Pure Metal Recovered From Electronics & E-Waste

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hey guys my name is jason with mountain bakery  mining and metals and today we're going to run   a sample of pc boards through our hammer mill  and shaker table crush them up and try and   get the precious metals and base metals out of  them we have three different samples here and   what do you guys think those low-grade i'm not a real board expert here  but they've got some stuff on them   here's what they're calling mid-grade  boards kind of see what these are they don't have any i don't know got some of these  what they call them flat packs i guess there's   a bunch of gold pins it looks like these  little guys so that's mid-grade and this is   the high-grade stuff and i think these are  motherboards right is that what these are   these are motherboards out of computers but  they've got these little gold chips in the corner   this one's pretty nice it's got a bunch of them   so that's kind of stuff we're going to  be running let me go show you the system   here's the system we're going to be running you  got our 16 by 12 hammer mill up here i'm going to   feed the boards down the top crushes up the boards  through a screen and with water flows down onto   the shaker table here's our 4x8 shaker table and  i was running a sample of copper wire chops across   this last time so i had this this plastic sheet  on it i'm going to take that off clean the table   out really good but then i think i'm going to put  the plastic sheet back on i kind of like that i'm   going to try try that some more that i use it to  break the surface tension and help all the metals   fall down and get in the grooves to come over the  shaker table this is uh the number one and the   number two concentrates here's the number three  midlings and the number four tailings and for   this customer i got those three different samples  i'm gonna give them all of one all of two and all   of three back and take a representative sample of  the number four tailings so let's get this stuff   fired up and we'll run some boards now normally  what i do with these big boards is i'd pre-shred   them through one of our big hammer mills but  we've sold all our demo equipment and everything   so i need to get them a little bit  smaller to go in the little pcb system so i'm using our iron worker in the shop  just to share them into smaller pieces that way they put down the  throat of that hammer mill so here i can actually do it once  see if i can make this work here double production and there you go finished product  ready to go in the hammer mill i'm going to start with the low grade boards  first because uh that way we don't contaminate   with some of the higher value boards if we're  going backwards but i've got the low grade boards   i'm going to put them in buckets i'm going to  get a weight on them and then we'll get a total   weight and we'll start running all right total  weight on all the low grade is 22.1 kilograms uh so um so hey foreign down um huh uh so all right we'll take a quick look here at what we  recovered this is the low grade low-grade boards   this is the number one fraction the high grade  concentrates pretty much pure metal all a lot of   copper you can see this stuff on the table had a  lot more gray stuff in it so i think it had a lot   more solder that tin lead solder probably there's  our number one here's a look at our number two there is still quite a bit of copper and it's  pretty much all metal but a lot more aluminum in   the number two concentrates a few little pieces of  plastic board but that's i mean by weight that's   99 98 metal so those two are the concentrates  here's a look at our number three middlings so we can get this focused  here pretty much all plastic   there might be some aluminum flakes in there it's  kind of hard to tell with the white insulation and maybe every once in a while a  stray copper hair wire or something   don't trust the stuff in my finger because i  was just in the number one and number two but   like there's there's maybe a flake of copper but this is this is mostly   plastic so that came pretty clean and then here  is a sample of the number four and it's mostly   sludge i'm not even stick my hand in there but  i got a little bit of sample in number four   but a lot of that is just slime sludge there's  not much in there so i'm gonna get all these   bagged up and weighed actually before i do  that um the low grade stuff had a lot of these   big huge aluminum heat sinks on them stuff like  that and i manually took that off of the hammer i   took that off because putting that stuff down the  hammer mill with a point eight millimeter screen   uh just it it's not that's not what it's designed  to do there's a huge transformer all that steel   it's it's just not designed to do that so the  best thing for these would be to pre-shred these   through a bigger hammer mill like a two or three  inch uh hole or slot screen have a guy picking out   all these bigger pieces of aluminum and metal  before they go into the the smaller hammer mill   but um we'll we'll get a weight on all this stuff  and figure out where uh the metal is and how much   we recovered here's the results from our low  grade boards we had a total of 22.1 kilograms   i picked off two and a half kilograms so this is  how much that actually went through the system   the number one and the number two weighed 7.15  kilograms that leaves 12.4 kilograms and number   three and number four which is more or less waste  and when you divide 7.15 by the total weight it   ended up being 30 36 metal now one of the things i  got raked over the coals on a previous video i did   about weighing wet and everybody got  all concerned about me weighing wet   the reason why i don't think it's a big deal  correct me if i'm wrong i'm not trying to start   a huge youtube you know feud here but copper  by weight is nine times heavier than water   so if this jug had equal parts water and copper by  volume it would be ninety percent copper by weight   so it'd be i'd be ten percent off if i weighed it  and said it was all copper this stuff is like you   know 99 copper 95 copper so the amount of water in  here it's it the density is so small compared to   the metal that it's like almost irrelevant the  water weight in here that's my thought correct   me if i'm wrong you guys tell me what do you think  the the amount i'm off is in a percent by weighing   it damp then you know again this is like there's  there's no water coming out of it it's just   it's just damp what do you think leave a comment  below this might give us a little bit better look   at what's in here this is the number one a lot of  copper a few pins i expect there's quite a bit of   steel in here as well so it should by right be run  under a magnet and see what they recover as far   as steel is concerned but there's the number  one we'll slide over here to the number two again these are all low grade see can  i get in the shadow here there we go   but there's a few little pieces of  board a few little pieces of plastic   99 metal some finer stuff in here it looks like  there's more kind of hair wire and stuff so anyway there's the low grade number one and number two   moving on to our mid-grade boards here and  it doesn't look like there's anything for   me to pick off of these guys so these will  these will run through pretty easy and fast   um but let me get a weight on these and then  we can get him run through the hammer mill uh time so well now i'll take a look at the results from  the mid-grade boards and here is the number one and i think there's actually less by weight  or maybe just about the same and number one   and number two i haven't weighed him yet  but most of those boards weren't populated   and so i think mostly what comes across into  the number one is like the pins and the the   larger pieces of copper and there just weren't  very much of those number two has more volume   and it's a lot flakier it's more flaky like uh the  copper laminated between the boards i think that's   what most of the weight in these boards were  there were some that had some pretty nice gold   uh plating on them but for the  most part it's that copper flake here's the number three middlings and  there's actually some copper in here   you can see when i dig down  you get into some of it i don't know if you can see it in there but   there's definitely some going across the two  safety grooves into the number three and again   they're like super flat flaky copper pieces some  still have pieces of board attached to them like   they're the laminations between the fiberglass  but there's not a whole lot here this was all the   the boards we ran and this could very easily be  run back through the hammer mill and onto the   table to capture a lot of that copper since you  you know what happens is most of the the copper   floods across the number one and number two and  there's only a certain capacity the table can take   and so any extra copper the lightest flakiest  stuff gets pushed down into the number three   now this is all ground up you could run this back  to the hammer mill in like five minutes or less   run it back onto the shaker table and recover  a huge percentage of this copper so here's the   results from the mid-grade boards we started  out with 32.7 kilograms number one and number  

