These "gold fingers" are often bought by amateur chemists, who using a blend of household cleaning products and hardware appliances, refine the gold to almost .999 purity.
These gold components are, despite appearances, not "ripe" with gold. Yes, refining gold fingers is easier than refining ore, but that doesn't mean it is "full" of gold. It will take hundreds of pounds of computers to get even close to an ounce of gold.
In you have the time and patience to collect about ten of pounds of these gold fingers, home refiners will be willing to pay you upwards of $300. Even a pound of fingers will likely draw $30 dollars. Each pound of gold fingers usually contains at least 1.5 grams of gold.
These scrap gold fingers can be found in many high grade electronics. For example, inside of flat screen TVs, computer motherboards, daughter boards (PCIs) and in some printers.
To get the most money from these components, you need to include a detailed picture which shows how "clean" they are.
To "clean" the gold fingers, you must cut them as close to the gold plating as possible. There should be no other types of electrical components; or in other words, just gold and green.
To cut gold fingers away from whatever green boards you have, the best tool would of course be a band saw, followed second by any type of saw you favorite. I have cut them off with an old rusted pair of tin snips, but that never worked very well. If you do not have any type of saw you want to use, you can always find a strait edge, then score along the edge of the gold with a razor, then break off with vice grips, a vice, pliers, hammer, ect.
To summarize, Gold Fingers are:
- Refined similar to CPUs and Motherboards, except it is easier to do for amateur chemists.
- Valued at at least $30 per pound.
- Can be collected from high grade electronics: flat screen TV, computer motherboards, PCIs, printers, ect.
- Should be "cleaned" properly if you want to get payed the best prices
- Can be cut best with a band saw. If no saw is available score with a razor a few times, and break off with a vice.
For more information on scrapping a computer, hard drives, CD DVD drives, motherboards, and most any other electronics, check out How To Scrap Apart A Computer.
Try closer to the value of $80 to $100 per pound of fingers. Average is 2.5 Grams of gold in 1 pound of fingers. Thats only 12.5 Pounds of fingers for 1 troy ounce of gold.
ReplyDelete@Tony Yes, I understand that that the gold in the scrap fingers is worth more than $30 per pound. But If you are not refining it, just selling them, you can't expect $80 per pound. I will however include as a footnote the gold density of the fingers.
ReplyDeletefirst off im glad i found this site. thanks for puttin all this info up on here. iv got a bunch of circuit boards and some of them have the gold fingers. i need to cut them off. is a bandsaw really a way to cut them off? how would i hold the circuit board still? put it in a vice?
ReplyDeleteYes, a bandsaw seems to be the best way, in my opinion. You would cut them off just like you would cut anything else with a bandsaw; so, no, there would be no vice necessary. My guess is that you may have bandsaw confused with sawzall? Either way, if you don't have a band saw, the next easiest way to cut them is to grab the gold fingers in a vice, score the board with a razor blade a few times, and then snap the gold fingers off in the vice. Good Luck Scrapping!
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