Fiberglass Chemistry for the Dummy Gold Collector

Fimerglass PC board

You gotta love eHow; assuming, of course, that you are one of the people who love misinformation and half-baked kludges of other people's knowledge. Take, for instance, the article entitled "What Dissolves Fiberglass Resin?" by Leaf Group niche site Hunker.com's Matthew Anderson, a musician who claims to have majored in chemical engineering (but seems far more at home with video games). 

Back when gold was closing in on $2000 per ounce, lots of people wanted to dissolve printed circuit boards to extract tiny amounts of gold - but they didn't know how to dissolve the resin holding the minuscule glass fibers together. Well, according to Matt's post, it's so easy a child could do it with chemicals found under the bathroom sink. Yep, Matt tells us...

"Most strong acids can dissolve polyester resin, but they have little to no impact on epoxy resin. Strong acids include acetic acid, carbolic acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid and sulfuric acid." ...and also tells us... "Most strong bases dissolve polyester resin, but do not affect epoxy resin. Strong bases include potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide." Interesting information, all, except for one thing: according to The Engineering Toolbox, polyester resin is resistant to acetic acid, nitric acid, and weak to moderate concentrations of sulfuric acid. It's also resistant to sodium hydroxide. So, which is it???

So, dear Dumbass of the Day, did you not bother to pull that engineering handbook off the shelf before publishing this bullshit? We thought so. Note that in reality, there's a wide variety of both polyester and epoxy resins, with a similarly wide variety of solubility parameters. You would – duh – need to know the specs of the resin used as binder on the circuit boards to be able to choose a method of dissolving it.

copyright © 2015-2022 scmrak

DD - CHEMISTRY