining. That also helps explain why something like fingers is worth so much where pins are so low. Honest youtubers will tell you something along the lines of ‘it’s been two weeks let’s see what we have’ and the like.
Professional commercial refineries have massive scale. Use multiple methods, including acid and reverse electroplating, and have and use chemicals that consumers don’t have access to. They also recover everything. Copper, wood, polymers, gold, tin, etc.

If boardsort pays you $40, they’ll probably sell that material in massive bulk for around $50. The refinery will triple the value but loose a fair bit in expenses. Netting around $75 to $100. On the other side (and where so many refining discussions degrade into flame wars) if you self refine that $40 worth of boards you’ll (generically) spend $10-$20 in chemicals and supplies, get $10 in precious metals and have a bucket of hazmat soup to contend with!
It’s simply not worth it from a dollar standpoint.

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Well noted lost. Sorry for any disruption, not my intention; just being a sponge.
Yes, I never sell any refined or harvested material to my precious Boardsort guys(Best e-scarp company I've found out here). I'm too honest of a buyer/seller and put my morals along side that.
Nice analogy btw, haha. Understanding more n more how the make-up of these boards are and what's out there. I've saved those kind of boards or ones I think might be worth it in similar style, to experiment with and trial run when I get the time to do so. Yet, you always tell yourself, " Yah, I know what I'm doing!" to find out you're saying next, "What.kind. of. mess. did I get myself into..." and I've def been there too. When I started I was def one of them looking on the Tube thinking, " man, I can get rich in a week" to quickly find out, not everyone is doing it right, safe, or for the environment. It's always worried me about the house expense and troubles of hazardous waste you're left with or if the yields I generate are actually accurate or within the highest scope. That's why I just look for the big guys now or my Boardsort.
I always love asking the more experienced ones and picking people's brain on processes and materials out there.
I appreciate the knowledge.
Much love

Q: Is there a list or chart I can look up to better explain markings on boards for the actually contacts like you described? Besides the IEEE charts.

A: not really. As far as I know it was never standardised completely. The markings and meanings were taught to my by other technicians. I’ve found over time what they told me on it was generally accurate. I know you can grab drafts of the proposals from the ISO but everything from them costs money.
In all honesty I’ve never cared enough to go looking beyond knowing you need to pay an a membership fee AND pay for the documentation to get terminated drafts.
The basics have worked for me the majority of the time
Solid: whole coverage
Hash/slash: partial coverage

Gold, copper, white metals. Usually silver, sometimes nickel. But I’ve found all sorts of metals used in boards during my multiple refining kicks.

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