Return of Silver from 'Sanken' type audio amps. STK4122 & STK4131 etc.

I saved up a few of these amps from stripped home audio gear. They have silver wire connecting the board to the transistors etc, both preamp & main & often several different channels too.

From 18 of them I picked off 0.3grams of silver with a pair of tweezers. It took a bit over a hour & I used gloves so I wouldn't get the white heatsink paste on my skin.

The squares are copper & soldered to a Ali main heatsink. They can be twisted off with good pliers. I don't know what they are plated with, probably silver...

Some of the wires have a clear stikky paste over them. Those wires got pluck off & put in a beaker with turpentine & boiled for a while.
The turps got poured off & the clear paste was heated & it dried up & crumbled off the silver wires.
http://img542.imageshack.us/img542/5015/p1010192d.jpg

Was just stripping one down today. What wires are you referring to? Are they on that PCB? And, yes, that heatsink paste is nasty.

looks shiny and clean, but all that for 3 tenths of a gram of silver ?

I find this quite interesting, however from the investing side of the equation. Being that silver is used in so many applications, but it is rarely worth it to recover it by itself. Sure some does get recycled, but often it is either not identified correctly or is in consentrations (like items pictured above) that are too low to warrant the effort to retrieve it. If they were gold wires, .3 gram would by more like $15 instead of 30 cents of silver. Point being gold often times doesn't get wasted because its value is at a level that makes the effort to recover much more worthwhile. Much of the gold mined throughout history is still above ground while some of the mined silver is consitently being used and disposed. While getting some silver for free is nice, investing in it could be wise.

More than not the wires are Al some will be silver plated Cu

Eric