Thanks for all the videos Ben, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence with my comment on using punches...it was meant for people just starting out. I've learned so much from you and appreciate it. Thanks
Thank you for sharing this free video learned from it and will share I too recycle and the information was much valuable. Thanks again from the Dominican Republic Guillermo.
@@jherb7159 That sounds like my kind of luck. I use to tear old computers down for the parts. You never know when someone may need something. Anyway I got tired of computer repair but if I would have known I damn sure what have kept every single parts. I think I may have a few cpu chips back there but not enough for me to get up and look
I am a computer repair person and have saved all pc parts since the 80s just to scrap we have just started and already made enough to buy 3 new computers and are working on more so its worth it if you have lots of parts with gold that are sitting around collecting dust,
The rods in the DVD drives are sometimes Stainless, especially older ones. The motors is on DVD is actually really easy to pull and get into. A few screws and it's off. A quick hammer hit to pop the top off, then needlenose pliers to pull out the copper. The brass rod, though check it, sometimes those are aluminum rather than brass pops out. It has a small magnet at the tip that I crunch off with a hammer. The smaller board I put in my low value board pile. The hard drives are usually easy to take apart. The outer case on really old ones might be aluminum. They are usually low grade Stainless on newer drives. The platters are almost always aluminum. The tips of the heads have a precious metal, and that was why I watched the video, was I am trying to learn exactly what and how to remove but it's worth a lot of money. The rest of the heads are usually aluminum and steel.
Capacitors: The mid size and bigger if you take a razor blade and peel off plastic, they have a good amount of prime copper spool that is easy to remove and adds up pretty quickly. I would not recommend the small capacitors, as it takes to much work to retrieve the copper, but they have copper spool as well if you have the time. More FREE Copper to add to pile and a bit more $$$ squeezed out!
That crumble could take awhile. Looks like a lot of fun to sort through. Just sit back in the evening, maybe watch some tv. Have about 10 to 20 containers ready to put them in!
Have you thought about doing your gold and precious metal separation and extraction? It is a tedious process but it looks like you have enough supply to make it worth while.
I'd be all over those hard drives. Even 100 gbs would be a precious find. Data storage is expensive as hell, so anything that you can get for free is fantastic.
Kind of sad how much stuff we manufacture as a civilization that ends up as obsolete junk. That computer may still have functioned, but its utility probably isn't that good if you want to run modern software. All of those components are objects that took a tremendous amount of time and energy to design and manufacture, from mining the raw metals out of the ground to designing the circuits in a CAD program down to the assembly line that put it all together to sell to some customer. This is better than dumping it in a landfill though.
if you think about it in middle ages they made those fancy, high quality, totally handmade pieces of armor. Today it's only the historical value that makes them valuable. In fact a huge amounts of those were also scrapped and recycled back in the days. A worn and damaged beyond repair piece of medieval armor was melted again to make something else...
Ya, granted technology is always evolving. However 95% of the waste in the world is from planned obsolescence, or greed I guess would be a better way to put it.
on those sound card take some of the solder mask off to check if the whole board is gold plated. iv found a few nice creative ones that are just covered even the steel bracket is gold plated!!
those pins that are gold plated, the plating is only about 3 microns thick. just the same as the "fingers" (interface pins of addon cards). I have already once tried to isolate all the gold from all the parts that were gold plated from 9 motherboards (All ASUS P5-A) and used concentrated acids (nitric and sulfuric) to extract the net worth of gold from them. I ended up with (in total) a solid gold nugget that weighed 7 grams. that's it.
Yes people. There is better yield in CPUs than there is in traditional ore mining. It takes 1 ton of ore to yield 1 gram of gold. 6 gram yield from a CPU in your house is way more economical. The problem is scaling, sourcing and the environmental impact. E-waste is the largest growing waste sector and is estimated that 7% of the worlds gold is tied up into it. Invent a solution that strips gold off as soon as you dip the part into it, environmentally friendly and can be recycled. Boom. Billionaire.
I have an ewaste facility here in the US. Yes you can scrap alot of old computers. But refurbishing alot of them will bake you alot more money. Selling each PC for at the lowest of $60-70. Make a windows bootable USB "its free" and off you go. Scrapping them will only bring about $2k-3k usd monthly But refurbishing and scrapping makes at least $8k monthly
i think it depends on the amount you get your hands on. This guy obviously has access to tons over tons of old electronics so he makes the best out of it. You'll never find so many customers for all that old electronics. However I'm certain best way to make $ out of it is to sell tiny bit on ebay and scrap the rest.
