Saving stuff from the scrap heap.

Alpha-tron

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I was digging through a box of arcade board going to scrap. I got a few things. They look like they been stripped of most of their parts. These were someone's problem child boards.
I got a few odd ball pieces. I got a small box of boards about 28 pounds worth..
Did you know that 28 pound of boards are expensive? I was informed that these older boards are worth over 10 dollars a pound or more. No wonder older parts boards are not around anymore. The metal in scrap is getting expensive which drive up the prices.

Just the sign of the times I guess.
 
$10/lb sounds off to me.

I found a recycler paying $2.30/lb for copper tubing, and copper is only at about $3.40/lb so they aren't after the copper (there's a few ounces of it on a board, if you can recover it easily).

There's got to be less than a gram of gold plating on a board (if any), and gold's only $57/gram right now. If they got 1/2 gram of gold off of a board, they'd have to spend less than $18 to recover that gold. I guess if they ship it oversees where they don't have any environmental regs that's feasible, but I think if you try to do that in the US, the recovery costs are gonna kill you, because if I understand correctly the chemistry for doing that is quite nasty.

Wierd.
 
That is what I thought that 10 was way too high but what a typical scrap yard is never going to pay you what they can sell scrap for.

They have over head to deal with. The profit margins have to be big to compensate for cost of running business. From my days of dealing with scrap, The value of a pile grew when the piles got bigger from pounds to tons.
 
That is what I thought that 10 was way too high but what a typical scrap yard is never going to pay you what they can sell scrap for.

They have over head to deal with. The profit margins have to be big to compensate for cost of running business. From my days of dealing with scrap, The value of a pile grew when the piles got bigger from pounds to tons.

Yea, I guess that makes sense. The scrapper bought them at perhaps $2-5 per pound, but charged you $10 because otherwise it wasn't worth the effort of doing the transaction.
 
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