Welcome to Boardsort™ - Learn - Sell - Profit -

More whiz-dumb from Meowpher the 10th, or let the cat get your tongue.
Lostinlodos made a post a few days/weeks/months ago, (wow, at my age, looking at the calendar is like speed-reading a novel: while I am mentally still processing 1984, the writing on the wall says it is 2026) concerning scrap metals , and how the larger buyers are more picky in the classification of the grades they buy. Lost pointed ot that a small amount of contaminate, ie, a different metal can ruin a whole batch. I think the topic concerned disposal of capacitors mixed in higher grades of Aluminum.
Different yards may buy the same material in differing classes, depending on who they sell to. Your local yard may buy anything aluminum as old sheet and cast, with extrusions, clips, painted, clips, sheet, everything thrown into the same hopper.
Others have more categories, each bought separately, at different prices, depending on who their buyer is and how picky that company is. But when you get to the big boys, they have narrow classifications.
Since aluminum is not profitable to ship to Boardsort, it makes sense to sell it locally.
You may have read some of my escapades with antminer hashboards, and the learning curve involved in removing 120 aluminum heatsinks from each board, and there were about 1800 boards, or was it only 1200?
The first batch I cleaned, I got 850 pounds of aluminum extrusions which a local bigboy yard bought at about 65 cents a pound, calling it 6061, but that was a dime or so lower than the usual price, as it had some small capacitors (about the size of a pencil eraser) and the bits of copper/chip/an etc stuck on some of the sinks.
Some weeks/months later, I had another couple hundred pounds, and I took them to another smaller yard in a different county, since I heard this smaller place bought e-scrap. (Turns out, they didn't really want a lot of e-scrap, but handled some because there was no other place for their clocal customers. They bought the heatsinks as extrusions, at 84 cents per pound, but only offered 18 cents a pound for powersupply boards, and only had one grade for all motherboards, telcom,. finger boards, etc, that basically amounted to about 10 percent of the actual value. So, I have no reason to go the extra 50 miles just to sell heatsinks.
I took another 130 pounds of heatsinks back to the bigboy yard in Chattanooga two weeks ago. In the express scale line, for smaller loads (This yard unloads tractor trailer loads mainly, with hundreds of tons of bare bright copper in stranded the size of a man's leg). Another guy was weighing the material at the express scale, and wrote my aluminum up at $1.31 per pound. $170 for a trash can full of aluminum.
That inspired me to jump on the remaining 300 or so hashboards. I spent about six hours, got another 200 pounds of aluminum. I took it to the bigboy who bought last week. Different guy on the scale. Wrote up and told me I did good. 176 dollars for 200 pounds.
Well, my lawyer once told me, he could get me acquited for anything in court, if I would keep my mouth shut (never any serious charges), so what did old Meowpher do when he got to the pay office? This Cat done run his mouth, because the ticket was written up at 84 cents a pound (which is what I would have expected, before they bought the previous batch at a dollar 30.
The cashier said she would check to verify while I waited.
After a short while an official looking guy showed up, and explained the material had some of the small capacitors the stuck material on the heatsinks, and that the material didn't really have a category, and that they didn't have a buyer for that particular item as it was, that they could only buy it as aluminum breakage, at 18 cents per pound, which would pay me 36 dollars total for 10 hours work. He offered to allow me to take it back, which I did.
There was another national yard I had used regularly, across town, until my tumor and brain surgery caused vision and balance problems 4 years ago, so I drove on across town, after getting my stash back.
These folks called me by name, and treated me like someone returning from the nearly dead. I showed them my aluminum, and told them that the other yard had downgraded it to aluminum breakage. They looked it over, and assured me that it fit their classification of extrusions.
So they bought it at 90 cents a pound.
So why did I raise a ruckus when offered 84 cents at the other yard? That was a 50 dollar drop in the total pay based on the previous sale. Definitely enough to question the price.
But, with questions come answers. When the question arises, someone in the know has to supply the answer, and in this case, it was going to cost me $140 to get the definitive answer, and I didn't like the answer I got.
But luckily I knew I have sold enough to know that other yards have different preferences, and therefore I could at least get back to the original expected grade and price elsewhere.
The moral of this story is don't waste your time reading ole Meowphers ramblings when he could have said the same thing in three sentences, but humor me please, I got to do something waiting for daylight and for the coffee to put "Postum" in my step. (I bet there are not ten people here who ever heard of "Postum" which has nothing to do with posting on the internet.