There are two neo magnets in the lazer head of those cd drives. Usually a nice little rectangle around .25 in. I use them for all sorts of things. They are on either side of the lens, under that thin shielding.
Any chance of you keeping some of those vintage working graphics card's and selling them on eBay, cause if you find a Matrox card keep them their great for retro vintage gaming in dos.
A question please i have been collecting, gold from tel, palladium silver platinum, ram boards, sailboat, monitor, tv, tablet, do you know a factory where it is made? thank you greece
so once you've made such a huge mess with that air chisel.... how do you clean and seperate all those pins that just scattered everywhere and got stuck in the carpet? in most cases with expansion slots and such, you can just work a flat head screwdriver under the plastic connector and slowly, carefully pry upward pulling the pins through the plastic, then take a pait of side cutters and clip them all off at the base pretty easily... much less of a mess to pick over with tweezers later on.
How do you differentiate the low grade boards,high grade boards. And how do you recover the gold. Not familiar with electronic scrap other then the cords.
Prescient, Ben! There are neodymium magnets in that dvd reader "eye" and the price of those has gone up 50% just this year (nearly five years after your video).
Hello there from Montreal Canada 🇨🇦 I learned a lot from you is there another way of depopulating I don’t have that tool that you using love your videos and your work thank you for sharing 😃🍺👊🇨🇦
there is a small amount of platinum in the hard drives . easy google search , plus rare earth magnets that are strong enough to hold a sledge maker on you shed wall.
CPU fans/HS's cost £10+ in the UK. If the heatsink was undamaged I'd convert it into a funky desk clock or candle holder. Many things can & should be directly re-purposed by creative bods rather than be scrapped for raw metal ; ) Still a good video though!
You probs already know, but in case, some of the parts in these older PCs are worth much more as a full unit than the gold you'd get off them. For example, 2nd hand DDR3 RAM is pricey still at the moment. £20-£30 per stick on eBay etc
Thanks for the video. I have a couple old computers to scrap. I am interested only in the precious metals (gold in particular) to salvage to use in a jewelry making hobby. I am not that interested time expended versus the value of my time. I just want all the gold. So having said that: 1. Are there parts that you scrapped to sell that I should keep for the gold. I will not be selling boards etc? 2. What carat of gold are the pins? Are they plated?] 3. About how many penny weights of gold did you recover from that computer? 4. Are there a lot of brass or yellow metals (plated) that I will mistake for gold? I would like to process the gold to a powder to turn into precious metal clay. I have the time to do that, but not the money to buy Gold Precious Metal Clay. Alternatively, I would use the gold for lost wax casting. I've used a lot of dental gold this way and am not so concerned about the assay. Thank you for your video! I will look forward to watching more of them. PS. Is there something like (cell phones, charging cord plugs etc) that I should be saving for the gold? I'll see if you already have a video for that. Thanks again.
Hi Ben those little fiddly motors are a bit of a pain ..true...but they can go in as a copper bearing motor ..25 Cents a lb vs. 4 cents a lb...same as the motors in the fans ...a little , but it does add up :) do you just leave the copper on the boards ?
ok i know this is old but first of all you dont just get gold out of a computer you get boards scrap steel copper aluminum silver platnum tantalum mlcc etc.... and also you can easily get a computer completely scrapped out in under 5 minutes once youve done like 10 and im personally able to get about anywere from 10 to 150 computers a week so in the end it is very profitable - also to answer your question i would estimate a quarter to half a gram out of evreything (obviously a backyard refiner could not get that much but a larger company can)
@eWaste Ben. Ben, I like how you de-populate the motherboard's. I also learned about the MLCC's with palladium. What all contains palladium on motherboards and drive cards? Dan
The "key" on the label that you type in after installing windows usually from a disk so it will be recognized by microsoft as a legit version of windows. Used on all versions except windows 10 which they gave out for "free" so THEY could have control over the computer or laptop YOU bought. This was done to have exclusive legal control over what you do on your device. Every "update" on windows 10 is simply gathering intel from what you have been doing and "Cortana" is not your friend. It is also a spy device. You cannot uninstall Cortana because it is integrated into the windows 10 software. Get rid of Cortana and you have destroyed Windows 10. If I had a windows 7 disk for example, and no "key", you can use any key you can find for any other computer and it will activate my version that you downloaded from my disk.That is why people into computers still keep old windows version "keys". If you don't have a key, you will find after 30 days, your "trial" version of windows will expire and no longer usable until you enter a legit key. I think they are 16 digits and usually on a sticker stuck on the body of the computer. XP keys will not work on anything but XP. Vista cannot be substituted for windows 98. Windows 98 will only work with windows 98 not windows 2000 nor millenium. ETC ETC. Hope this "too much information" helps somebody.
