All About Keyboard Mylars

Hello members,

Since I refine keyboard mylars for the silver they contain, I know a little bit about the yields and so forth and what can reasonably be expected per lb.

Every mylar is not made the same, nor do they contain the same amount of silver in them. As a matter of fact, some mylars don't contain silver at all, but are carbon. And some mylars have silver and carbon covering them, which can make recovering the silver very hard, but not impossible.



* There is an average of 78 mylars to equal 1 lb.
* 1 lb of mylars will yield around 12 - 15 grams of silver
* 1 lb of mylars will yield a different amount of silver than another mylar.
* It takes approximately 2 lbs of mylar to yield around 1 ozT of silver.

There are many types of mylars out there, and I have come across mylars that contain silver but I have no idea of what component they came out of. I'm going to post pictures of them and if someone can tell where they come out of, I'm going to compile that information so that way if I can get at least 2 lbs of them I can give an accurate yield data on them.

Some of the mylars I am processing right now I feel that if I had at least 2 lbs of them, they would probably yield more than 1 ozT of silver.

I also had some rectangular sheets sent to me that are 100% silver on one side of them. No lines or anything else, just the whole thing coated with silver. I'm sure those will yield around 1ozT of silver from just 1 lb of them. I wish I had more to determine the yields.

When I process them for others it's hard to tell which types yields what amount due to not having at least 1 - 2 lbs of that type. So, when I process them, I combine them all together, but, if I have pounds of a particular type (standard keyboards, PBX phones, etc,.) I do process them separately so I can get the yields from them.


Kevin

I was thinking the other day of a possible way of estimating the silver content per sheet, but of course there are a lot of variables and technical expertise that I don't have so I'm not sure how accurate it would be.

First, thickness of the tracings would have to be determined. This is one of the problems because an average would have to be used most likely.
Second, place the mylars into a scanner and export into a graphics or other type of program to determine the area of the tracings some how. This ends up with problems such as tracings on both sides running across each other, and also non-transparent mylars.

This is just an idea I had, but thought it could maybe turn into something useful.

Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

Ok your own math doesn't add up. You said 78 mylars were aprox a pound and that pound would yield 12 to 15 grams of silver. So if we take 12grams and devide that by 78 mylars you get .15 grams of silver per mylar not .05 Also I went out back and weighed the mylars I had taken out from random keyboard and I get closer to 50 mylars per pound.

Averages my friend. Averages. Take the same keyboard mylars (if you have them) and get a total of 1 lb. Once you get 1 lb of them, count how many you have. You'll have between 70 - 84 keyboards. From all the mylars I've processed and weighed, the average amount of the SAME mylars is 78 sheets.

I just now took random mylars from my pile and weighed them to 1 lb. From the random sheets I weighed, I came up with 60 sheets. So, right now, it looks like there are on average, counting 60 and your 50, we can say there's an average of 55 mylars per lb of random mylars.

So, my math has been based on the same exact sheets and not random sheets. I'll do more random sheets and see what I average from doing it that way. But, as I mentioned before, you'll get an average of 78 sheets per lb using the same exact mylars.

As far as the amount of silver per mylar, your math would be correct. I used the data from another source where refining is discussed. I'll go back and review the data again and if needed, ask them to make a correction to the amount listed. That would mean that 50 mylars will yield 0.24 - 0.3 grams per mylar at 12 - 15 grams total.

I'll recheck those numbers again to make sure, but the data per mylar isn't on the top of the data chart. I'm interested in what is actually recovered per lb. From there an average per mylar can be better calculated.

Since I have plenty of mylars, I'm going to weigh more random mylars to see the weights of them, and I'll do some more of the same mylars (I did 4 separate lbs already) to get more weight data.

Thanks for the input. I'll go recheck my other source to make sure I'm not calculating incorrectly.

Kevin

Originally Posted by jghilino

Thats why i buy and sell them by the sheet, it pays alot better than doing it by the pound. There is alot of variance in the sheets, mainly in surface area coverage, it ranges from 20% to 50% so i buy and sell accordingly.

Did you get my email?

And you're correct. There are too many variances in any particular mylar compared to the next one.

Kevin

Originally Posted by jghilino

Thats why i buy and sell them by the sheet, it pays alot better than doing it by the pound. There is alot of variance in the sheets, mainly in surface area coverage, it ranges from 20% to 50% so i buy and sell accordingly.

Why not tell what you buy them for (low grade vs hi-grade) and show photos of the different grades?

Kevin

Originally Posted by mrmylar

Hello members,

Since I refine keyboard mylars for the silver they contain, I know a little bit about the yields and so forth and what can reasonably be expected per lb.

Every mylar is not made the same, nor do they contain the same amount of silver in them. As a matter of fact, some mylars don't contain silver at all, but are carbon. And some mylars have silver and carbon covering them, which can make recovering the silver very hard, but not impossible.

* There is an average of 78 mylars to equal 1 lb.
* 1 lb of mylars will yield around 12 - 15 grams of silver
* 1 lb of mylars will yield a different amount of silver than another mylar.
* It takes approximately 2 lbs of mylar to yield around 1 ozT of silver.

There are many types of mylars out there, and I have come across mylars that contain silver but I have no idea of what component they came out of. I'm going to post pictures of them and if someone can tell where they come out of, I'm going to compile that information so that way if I can get at least 2 lbs of them I can give an accurate yield data on them.

Some of the mylars I am processing right now I feel that if I had at least 2 lbs of them, they would probably yield more than 1 ozT of silver.

I also had some rectangular sheets sent to me that are 100% silver on one side of them. No lines or anything else, just the whole thing coated with silver. I'm sure those will yield around 1ozT of silver from just 1 lb of them. I wish I had more to determine the yields.

When I process them for others it's hard to tell which types yields what amount due to not having at least 1 - 2 lbs of that type. So, when I process them, I combine them all together, but, if I have pounds of a particular type (standard keyboards, PBX phones, etc,.) I do process them separately so I can get the yields from them.


Kevin

"I also had some rectangular sheets sent to me that are 100% silver on one side of them. No lines or anything else, just the whole thing coated with silver. I'm sure those will yield around 1ozT of silver from just 1 lb of them. I wish I had more to determine the yields."


Are these the single sheets found inside some LCD computer monitors?

Actually, I don't know what they came out of. But if I had to guess, I'd say maybe a monitor of some type or an iPad. I'm going to take pictures of the exotic mylars I have so I can get more data on them.

Kevin

Originally Posted by mrmylar

Actually, I don't know what they came out of. But if I had to guess, I'd say maybe a monitor of some type or an iPad. I'm going to take pictures of the exotic mylars I have so I can get more data on them.

Kevin

I have some touchscreen POS units that have a mylar over the touch screen. Tracing is on the outside around the screen.

Originally Posted by ryanw

I have some touchscreen POS units that have a mylar over the touch screen. Tracing is on the outside around the screen.

It sounds like I have some of those too. Can you upload a picture of the device and mylar?

Kevin

As Auminer said... and here's another pic..of a mylar.



Sirscrapalot - "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."- Einstein

I've thrown so many of those away, what else am I supposed to do with them??

the deal I saw on ebay was a lot of 50 that sold for $1.25 and cost over $5.00 to ship. big loss there.