Recovery walkthroughs
Reference · Recovery walkthroughs
Every walkthrough here is the same loop: take a part /guide already identified (e.g. an OSCAR /beta/identify hit), PPE up, use the mechanical route by default — and only the chemical refinements where your jurisdiction and environmental permit allow — then drop a weighed, photographed batch onto /boards for assayed yard quotes. All walkthroughs below cover the same loop end-to-end: gear up, take the part off the board, weigh and photograph the batch.
Available walkthroughs
Pick a procedure
All walkthroughs are live. Each card opens the full procedure: pre-flight checklist, PPE, tools, mechanical steps, the optional chemical refinement (clearly labelled as legal-where-permitted), verification at the yard, and the FAQ.
Recover gold from CPU pins: identify the part, suit up, mechanically strip the gold-plated pins (legal everywhere), or leach them with aqua regia (where legally permitted), then verify and list the lot at the yard.
Recover tantalum from electrolytic capacitors: identify the caps, suit up for Ta₂O₅ inhalation hazard, hot-air desolder with a two-tweezer lift, then verify, weigh, and list the batch. HF / HNO₃ refining only where legally permitted.
Recover gold from PCB edge connectors — RAM sticks, AGP / PCI / VLB risers, NICs, motherboard slot edges. Identify the card class (older SDRAM / AGP / VLB pay best, DDR4 often has none), snip-and-strip mechanical-only (legal everywhere), or leach with aqua regia where legally permitted, then verify, weigh, and list the batch.
Identify a stick of RAM, then funnel to the gold-finger path for the connector and the tantalum-cap path for on-stick SMD electrolytics — plus residual FR4 PCB value. A "category-of-one" walkthrough that consolidates prior guides.
Where this fits
From “identified” to “extracted”
The Component Guide stops at “what is this part — and what is it worth?”. OSCAR’s /beta/identify takes the next step — a phone photo in, a labelled part out. This hub starts from there: how do you actually take the part off the board, safely, in PPE, with the right tools, ending with a weighed and photographed batch ready to list.
Every walkthrough in this hub finishes at /boards. Yards on /boards see the same live Au / Ag / Ta snapshot that /prices publishes, so the moment your batch is weighed, it has a real quote path — no spreadsheets, no chasing. As a release queue adds more procedures (RAM, NIC, GPU, tantalum caps, palladium-rich fingers), they will land on this same hub.
Next step
Once the batch is weighed and photographed — a pin-stripped CPU lot, a desoldered tantalum-cap batch, or any optional chemical refinement where legally permitted — list it on /boards and let yards quote against the same live Au / Ag / Ta snapshot /prices uses. Reference this hub when you re-read the procedure before your next batch.
List your batch on the marketplace