How do I know (metals question)

Originally Posted by Aristella

Ahoy fellow scrappers!

So i took about (.10) of motherboards and cirtuit to my 4 local scrapyards yesterday, up in buffalo, NY.

Needless to say i was pretty disappointed! I only had my stuff weighed at one yard, and immediately the guy took some ribbon wires, computer connector and broken down CAC card readers, and threw them into a pile of stuff that belonged to the scrapyard, assumingly taking my stuff without asking and got me pissed! He proceeded to weigh my stuff as circuit breaker meterial though i specifically said i wanted to sell this for the price of the gold pieces on them. Anyways i left with all my stuff not bothering to get a price.

Mainly because i have (i think) a better idea: melt down the gold myself

Im going to dive into this topic tonight and see what tools i need, and the overall expense.

Any pros have thoughts on this? Id love to hear, as always thanks for sharing your knowledge.

I am going to stop you right there. We have buyers on this forum that are worth shipping to. Check them out.

As far as "melting down the gold", as you mentioned, it is not anything like that. There is massive chemical process that in order to do it properly requires lots of time and equipment and knowledge to do properly. You can actually kill yourself if you don't do things the right way.

So, please check out our buyers, but if you are dead set on checking out refining the material yourself, then the site you are looking for is called the gold refining forum. Look them up and spend a LOT of time reading before you ever think of asking any questions there. They will first point you to a book that you can download for free to read by Hoke. Start there.