Merkman wrote:
any of the low grade picking is more of an educational and destressing tool for me anyway....
i can relate to that :P
What is your 'shred' rate... the yards by me have a 'steel shred' rate (at about 5-6 cents/lb), is that the kind of rate you are talking about? In which case it is easier to justify the break down of the low grade boards. It would be relativily easy to go after any large transducers/tranformers, IC chips and aluminum... other then that, there really isnt much of value on low grade boards.
Silver contacts are usually found in switches that are high voltage or high heat applications... and even then not worth much. A gram of silver is $0.55 if pure, so silver plated stuff and alloyed stuff is hardly worth going after unfortunately. And to be honest, the only place that I have found silver in quantities worth recovering is in the brazing of bonding wires in IC chips... and only because I need to get the silver out of solution to refine the gold.
I would say that if you are pulling off the copper coils, the aluminum heat sinks and IC chips if there are any, that you are getting 80-90% of the value on low grade brown boards... they very rarely have much in the way of gold or silver that are easily recoverable.