Yup, determining what you can accomplish with the time you have is a big factor. If you finished getting through all your material and have time left to do something, maybe you teardown CD drives or strip thicker copper wire or pull gold pins from connectors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't tear down CD drives currently, I try to strip wire that'll be #1 copper but nothing else and only keep gold pins if they fall off/out of something.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
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Well since we are on the discussion of CD ROM boards: can I put all of the pcbs that come out of a cd rom into the cd rom catagory? You know you have the main pcb, and then there is often two other smaller boards. One is shaped like the letter b and is usually thin and has a layer of glue on it to stick to whatever it was connected too, and then there is usually a 3rd smaller board that I believe the ribbon cables attatch to. If I was home I would take some pics of the boards I am reffering to. They all are inside the cd rom metal encasement from say a PC towers.

Only the main controller board will go as CD/DVD. What usually has the pin connections or SATA connector.

The laser assembly, once it's off its rails, can go mid grade (metal) to low peripheral (plastic)
On desktops the long rectangular board with a motor will be low or mid grade.
On compact drives the main board sometimes gets split into two boards or miniaturized so much that they don't qualify for cd/DVD board.

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

thanks guys