Welcome to Boardsort™ - Learn - Sell - Profit -

Gteat list mls.
One more thing to look for is rhodium. Surprisingly it hides in plain sight in the least likely of places. Such as low grade boards. Except inside sealed equipment or as bonding wire in ic chips it will almost always be a rhodium nickel alloy at 80/20 ni/rh. Known as "transport rhodium" it trades around $580/oz right now.
So called low grade boards from The 70s-90s are full of rhodium. And many people, including recyclers, are unaware of it.
Boardsort and others, who do know, tend to not concern themselves with it because if the sorting work involved in finding and verifying it.
But if you are stripping your own boards like you intend to the extra time it takes to test out is worth it. I've received over $50 each for stripping down old vhs and betamax players. Old server power supplies are another great source. Anything pre 1990 intended for extended high temperature use. Old music amps, speakers, stereo equipment etc. Crack open ancient brick power supplies.

I'll post a photo later to give an example. One I'm working on now. It will look like standard silver or nickel plated brass/copper but have a slightly blue-pink tint to it. Especially under florescent lights.

Good call on saving the black top of the bga chips! Are you going to refine them yourself?

Whats your name over on goldrefiningforum?

my user name in the gold refining forum is kikesound but haven`t post yet you has to be a chemical guy to talk there. been reading for a few months when have the time. maybe i wil refine small quantities to get some experience. dont want to risk much while learning.in videos it look very easy even the panning, but in my first paning i made a mess ant took some time to spot the gold bonding wires they are smaller than i spected. pathnor sold me his guides and they are very friendly to understand. its exiting wuen you store some gold that finded yourself (gold fever) But! if the gold keep going up like seen right now!!!!maybe i stop the idea of refining and keep selling the storage.

To the guy asking about tant and monolithic caps. I don't know what dude's talking about the idea bouncing around, they do buy those things. It's not much tho, monolithic caps are like 2 or 3 bucks a pound, and tant is about $15/lb for the small square ones.

Thanks for the update... When I asked (a couple years ago) Bruce seemed pretty firm in his stance, so I never bothered to ask him since. Could be that he is willing to buy them, just doesn't want to promote stripping them from the boards... Or maybe that he now has a buyer that he didn't before.

When I asked late last year i was told no because they don't want people devaluing boards and they didn't have a buyer for them at that time.
There's a somewhat lengthy thread somewhere that has suggestions for buyers on both. Try searching for it.

What any buyer takes them as varies but palladium heavy is $4.20-4.50 today and clean tan is 13.70-14.20 my guess is capacitors would fall into a breakage level so expect 25-50% less. I don't have a listing for it.

that`s why i only depopulate tantalum o mono-ceramic from certain boards. On telco or pcb i leave them intact to avoid downgrade, but there are lots of tiny boards(lou grade) that i pop out those capacitors and still selling them like low grade boards. here are the boards in mention.
Regards,,,,, Luis

The first picture are all midgrade.
The second looks like mixed motherboards.

Directed at lostinlodos. Your post about the rhodium on this thread was interesting. I'm looking at a low grade board I have now and it looks similar to the pic you posted. Are those usually rhodium bearing coils or is it few and far between type of thing. My board also came out of a vhs player. Take a look and tell me what you think. I'd be very interested to start a new collection jar :) especially since it's off a low grade. Thanks.

It's not the coil but the metal bars. Jumpers, crossovers, relays etc.
Under N on the top board looks promising.
How dark it is compared to the rest. But equally it could be a dull nickel or steel.
The only way to know for sure is to scan it or hit it with acid. I use a platinum test kit. Rhodium won't react at all. I'll post the exact formula in a bit when I get down in my dungeon (er, workshop).