Im not mad. I figured that would get somebody, who as would be so kind to shoot him an email and ask to answer (or tell me to go jump off a bridge and that its non of my business).

Im a genuine lurker on this site. Back when I learned about boardsort, I used to try to pull circuit boards off of any little thing I could and looking back at it it was a joke. But that's how you learn in life.

Now I have more crap than I know what to do with, but finding the correct shipping carrier, (boxes or pallet), plus the fact that I sell on ebay and have the "scrap is the lowest value of an item, every time. I deal in school surplus and if I were in driving distance from this, refreshing, genuine, "blood sweat and tears" successful business this man has created, Id be a happy man.
I guess I know the owners email myself, now that I think about it, but I figured others may be interested as well, if this topic has not already been brought up, that is.

Sorry guys, I got minimal sleep last night and I am not at my sharpest thinking-and I hope Im not out of line by asking this but I admire and get inspired my successful entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are what make America the country it is. The day you have the balls to stop "working for the man" because you finally saved enough, or you side job is making more money than your labor intensive job is a great feeling.

No offense to anybody that punches a clock, as those "balls" I speak of "leaving the factory job" can quickly turn to unsuccessful balls, and you are right back to punching that clock. That's sort of where I sit right now. I grew to fast, selling online out of a 3500 sq ft business property with an overhead of way to much a month. But I refuse to give up and every entrepreneur becomes successful , not off his first "big money idea" but what he/she learned from that idea, changing direction on the way until they find that thing that works, and they work it until they are successful people.

Chris (i hope im right on the name). CAN YOU PLEASE SHARE YOUR STORY TO SUCCESS? WHAT YOU STARTED OUT DOING AND WHAT YOU DID DIFFERENTLY THAN OTHERS TO TURN IT INTO A SUCCESSFUL OPERATION?
HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU HAVE INTO YOUR EQUIPMENT AND DO YOU SEE YOURSELF BECOMING BIGGER (AS A COMPANY) OVER THE NEXT YEAR?

HOW DO YOU HANDLE THE HEADACHE OF EVER CHANGING GOLD PRICE? You prices dont seem to change dramatically from day to day.

IF YOU COULD HAVE DONE ONE THING DIFFERENTLY, WHAT WOULD IT HAVE BEEN?

ANY ADVISE TO A 2 EMPLOYEE (MY WIFE AND I) SMALL BIZZ THAT IS GETTING ABSOLUTELY MURDERED BY EBAY BILLS (I seriously considered just sending everything in my warehouse to you, just to see what the turn over was (i get this stuff for peanuts). My ebay invoice from last month is currently $2570 due in 5 days. You can technically get "rich" on ebay but you have to put a lot of orders out, im talking 50-100 items a day. When its all said and done, you take home roughly 30-50% profit.

Im just curuois. I love to learn from sucessful people. Im not attemoting to "steal ideas" or anything of that nature, so please dont get me wrong. I just am intrigued on how one can become successful in this field without some serious funding from previous ventures.



EDIT let me elaborate on my last sentence. I see these guys, working their asses off (myself included I just don't sent it in because I realize AFTER I do the work (cutting off 30 lbs of connector ends only to find out you just paid for the shipping fees. What I don't understand is just how much goes into the refining process and how expensive it must be. I see these DIY "smelters'" with their hours of labor smelting material for a puny little dirty golden nugget. There got to be more to this that im missing. Either way, I admire Boardsort for not telling the little guys they "don't meet the minimum requirements of 20,0000 lbs of military vintage boards (I exhagerated) but you get my point. CHRIS- WERE YOU ONCE A HOME BREWER OR DID YOU JUST SEE THE MONEY IN THIS BEFORE OTHERS DID, INVENTING YOUR OWN EQUIPMENT AS YOU GREW?

I’ll forward this link to Chris for a possible direct response.
I will touch on a few things though. In no random order.
Gold refining. Grr. I’m going to make people mad with this statement but my suggestion is run the other way. I tried it for a while. And with my breadboard computer experience I have more understanding of metals and chemicals etc than most big box techs do. You won’t get rich refining boards in your basement or garage. People on YouTube tend to not keep the best records of expenses for their refining endeavours! Most of those junk scrap melts on ebay are just that first word. Junk. They take a few ounces of gold plate, dump it in a crucible and light up a torch. Looks pretty. Generally worthless.
You spend hundreds in equipment and acid and gases; bases and etc to get very little. The best personal refiners can get their melts to about 75-80% purity. Best batch I ever made was 77% pure. About half an ounce. From 10 pounds of circa 1980-1984 pins. Or at the time about $450. It took six months of melt, cool. Acid. Separate. Burn. Acid. Burn. Acid. Burn separate. Melt. Acid... I figure I spent close to $100 on chemicals and another $50 on gases for torching at exactly the right temps to burn off and melt this but not that etc. I considered it the best it could be and decided to stop trying while I was behind.

