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Thinking of going gold panning as a hobby in order to find some gold to stock up on? Or are you thinking of investing in gold or gold stocks? Well, if you’re searching for gold, have you considered searching in old phones and electronics? While gold stocks can be tricky to time in order to enter the market, and owning gold in gold bars or gold coins can be tricky to store or insure, harvesting gold from old electronics is another option.
How is it done? Let’s look at how to do it with an old mobile phone.
First, you take apart all the parts of the phone. The keypad area, in addition to circuit boards, is plated with gold sometimes hidden. In mobile phones, they used thick gold plating for a lot of the chips, and that’s around 18 carat gold.
Also note that the camera phone may have gold in the camera (circuit board, ccd camera, and connector) but not necessarily in the rest of the phone.
Look for gold wire in the electric circuit connections.
Mobile phones will often have a core that is a gold plated PCB board, as well as gold wire in the IC chips, connector pin, and as mentioned above, the camera.
The process we’re looking at it gold stripping, and you need to be very careful when doing this, as you I’m sure know, because it involves pouring sulfuric acid in the breaker IC chips. There is protective clothing, gloves. After the gold is exposed this way, pour water to clean it, but remember there is a chemical reaction that takes place when water and sulfuric acid meet, which is another point of caution.
If you’re still interested in the process at this point, you probably are comfortable and knowledgeable on how to treat electronics with chemicals, and you can watch this slightly long video on how to do it by Archimedes Channel. The only thing is it’s narrated by a computer.
This method harvests 24k, 99.9 percent gold.
By the way, did you know Japan was encouraging people to turn in phones before it hosted the Olympic Games, in order to make winning medals out of recycled gold from electronics? Yup.
For what electronics have the most gold in them, click here.
