http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14621075

I'm amazed how how much gold this guy got, he's well minted now!!!

 

Nice clip! I wonder how much do the chemicals cost and what he does with all the chemical waste he produced, though..

 

The beaker he used to show off his gold at the end probably cost more than the gold it contained!

 

He missed a better bet, I worked in a cleanroom where we recycled our etched gold. We used a iodine etchant for our lithography process, captured the effluent in a epoxy filter (the filtered water went down the city water system). When the filter was full I took it down to our materials lab, where it was separated out. Imagine a large beaker one half full of gold dust. Overall a much cleaner process.

 

How can you tell between gold and bronze contacts and pins?

 

We had 10's of thousands of old PCB's and looked into this. It just wasn't feasable to do. The best bet was to just sell them to the guys that do it for a living and have the machines to do it right.

 

Google gold test kits,they can tell the 10,14,18,24 .You can elimiate some coated metals
with a magnet.

 

I wish I could remember the companies involved but we used to work with a used equipment dealer who was called in to make an offer on an obsolete mainframe computer system, something massive from the 60's. He hemed and sighed and said "guys, really, it's obsolete. I'd have to charge you $5,000 just to haul it away as junk." Not being the first guy to say so they cut the PO and he showed up with men and trucks and hauled it all back to his shop where he disassembled everything and removed beautiful gold plated wire wrap sockets, gold plated connectors, gold plated DIP ICs, gold plated PCBs... all the electronics inside were gold plated!

He made an extra $20,000 from the gold re-processor.