Recovery and recycling are different beasts.
When you sell 500 lbs of mixed everything boards to a local steel focused recycler, chances are the boards get tossed whole into some low grade iron melt. Stub steel. Commercial refiners use VERY different methodologies. Most today use electrical chemical bathing. Where heavily sorted escrap and jewellery waste shredded and milled into tiny nearly microscopic dust and then is placed into what I can only describe as gigantic kitchen mixers the size of small buildings. A different combination of chemical and electrical currents for each metal and mineral. Sucking individual particles to ‘reception plates’. At 100,000 pounds a batch. Each and every atom (figuratively) is recovered. Right down to the chemicals in the paints and the fibres of the boards. These are the type of companies boardsort sells their stuff to. You simply need volume. Boardsort simply gets the quantity, the volume, with 50 pounds here and 100 lbs there.

I’ll keep following up on this as thoughts come to me and I reread your post over the next few hours but that hits one point.

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ebay, is a beast. My suggestion? A business account. Figure how much you POST in an average month. Chose the paid business package that fits the number in free postings. The contract is for a year paid monthly. But you have x number free listings (insertions) and get most fees discounted. Plus a bunch of “free stuff” like free auction upgrades, many no insertion fee categories. Capped fees, etc. Subscription starts at $9.99 with 19.99, 24.99, and 29.98 being the most used for private people. Larger volume companies tend to favour the $99 and $299 package if the volume is there to offset the fees. But honestly if you post more than a few dozen items month OR sell more expensive items, Ofer a few hundred dollars, the ease of the business tools takes loads of time off the posting hassle. With automated messaging, extensive shipping rules— one click shipping setup—, all item editing, and access to the full item details catalog. The last one alone will boost your sales by adding extensive details on catalogue products ranging from movies to dolls to computers; making your auctions look far more professional.
Also, if you don’t need instant access to funding (via PayPal) then take a look at amazon marketplace selling. But payouts are twice a month.
For just one subset of eBay options look here but if you log in and go to the my account page and click tools you will find many, many, add-ons.
For Amazon look here

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Pulling boards is a joke? I don’t really agree here. The education is invaluable.
You may findwhat’s inside it to be useful. Where I pull apart random stuff. Including lightbulbs! Why? Because! I just had an urge at that moment to do so.

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bfsu87,

There is no secret, just a philosophy... "work smarter".

First, as with any opportunity, you have to be in the right place at the right time. We are fortunate we operate in a region that is considered one of the scrap metal capitals in the USA. We run our operation in the heart of the rust belt. If I lived in Hawaii I would be surfing not scrapping.

So right from the beginning the idea must be viable. Having resources within economic reach is crucial in the beginning. Even if that means driving 400 miles, as long as you are able to take enough material with you to justify your gas and time. If a person considering full time scrapping is surviving day to day then it might not be the right to to start a business. How will they feed their family until they get off the ground? Can they work 1 or 2 jobs and still find time to acquire and process scrap? Place AND time.

There is a fine line when calculating time>effort>expenses>profit. Each persons situation is different, but the results all must end the same. No profit? No bueno.

Work smart. First figure out if it is even viable. For some it can be, others it probably wont be. Always use your brain before your brawn.

E-scrap is not just e-scrap, it is all-scrap. If you are to the point where you are actually making money on e-scrap, then you are also generating 3 times the volume in regular scrap. Everything from steel to copper to aluminum. Again, you must be able to realize the values from everything you touch. There must be little to no left overs. Plastic should be your only waste. Eventually you must sell everything, even the cardboard. Yes, it only pays pennies. But the alternative is paying the rubbish company to haul it. That adds up when you consider we could fill a 40 yard dumpster lickety-split with basic trash. It's not e-scrap it's all-scrap and you have to have a plan in place to deal with it and make it pay you and not cost you. Work smart.

Work less. Yes! Work less. Use your brain before your brawn means THINK FIRST. Don't tear that unit down until you understand the economics of what you are doing. Some guys see scrap and immediately out come the sledge hammers and screw drivers. What is the value of the item before you touch it.
What will the value be after you do what you do to it. How long did it take you to do what you did? What is the value (or expense?) of the items you removed and now must deal with?

The original post said he would "pull circuit boards off of any little thing I could and looking back at it it was a joke". A perfect example of this is trimming the gold fingers from finger cards. If you use your head first and perform a few basic calculations you will learn that you are losing almost half the value by doing so. (I made a post about it a while back, search for more info). I'd venture to say more time is wasted in the scrap business than anywhere else. All because you sweated does not make the value any greater.

Work smarter not harder.

The beauty of running boardsort.com is that everyday I get to interact with people from all around the country. These are good every day people who make an honest living doing what we do. Each has their own unique story that brought them to this world of e-waste recycling. They are not famous, they don't have 50,000 followers on Youtube. Nope, just Moms and Pops hustling junk, driving a beat up pickup pulling a rusty trailer full of scrap. You wouldn't recognize them from any other scrapper. The difference being a good percentage of these folks are very smart and have given a lot of thought into what they are doing. Oh, and that janky old pickup? Yeah. They don't like to put scrap in their Mercedes. (ok drama added for effect, but the point is real). Work smarter.

