Regarding the 90s era Motorola phones, do you have any idea of the model numbers? I purchased about 30 non-working "older" Motorolas and they do seem to be fairly well appointed with gold but I'm not sure it's what you are talking about. Also, you say the ones you are referring to are worth $50 in scrap, but how and where? At $13.5/lb for cellphone boards they would have to be four pounds to get $50 from BS. Do I need to send directly to a refiner? Are they graded differently from other cellphone boards?

TLDR: skip to last paragraph.

The phones are about 4-6lbs whole without battery (apx 10 total).
You’re looking for the MicroTAC series. The original late 80s early 90s flip down mic brick phones.
The smaller the model number the better.
The earliest (88-90) are extreme in gold content. Gold plated silver wires. Solid gold antenna. 18kt battery contacts. The boards are double layer sandwiched, thick gold. A thin outer flashing as well.
Yes, we’re talking refiner for the board (or a scrap company with a contract to one).
We’re way outside of what boardsort can set apart for: because a, so rare to find in the US these days and b, they aren’t a refiner.

The prices have come down a little bit (buyers market!) but I see only 1 sub-300 series sale on ebay for over $170.

The 300-800 series are worth around $25-$30 in scrap, a slight increase for working.
Those in the 1000 series plus tend to scrap out around $20 but can be sold in working order for $50+

The catch here is you are almost always better selling the phone whole. They are still in use all over the world. Parts are readily available, the large format and wide lands and holes makes soldering easy even for beginners.
And working they start at $50 or so even beat to hell and back.
Then again: find one with a box and call an auction company. With a box and manual… a large one.
And if you have it all, box, phone, working nicad Motorola battery, manual, safety card, registration card …
Call the big boys. One sold last year cib for $1800
A near complete 550 set sold on ebay in September for 180.
Heritage sole a partial with box 220 for $945.

Then again, the 2000k range and above, are about $50 new.
The 5500, 8230, and 9504 are the three most common in use today. $40-$60 new. $10-$25 as scrap

Find yourself a 101 or 120… they’re worth over $200 in scrap, but much more if it’s a recognisable phone to the collectors’ market.
You’ll occasionally see a 080 in the wild but those are thousands of dollars as the original 1987-1988 local test sales. The mobo is a solid piece of aluminium with thick apx 12kt gold alloy layers. Solid gold wires. A palladium antenna cable. Etc.

Retro, yep, I can go on forever


After all this. You find one below the 900 series and you can pull it apart. Board excluded the various wires (carefully stripped), shields, and connectors and contacts, can be sold to most non-mall jewellers. The boards, if one or two, you may get a coin shoppe interested. They are worth, on paper, up to about $75-$90 high end in scrap. Though $30-$60 is the norm. You’ll find the post 1998 2000+ series easily on almost any foreign shopping or auction site. So keep that in mind. Find those lower models though, and pay attention.

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Wow, thanks for the knowledge dump! If you have any more information about specific items to look for (desktops, laptops, TVs; if there are any tablets or iPads with reasonable circuit boards) feel free to lay it on me (well, everyone here I suppose). In the meantime, I picked up a bunch of older Motorola phones; the i series; i35 up to i1000plus; 2003-2006 roughly. 32 phones yielded just under 2lbs. Even with all of the information you gave, it was still difficult to determine how old the phones were until I actually had them in hand. I attached a picture of some of the circuit boards. Since there were duplicates I was able to put two of the same thing next to each other showing the front and back. As you can see, there are a lot of gold bits gold rimmed capacitors some tantalums, etc... but the boards themselves for the most part were fairly unimpressive. I'm also including picture of about 20 g or so of gold plated material that was not part of the boards. Looking at the image of the circuit boards, do you think they could be worth any more than the per pound board sort price?
P. S. I have three "original" Blackberries on the way. I'll post them once I have taken them apart.

Your in the stuck and candy bar era.
Unfortunately the bucket isn’t quite what it appears.

The bad news
The rivets are brass.
The brackets have gold, but even I don’t fret over placing them in the brass bucket. (We’re talking 1000ths of a percent!).

The good.
I haven’t sent any in a while but boardsort did have a non-listed category for gold micro-caps and COs etc and the little microphones would probably qualify for that. Email Chris to find out if they still do.

The great.
The contact posts are gold plated pins. Toss the lands in with them.

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Most things that would be the biggest abnormal scrap outs tend to already have a dedicated collector’s market. Phones, game systems, minicomputers.
As examples:
Hand held “tablet” pen computers from the late 80s and early 90s.
8-bit computers prior to 1982/3
Bag phones from the mid-late 80s
Very early plasma TVs and monitors
HR projection units from the early 80s back.
Digital programmable calculators from the 70s
But these are all generally worth more as a dead example than as scrap.

Hifi audio equipment. There’s a reason a mcintosh mx200-series costs $9K with a surprising cost of production around 8000-8200!
But again, a dead one is gonna get you around a grand. And selling parts that are tested can push real close to retail.

Honestly the best shot for a scrap cash out is no-name computers from two distinct generations.
8-bit systems from 77-82ish gold leg 8080/8086 knockoffs were plentiful and gold cap gold leg chips are fairly easy to find. And again from 1989-1992. Gold cap PGAs were very common.

The other often overlocked area is digital typewriters and “word processing systems”. From the mid-70s to the early 80s most digital typewriters used dips sockets with gold pin chips.

Those word processors (especially any with a floppy disk drive) were full of kool (and expensive) stuff. You’re stuck with a tube monitor to get rid of though. AND there is a bit of a retro market growing for them today as micro BSDs and real-time Linux options allow for skilled reprogramming.

Early electric pinball machines and electro-mechanical ones are full of silver. But, the market. Same thing with early electric organs (organs, not keyboards).

Electronic tubes are always worth cash but selling is hit and miss because many contain not just high value metals (gold, platinum, rhodium, palladium) but also mercury.
Speaking of, mercury is currently quite valuable but nobody appears to want to pay for it. Go figure!

You can be a bit daring. Go old.
Microwave ovens (ones the size of a commercial convection oven) have a load of pm. And gigantic mercury thermometers.

Mainframe equipment can be fairly inexpensive by pound. But you have to lug it. Often day of sale. And, well, a LOT of lead. But there’s a LOT of silver and copper and gold as well. (I buy true mainframe and early mini- equipment based on lead weight value).

Electric cash registers rarely work, the collectors market is brand specific, and they have quite a bit of copper and silver in them. Occasionally gold lands for the keys.

I wonder how many bulbs I’d have to scrap to make cash off the tungsten filaments? lol.

If you live in non-urban Pacific Northwest… feel free to dig up your yard and refine the soil. Some of the richest gold deposits at ground level.

You know there’s even gold in the human body right. But I don’t suggest refining corpses from the cemetery. That’s just rude. And expensive. Know how much acl it… er.

My getting crazy point is the same I make all over this site. Think outside the box!
Why pay to buy a phone to scrap when someone just tossed a broken (sport team here) florescent sign on the curb. That the trash company won’t pick up. Take the light tubes, taped over the ends, to a home goods store for free recycling

Don’t pay 1.99 for a thrift clock. Buy a $2 electric junk box instead at the yard/garage/patio sale.

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