two weighed 11.1 kilograms we ended up with 21.6  kilograms and number three and number four there's   probably a little bit of metal in there and number  three but not a whole lot and at 11.1 kilograms   that's 34 percent metal so that's pretty good  recovery on those mid-grade boards lots of copper   not a lot of populated boards in there so mostly  copper with probably some gold from the plating   now we're going to run our server boards  that's what the tag says they've got all   kinds of goodies on them they've got a bunch of  gold pins and we've got i don't know what that is these things we talked about  earlier those little gold chips   on the corner these things got all kinds of  stuff going on so we're going to run those   let me get a weight on them all together we have  23.2 kilograms of server boards so i took that   sheet off the shaker table as you noticed in the  last one and i'm going to run the server boards   with it off as well and the reason was is i had  this foam start coming out of the hammer mill   and man it's just like thick foamy junk  there's probably two or three inches of it   on top and it's like it's heavy i mean  it's like it's real stiff it's almost like   whipping cream does anybody know what that is what  what do you think that is and how do i get rid of   it because when i was running with the plastic  on the table man it just like ballooned up and   made these huge blobs and it kind of gummed up  under the plastic sheet it wouldn't come out and   it's obviously filling up my settling pond um it  doesn't seem to be hurting anything but you know   it's kind of a pain and i got to scrape it off  or scoop it off and get rid of it so if there's   something i can put in the water to knock all that  foam down let me know leave me a comment below one so thank you so so so so and here is our concentrates from the server  boards there's our number one looks very similar   to the mid-grade boards there might be a little  few more pins and stuff in here but probably more   precious metals i think this is where the precious  metals go based on all the pins the gold plating   and you know if there's any free gold wires that  they're so dense they come into the number one   here's the number two this is again mostly  copper flake looks like the copper laminated   between the fiberglass i don't see any pins in  here at all i bet this stuff is mostly copper   uh and a little bit of aluminum you can see here  on the edge but that's the number two and then   the very similar looking stuff to the mid grade  it's mostly plastic a little bit of copper flake   but based on the weight of the bucket there's  probably not a whole lot of copper in here because   the bucket doesn't weigh very much you know  based on the volume of stuff i have in here so   there's the number three and again we got  number four that sludge kind of stuff again so   i'll get this stuff weighed and  figure out what we recovered and here's the server boards we started with 23.2  kilograms number one and number two weights there   that leaves 13.75 kilograms in number three  and number four the 9.45 kilograms of metal  

we recovered is 41 metal by weight so these are  obviously the highest metal content and probably   the richest as well all right guys well thanks  for watching our test i hope you guys enjoyed it   and uh if you have any interest in any of our  equipment you can find our contact information   down below in the corner and we do run tests  for customers so if you're interested in   running some tests with us give us a call or  shoot us an email we do charge for the service   we'd love to talk about it with you and  hear about your problem and maybe come   up with a solution for you so thanks again  for watching and we'll see in the next video

2022-08-30

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