Many of the printed circuit boards we encounter have oscillators for timing. Some of those oscillators have gold edges leading scrappers to ask, “Is there really gold in there?”
The answer is YES!
This short post gives you an idea, but the real gem is in the associated YouTube video. In the video I take a deeper dive through these oscillators and see what’s inside.
The featured image above shows two gold edged oscillators circled in yellow. Zooming in on the oscillator to the lower right, we see the oscillator in greater detail. Normally we would remove the oscillator as shown in the video linked below and accumulate a large quantity of them before attempting to process them for the gold. For the purposes of this illustration, I have removed the metal cap over the gold-plated internal mechanism (Figure 2). Now we can see there really is a gold-plated internal structure to this component.
