Welcome to Boardsort™ - Learn - Sell - Profit -

I got tons of Cisco routers, cloud storage, and other devices. Many of the boards are telecom but have transformers and other heavy junk on them. I'm wondering if they are worth breaking off the junk to get a telecom price or what these are worth as is. Any input is appreciated.

As a very general statement.
Removing junk. Always helps to upgrade or maintain the grade of a PCB in question.
Large transformers,metal brackets, heat sinks,metal standoffs,heavy shielding. Those are not friendly items to leave on a PCB you intend for a High Telecom grade. Or single or multisocket server motherboards.
Now. Is it worth it to clean? Only you know your own labor costs.
Intuitively. I would think yes. But. I also have never dealt with a ton of PCBs I had to sort and process.
Here to learn like everybody else.
My evaluations are my own opinion.

The ports you can leave on since those have some gold pins - the heat sinks, transformers, face plates, anything steel, etc... can come off to upgrade the board

Gonna rephrase some of what's been said first.

Boardsort generally expects a board to qualify for a circuit board category after you make sure:

if something is socketed or plugged into the board, take it off (batteries, RAM, CPUs, PCI cards, peripheral boards, etc.)**Not ICs**
if there is a case/housing, remove the board from it
if it can be unscrewed/unpinned and taken off, do so (heatsinks, braces, SSDs, wifi cards)
if there are large steel/aluminum pieces that are a good chunk of the weight of the board, remove them
if there are wires/cables, plastic or glass, remove it

Otherwise they may fall into a teardown category or drop significantly in the $/lb.

Performing additional work on acceptable boards (above) generally isn't recommended, especially if you're learning still. If it's not covered by the above and is soldered to the board leave it. If you're not sure, post pictures and ask.

Second, these types of switches/networking gear always feels borderline on telco to me. Board 1 may cross that but I'm leaning toward not for the rest. Go ahead and clean them up to get them to the acceptable as circuit boards point and repost pictures.

_________________
Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort