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Good Afternoon,

I'm curious as to what the blue, red and black boxes are on this board. I'm pretty sure the black cylinders are capacitors (can these be sold at all?). I cut one of the blue ones open, they are plastic filled and contain both magnetic and non mag metal. The black ones contain what appears to be many sheets of aluminum foil and haven't cut a red one.

Any ideas?

Thanks - Rob

The black ones may be contacts and those have silver contacts.

Relays

Are relays worth saving? Do they all contain silver?

There is no good easy answer to that.
If they're silver... probably not. Some use gold. Some have rhodium. Others are even worse; in value. Copper. Tin. Zinc. STEEL!
Then there's the order ones and foreign cheapies. The term.... sealed glass mercury arsenic comes to mind.
And then there is the plastic shell to deal with. Those aren't standard computer polymers. like pp or abs. They are designed to Withstand 100°c temps 100+ amps. And cross board voltage spikes exceeding 500 volts at ± polarity. The plastic is very bad for you,pets, and the environment. Far more so than the metals inside could be.

So now that your afraid :
My cutoff has always been at ½ inch. Anything smaller is worthless on its own...to me.
If you can read the numbers by all means type it into Google. (Hence my size limits) beryllium, rhodium platinum etc go for well over $5 each with no work involved beyond slicing them from the board. no breaking or refining involved.
Boardsort doesn't buy them but refineries will. If your local yard takes high end precious metals (were talking over $1500/oz like rhodium or camsmith alloys ) . Some jewelry dealers or diamond buyers may take the better ones since they deal in high pm materials directly with refineries.
Simple dropping them in a jar of acid like gold pins etc will only get you dead.

I've been working on computers for over 20 years and gave up on them /long/ ago when rhodium was still over 5k an ounce.
Doesn't stop me from looking up the occasional part number though. ;)

Ohkay first STOP CUTTING OPEN WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW. even those aluminium capacitors have toxic stuff in the oil. I sell all caps as aluminium #3 (aka old aluminum or heavy break) or copper #3 depending on the film top cap.
Any board higher than mid grade your loosing money by removing stuff. (One you posted is midgrade)

I took a couple more pictures of the items I was describing. I've been an electrician for 20 years and have never seen a relay like this before. Relays I'm familiar with have copper coils and moving parts. These devices have what appears to be layers of aluminum foil in a curved shape, poured over with some type of phenolic (?) type resin. Solid state like. I got these boards from a defunct Powerware UPS system.

I have also included one of the main board from one of the servers I took apart. Is this adequately stripped down? Can I make more from more dismantling? Or did I already go too far?

Also, I would never cut open a capacitor. I may be dumb but I'm not stupid.

Thanks for the help,

Rob

Message

Subject: Plastic Boxes


The board... you went too far. I think there's enough left to still get single socket but I'm just guessing.
Best advice given is that low grade and mid grade (mid-low) you can strip to your heart's desire. Anything above that you're probably loosing money.

Remove large heatsincs and wires. Any attached boards.

I'm not an electrician so I'm the first to say i don't understand /how/. Just the general what and why. But yes solid state. The comon copper and silver ones go for something like 5c and 25c a pound so it's turned out to be a futile exercise in giving away money when mid runs 25-30c and low @10-15c
Most turned out to be tin.
furthest I've gotten with the help of the friendly people at my local yard is the majority of it is a ferrite /hematite ceramic powder. Worth around 3c a pound. That. Powder is added to some form of plastic res that is cured to make the relay.
The best ones if seen are on Asus /asrock high end gaming boards. Gigabyte blue boards. And HP btx boards. Dell has always been an experiment in doing the Most with the lowest cost materials. Even the gold pins and contacts are so lightly plated it costs More in acid to melt than the recovery value.

If you're not refining your own PM there's nothing on a mobo to remove that will pay out better in the short term on it's own.