Spence1015 wrote:
...
(S)he’s gone.
:(
You know... some of us (ME) never learn.
After the years now of seeing this every time a plastics person shows up I should probably admin edit or outright delete “omg you buy plastic” comments and yet every time I join right in and ... all bow to the plastics gods.
So I’ll say two things quickly.
None of us other than user “BoardSort” work for boardsort. We’re just sellers to them. So please don’t let us influence your options on boardsort as a whole.
And
I’m not entirely sure what the answer was to the question you first asked.
My short answer was more of a post something now than a thought out reply.
Populated boards with components range from a few cents to a dozen plus dollars. Based on metals, minerals and transitional values.
Bare blank boards are a different situation. For boardsort they generally don’t buy blanks except for two specific cases. You have one or two and you’re sending, bringing in, a bunch of other stuff. Or. You have a monstrous gargantuan Gojira sized lot and I’d suggest you call Chris by phone o discuss exactly what it is you have.
Outside of boardsort in the even more selective marketplace buying that and that alone-> it varies. You have the plastic value as you are aware. A few pennies or so, maybe a few dimes. Depending on the plastics of the material and if it has wood or paper fibre in it.
And the metal. Ignoring any components for this statement. The oldest and lowest quality boards are nothing more than a solid plastic, wood, or paper material with conductive metal tracing on the outside between holes and mount points.
Most boards have an inner layer. Low end being area coverage where small sections of thin metal are connected with conductive tracing. Where the majority of minders post-70s boards will have a complete or near-so- layer across the board. Often aluminium or copper but tin, silver, nickel, and gold... all common enough.
The worst paper PCBs will basically run like junk adulterated paper. As it’s turned into news paper or toilet paper. The metals extracted but lost to the process. A hard disk controller printed and manufactured on a paper fibre board is of rather low bulk value outside of a PM dedicated recovery agent.
Plastic boards almost entirely depend on the metals of the board. The plastics being a none set of standards, pbs, pvc, abs, bppc, etc.
Metal boards start at the bare metal value.
Glass boards are generally ignored. They’re between $0.20 and $4-$5. The board is heated, components removed, and the remaining heavy-metal-based glass often is sent to iron factories as a cabin substitute.
Various crystal based glass substrates can run into the $5-$10 range.
Obviously aerospace and defence boards, primarily those from the Cold War era and from space use, on heavy gold based substrates... we’ll thousands.
But the chance of finding that last one is Bill and the chance of finding one and being legally able to sell it, less than nill.
If you find guidance controller boards from trans-orbit return flight equipment I’d suggest you turn it over to the government or walk away and forget you ever noticed it. ;)