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PostPosted: Mon Jul 08, 2019 7:48 am 

Joined: Sat May 25, 2019 11:05 pm
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Time isn't a big issue for me, so is it worth it to depopulate entire boards and sell the individual components as opposed to just sorting the entire boards and selling that way?


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 08, 2019 8:36 am 
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Generally no.
That said you’ve got two depopulation concepts.
For the majority of people
Computer boards post 1996ish DP never work out in your favour for services like Boardsort.
Late 80s to mid 90s. Ceramic IC era. 50/50. Just keep an eye on telco pricing. A server or minicomputer motherboard that would be $10 per pound can quickly fetch much more for gold pin dip ICs. Unix minicomputers and servers are popular with refiners AND scrappers because they can have a fair amount of soldered gold-caps you can flip to boardsort at the lowest gold cap rate even without the pins.
Mid 80s and older. Mixed . Could be worthless junk low grade which is generally worth dissecting anyway if you have the time anyway. Or a gold mine.
Or
If you have a scrap buyer for each individual component you’ll often make more stripping on anything lower than low telco/Gold finger card.
CMCs at up to $18 per pound. Canister capacitors at 45č. Resisters at 30č. Plastic ICs at $1.25-$2.50. Ceramic ICs at $2-$6. Transformers at 30č-60č.
Go far enough and CLEAN gold flashing at $400 per lb. silver flashing at $4-$6 per pound. Nickel runs $4-$6 per pound. Silver at $8 per ounce. Tin at $2-$3 per pound. Copper at $1-$4 depending on class and form.

My answer, then? For the vast majority of people don’t strip boards. You’ll loose money. If you have time and are into refining and cleaning materials... I suggest striping low and mid boards. You can melt copper and tin etc with a high powered heat gun. Anyone with a MAP tank (rare now) can melt just about anything, and with current MAAP and MAPP torches, commonly mis-claimed to be MAP, very little of what is on a computer board is out of melt reach. Some caution and knowledge (check out gold refiners’ forum) you can clean down most metals.
I don’t deal with gold, it’s too much red tape. Brass is a pain in the arse as it’s an alloy, and I’ve not the knowledge nor care to refine that.
But I do melt copper, tin, silver, etc. Thing I know from some minor chem-testing are clean or mostly clean.

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Last edited by lostinlodos on Mon Jul 08, 2019 4:40 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 15, 2019 3:33 pm 

Joined: Sat May 25, 2019 11:05 pm
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I've been keeping heatsinks for the aluminum. I melt it down for sand casting. Same for any copper I've gotten from like a couple of Xbox 360 and laptop coolers. I've pulled some copper off low grade boards cause from what I can tell, they aren't worth shipping and not worth the gas to sell em at a scrap yard.

Just watching e-waste Ben got me wondering if it'd be worth it to chisle off all the ic, flats, etc and sort it to sell as gold pins, processors, etc.


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PostPosted: Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:35 pm 
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Just keep in mind Ben is in Australia. The markets are very different there AND while they use Dollars their dollars are not equal to ours.
I’ve mentioned before I generally strip low and mid boards. The stripped value can be considerably more if you can move all the components yourself. Peripheral tends to be more or less break even. Some really high level peripheral can fetch more stripped but you will usually come out the same or close.
The value takes into account the amount of work required to prep a board for commercial recovery. That’s why there’s a big jump from peripheral and motherboards to the next set of classes.
They (the refinery) tend to manually pull liquid capacitors and steel and feed boards into the system. On a peripheral board or a motherboard, that’s a bit of work. On a memory card or hard drive controller, that’s no work at all.

Now at the small level, like boardsort, or us selling to them, removing stuff won’t make a bit of difference in the grade 99% of the time.
But when you consider 50 tonnes from boardsort get added to 500000 tonnes on the feeder you can understand why a hard drive board or memory card or ram has the value it does.

You’re not going to make a motherboard telco class. So I strip the penny boards. ICs, copper, etc alone can make it worth the effort. With boardsort and locally.

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