If it is to be, then make it be. But be honest with yourself first and use your head. Think about it. Understand it. Then do it. Not everyone can. Not everyone should.

Good luck!

♪♫♬
"some they do... and some they don't...and some you just can't tell"
"some they will...and some they won't...and for some it's just as well"
Goodbye Stranger- Supertramp
♪♫♬

Actually it’s so true. I know two guys who ran a small recycling business. One was a an old computer engineer. The other an auto mechanic. They would build wooden deposit boxes in the auto shop. Work out agreements with various local companies and create electronics drop spots. They’d pick up old electronics and appliances twice a week from all their boxes. Fix what they could on nights and weekends. And sell both working and junk on eBay.
Over time and getting to know them, I learned a lot about their business. They paid the stores $50 a week to host their bins. A win win. I found them on eBay as I bought a bunch of cube servers from them; realising after the win they were 5 miles away.
A friendship came from a conversation along the lines of ‘you sell strange stuff, any idea what that it?’ And I said ‘OMG it’s a mechanical office accounting machine.’ Worth a fortune! He got it for free and sold it for $5000 on eBay.
After that they’d call me (before it became a waste and I’d just show up) twice a week to get first grab at whatever they picked up. $1 towers and desktops, $2 laptops, $5 servers and $10 for full racks. Plus all sorts of random crap. Like snow globes, an analogue tv I still use for my 8-bit computers, dolls...!
Some of it I fixed up and sold. Most I simply scrapped out and sent to boardsort.
The reason for the quote? They both drove 76 corvettes. Had a massive dodge panel van for work. But still every Monday went out in an old rusty 60s ford pickup and scrapped the neighbourhood trash. They retired before 50 and moved to Florida. I lost my primary supplier and never reached that point again.
I recognise I simply don’t have the necessary ability to accomplish what they did on a permanent basis. Some can, some can’t. As Chris said.

I will counter the comment about taking things apart. With practice comes speed. Some waste of time items can bring value with practice.
10 years ago I wasted time on routers, calculators, phones, hard drives.
Today I can turn a profit on those. A router in under 10 seconds. A hard drive including irreversible data erasure in under 30. Non-sealed phones take one to two minutes. Things that would be steel shred for 2 or 3 cents can fetch me 50 cents or more in under a minute of effort.
I can’t live on that but taking 30 minutes to disassemble a box of broken stuff from the thrift store I pay $5 for... I’m never board. 50 hard drives to bare components scrap in well under an hour is decent for a hobby.

Some time in the near future I’ll post two “lessons” of sorts. One on my understanding of how those two friends created a sustainable scrap business. The other on haw to get even national chain thrift companies to toss the rules out the window and sell you broken junk for almost nothing. Junk you can either fix or scrap. Power tools with damaged or missing cables. Computers and laptops with gun holes from destructive disabling. TVs with broken screens. Even scrap jewellery. Things they’d otherwise put in the compactor for no value.

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Absolutely! By no means am I discounting tear down. In fact, as you said, it is all about the knowledge. But attention to loss/gain should still be paid. (ie: trimming cards)

From a hobby perspective your time can be free. From a commercial context where you are paying $10+/hr in labor for that same time, there must be greater considerations made to the efficiency of an operation.

In the tear down business if you are not taking a quarter and breaking it into 4 dimes, you are probably losing money.

Thoroughly enjoyed all the comments contained in this post

Have no clue how I came upon this but it was funny to read.

Knowing what everything and common weights is key. Lower priced items should never be shipped, at least thats my opinion unless you have a pound or two to fill out space in a box.

I sell on ebay all the time and if you get high end material you can make a lot of money. $100 and up for collectable boards, up to $5,000 with certain chips ( thats why you should learn everything you can about vintage hardware especially rare and unique chips ) find out how chips are marked for samples and prototypes.

Dealing with low end material is fine if you live close to boardsort, no shipping fees. Also find different platforms to sell on, facebook and craigslist are two off the top of my head.

You really need more experience or need to learn a lot more.

One thing I always point out to scrappers is scrap is the lowest price for material.

There are PCI SoundBlaster cards that, having the right chips, can fetch thousands of dollars.
The chip configuration produces a specific sound no one has ever replicated.

Same with old video cards. I’ve mentioned elsewhere there’s an analogue art form known as “video bending”. It’s found it’s way into digitisation now. Old video cards with analogue converters and output, coupled with high end computer (think Mac Pro, True64 workstations, zBox) via converter, the fine grained aspects have become click and type.
I’ve seen some crazy all digital analogue bending clips.

Oh, and don’t forget crypto mining. If it crunches 1s and 0s it’s good for mining… something.

Ebay makes these little projects accessible (until some news station runs a story and the prices jump).

And there’s millions of us that still us analogue equipment. So don’t worry or ignore potential because of age.
I need a C19 base tube for a tuner. Know where I’m looking?
Vintage broken radios.

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