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Plated fingered voltage ribbons, say for CD/DVD drives, HDD, and older components on boards; can I cut them like gold fingers to refine?
Also, what actual precious metals are on the ends?
Gold/Silver/Tin/Platinum/Nickel?

You can always remove ends. Excluding gold boardsort has no interest in connectors either way.
Never remove components from boards though without posting to the forum first. Component removal can turn a low telco board into peripheral or midgrade very quickly. It will destroy cell phone and hard drive board value of the wrong thing is removed.

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I mean the white ribbons that carry the low voltage power to either the ele motor, optical readers, and board itself. Sometimes they're yellow or black as well. Is that not gold plating or is that manganese?
If I choose to harvest anything off a board it's mine for the keeping. IF, I do turn to sell it when I'm done with harvesting, It's in a separate container and I always let Chris or the guys know.

The connectors are usually brass but I’ve seen both gold plate and nickel. Low voltage wires are usually actually aluminium. Larger mixed intake yards that sort wire types will have a class for aluminium wire for that reason. A low cost solution for very low voltage.

Ultimately Chris and boardsort don’t class wire ends in their wire rates. So removing headers from wires themselves is a non issue.
As for the boards, as long as you keep modified boards separate it is ohkay for those that bring them in manually. You’ve seen how quickly both Chris and I jump on photos of modified or acid treated boards.
So for the general public as long as you’re up front about it nobody is really worried.
Just keep in mind removing items from boards without specifically being told to do so will often lower the value class of the board.

I don’t have one to demonstrate but as an extreme example I can remove three specific chips from a V Gear WiMAX controller that would get high telco and turn it into peripheral.
Pulling BGA flatpacks from a motherboard will quickly dump it to peripheral; more than two or three large ones and it’s off to midgrade class.

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I'll be posting pictures of material soon. I'm updating phones. Give me a couple days I'll take some shots of the flat ribbon wires I'm speaking of so you can take a peak.
Oh , ya. Years ago I learned the hard way at the old Boardsort facility when I depopulated/harvested every board I got and went to sell it, haha. Lesson learned. Every flatpack, tantalum cap, MLCC, oscillator, and pretty much anything I saw with gold fever.

Thanks, lost