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From 1970’s radio equipment. And an old gas chromatograph. Lots of boards with what appears to be gold connectors. Big transformers, big capacitors, lots of silver colored wiring Newbies not sure how to proceed

The first two would need to be quoted out on reception they’re better than gold pin connector most of the time and not good enough for pin or peg board classing.
3rd photo, the green board is peripheral. The brown board is low grade UNLESS the etching is gold. Where it would definitely receive an upgrade, probably to peripheral.4th pic the GE board is peripheral and the boards with the big capacitors are low grade.
Last board is low grade. My suggestion is grab a set of slip jaw pliers and rip the pin connector off for clean gold pins, or if you don’t have slip jaws grab regular pliers and snap the boar. It would fall in line with the first two photos.

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-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

Thanks, that helps a little. The last pic that you said is low grade has a dozen of those shiny black circular components that are transistors with three gold plated legs.
We have some other GE boards from transceivers made in 1960’s and 70’s that have individual part numbers and names like Tone Board, Power Supply, Mute Function, phone dialer, etc. Does anyone buy those sorts of things to reuse or is scrap the only market?

midgrade
That second one....
Midgrade

Anyway the ones with the silver or nickel fingers will go as peripheral as long as they don’t have any transformers on them and have an IC of reasonable size.
Without an IC it’s hit or miss depending on other things
It’s very similar to pinball boards and organ boards I’ve sent to Chris. So I don’t see a problem.
Back to the second board. Normally in this age group and general class of boards the solder mask would be Lead. bUT! I have never seen a lead laydown so cleanly done. Ever. There’s a chance it’s silveride; silver alloyed with aluminium and/or nickel. Which with that amount could bump it to peripheral. On the other hand it could be an early use of tin and then maybe you’d get midgrade for it. I’m leaning to silveride and hence peripheral as it follows the etching to the edge connector (finger) and hence I’m leaning peripheral.

Stuff in this age group is always hard to classify, my suggestion is to post photos and we’ll all do our best but some things, like that second one, are ultimately going to need in hand inspection.

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-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

Thanks so much for the info. We are finally getting around to actually trying to sort and weigh our stacks of boards. I'll do my best to guestimate the grade and may post more pics with questions. Problem is, we have probably 200 pounds to look through...then we can figure if boardsort offer is worth the shipping cost.

You said a couple times that ultimately a hand inspection will be needed to classify. What if I guess really wrong?

For example, small comm board with big blue axial capacitors you said was likely low grade but it has a dozen or more thick gold-plated pins. Is it to my advantage to break off the pins to sell seperately, or do the pins make the whole board worth more?

does breaking things off the board make the board low-grade? We have several boards that have tiny silver-plated nickel components. Some of them we already broke off the shiny bits and have them in a jar, others still complete.