All About Keyboard Mylars

**mrmylar** · 01-17-2016, 05:53 PM

Originally Posted by jimicrk

Thanks for the update Kevin.
I hope you get well soon.
Jim

Thanks Jim, it's been an uphill battle. It took 4 moths to get my equilibrium where I could stand without falling or losing my balance.

Below are some of the mylars I'm accepting. See if you have them.

**Smf-retired-user-0043** · 01-17-2016, 07:57 PM

I would run the mylars through a paper shredder, then tumble the pulp in a small mill with an abrasive to wear the silver free from the mylar. Be sure to use water to rise off the pulp removed from the tumbler this way your sure to recover all your silver.

Silver is a very soft metal so a few hours in the mill should be enough time to remove any silver present on the plastic mylars.

**mrmylar** · 01-17-2016, 08:28 PM

Originally Posted by alloy2

I would run the mylars through a paper shredder, then tumble the pulp in a small mill with an abrasive to wear the silver free from the mylar. Be sure to use water to rise off the pulp removed from the tumbler this way your sure to recover all your silver.

Silver is a very soft metal so a few hours in the mill should be enough time to remove any silver present on the plastic mylars.

You would have a big mess and very little silver recovered, if any at all. The first mistake would be shredding them.

What I meant to add is that when using shredders, mills and other devices that causes friction WILL make the mylar/plastic melt and stick to each other and you'll have trapped silver in the melted plastic.

I've been there and done that! It will not work.

**Smf-retired-user-0043** · 01-17-2016, 09:22 PM

Originally Posted by mrmylar

You would have a big mess and very little silver recovered, if any at all. The first mistake would be shredding them.

What I meant to add is that when using shredders, mills and other devices that causes friction WILL make the mylar/plastic melt and stick to each other and you'll have trapped silver in the melted plastic.

I've been there and done that! It will not work.

I can understand your reluctance, but forums are for sharing.

I've done a lot of process's that required the use of abrasives, my first experience with a lapping compound to lap in valves on an engine, then I had a commercial sandblasting company, did lapidary as a hobby then used abrasives to remove gold from RAM boards.

I ran the mill dry but one could add water which would act as a lubricant, the mill runs at such a low speed there is no heat build up.

A paper shredder would eat mylars for breakfast all day long and the best part is that you would not have to separate the blank sheets from keyboard mylars. For every 20 pounds of shredded mylers you have in the mill one pound of abrasive should suffice.

In fact you may not even need to use an abrasive, the sharp edges of the shredded mylars tumbling with a bit of water may be enough to wear off the silver. There are instances in sandblasting that plastic media is used.

This guy is using plastic blasting media to remove paint from a car. for those of you that have an excess of scrap plastic it maybe a good idea to turn your waste into blast media.

Anyhow I'll leave it up to the forum members to decide which of us is able to separate the chaff from the wheat.

**mrmylar** · 01-18-2016, 12:02 AM

During my experimental stages of processing mylars, I took one sheet and used my heat gun to shrink it down to a ball smaller than a corn kernel. I forget what I weighed it at, but it was almost not readable on a gram scale. But my goal was to take a lb of them and try to slowly heat them to shrink them down considerably, and then put them on high heat, enough to make them brittle and possibly ash up and (or) break apart, leaving the silver in a ball or a pile. I never finished doing it that way.

But I think that if a person do a slow/low heating of the mylars (maybe a day or longer) they should shrink down enough without losing any silver from flying away, it should be condensed enough to apply higher heat to burn off more plastic until most or enough of it's gone to be able to process them further, or to crush them more and to keep the heat going.

If I were to attempt this experiment like I'm describing it, it would be better to do in the winter time, being as though I could justify using that much heat outside.

If I had a fast way to do each sheet or a pile of them at a time using a heat gun, I would because it only took seconds to shrink a mylar down to the size of a small pearl.

Although I don't use any incineration in my processing of the mylars, I wouldn't mind giving a try at a 1 lb batch. I incinerated them in a grill before and I lost silver in the soot going in the air, so open incineration will cause you to lose silver. A closed incinerator with a long tube pipe chimney about 6 ft going up, with a 60 mesh wire screen would allow the smoke and soot to escape and should keep the silver from going up that high.

On another note: Look at the photo below. Are you processing the tabs that have the red markers around them? If not, you're not getting all your silver and your yields will be lower than expected.

**Smf-retired-user-0043** · 06-10-2021, 09:30 AM

Originally Posted by mrmylar

You would have a big mess and very little silver recovered, if any at all. The first mistake would be shredding them.

What I meant to add is that when using shredders, mills and other devices that causes friction WILL make the mylar/plastic melt and stick to each other and you'll have trapped silver in the melted plastic.

I've been there and done that! It will not work.

Your claim above is a flat out lie we're dealing with keyboard Mylars not old cellulose film. If Mylars were an issue of melting I would have suggested to run them wet.