HP board "gold recovery" garbage

[systems_glitch]

I know folks get bent out of shape over board scrap listings, but like Will
said, there's actual money in those boards. It's my opinion that it
benefits the hobby to have scrappers listing stuff on eBay rather than just
putting them in the next Gaylord to go to the gold refiner guy. Of course,
I'd still rather have the whole machine get saved, but this stuff *is* junk
to 99% of the population.

I buy a lot of board scrap, both online and from clients, to either recover
parts for reuse, or to refurb boards (if they're in good enough shape). A
lot of it really is otherwise junk (boards from low volume custom
applications, stuff that's had catastrophic failures, etc.) and the scrap
guys for the most part don't really know the difference between "really is
junk" and "is something people want and will pay money for."

Jay, if you're really willing to pay out $300 for the one board, I'll see
if I can't acquire this lot of scrap too. I have no personal interest in HP
stuff, so anyone else wanting some is free to buy it. I won't try and get
it unless folks here are wanting to split it up though.

Thanks,
Jonathan

On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 11:29 AM Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> On 01/23/2019 08:20 PM, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
> > I learn something  new  then... when   was  palladium used?   was it
> around in  the  2100  hp  days or  was this   used  later?   and  I had not
> heard of  it?
> >
> If palladium was used, it was in VANISHINGLY small
> quantities.  Many circuit boards use palladium to seed the
> plating in the plated-through holes.  But, the amounts there
> are in the micrograms for a whole board.  I suspect if
> palladium was used in multilayer caps that it was used for
> the same purpose, a wash over the surface of the capacitor
> material, allow it to dry and then electroplate with the
> desired electrode material.  They'd probably use a couple
> milligrams at most on each layer of a capacitor sheet, which
> would eventually be cut up into hundreds of thousands of caps.
> Some high-value MLCs can have 20 layers or so, so that would
> be milligrams * 20 / 100,000.
> Not a hell of a lot of palladium would be in an entire board
> full of them.
>
> Jon
>