@@TEXAS-SMITH thx man! very informative! Btw there are pirated versions of windows out there which update just fine as original. No idea how they did it but i saw it worked!
Thanks, Ben. I will follow your advice from your other vids as well and pick what I can prior to any scraping. I watched your MLCC's vs. inductors (?) again today and have made myself a chart based on all your info. Are all resistors marked with an "R" containing ruthinium? I will try to locate your vid on that. Cheers! Patrick
@eWaste Ben. Hi Ben, I did learn a bit more from your video. One thing is I take out the hard drive platters and the drive motors and save them in other boxes. I'm up to 12 pounds in platters now. But here's two questions I wanted to ask you is, is there any silver on the motherboards and cards. Also question two, you mentioned you also take off the MLCC's, what's the story with them? Thanks for a great video, Dan
silver is all over circuit boards but it's too costly to recover for what it's worth, best going for gold, palladium from mlcc's etc but crystals might be worth picking off for silver
Ben, I never knew the hard drive boards have gold plate on each side.... I have 60 boards right now, so I'm gonna go to the garage to see what else I have tucked away. I edited this comment because i found my test kit and checked the hard drive boards, which turned out to be copper plating on both sides. Glad I watched this video because your way is the best by far when it comes to stripping off boards. I learned a lot from watching your videos.
That air hammer idea is awesome and works great. Did you ever think about trying to put a sharper edge on the chisel and that way maybe it would cut the pins better instead of bending them down. Just a thought since I learn a lot from you, I thought I'd try to offer my thoughts.
One more thing....can I trouble you to point me towards the identification process on which IC's to save for gold content? Or steer me to one of your existing vids on the subject? Thanks again for all the tremendous help to all of us getting started!
depends on the computer, usually I sell parts like ram, cpu & slot cards, if it's very late model i'll sell the pc but most pc's I get are end of life or not working.
I wish we could get payed for scrap steel in Norway but here we have to pay to deliver it. Isn't that a bit crazy. Love to see your videos. Currently it is -12 celsius out in my scrapper garage so not much fun scrapping here now even if I really should have gone through all the motherboards I have stockpiled.
Hi Ben, today I scrapped my first heat sink with the piece of copper rod inside. I put the heat sink on two bricks with the copper above the gap then I punched it out with a steel bar and hammer. What a lovely piece of copper, reminds me of an ingot. Looking forward to getting more of these. Great vids Ben. keep them coming.
Informative thanks. Quick question for you do people really buy de-populated motherboards? I mean I honestly I don't see the value in it... saving the scrap board, unless you can go through and get some gold out of it maybe
Oh, Good Lord, I'm not doing any processing beyond the AP method to strip gold from the boards....I'll find someone else to buy my stuff, etc. although I am going to try the reverse electroplating method soon....
Great video once again, Ben! How do you know what are MLCC's and the valuable resistors (from your other vids) after you've depopulated the board using this method? Or does this refining process(s) separate out the precious metals from both? Thanks!
Thanks....so crush them, incinerate them, etc....and go from there? Whatever gold comes from it, we're good? It will yield what it will yield, yes? Thanks
Thanks for sharing, I learned a lot. I don't understand why anyone would want to buy the ravaged motherboard after you're done with it though. Will they reuse the remaining components? Repurpose the board? Desperately recycle the remaining bits?
The thing is, PC scrapping is awesome, server scapping definitely is more profitable. But, I think your missing out on a great option here, and that is IT services. Business has a bunch of computers, they pay you $3 per unit for freight, $8 to test / document the system, $8 to wipe the hard drive 3 pass. Then, if it's working, you take a 30% commission on the sale. Anything that works, you sell, anything that doesn't, you scrap. But, at the end of the day, you earn way more money without ever having to open a single case up.
that's a different business, there's many things an e-waste recycler can do like data destruction, de-racking, De-commissioning servers etc for an hourly fee, also selling hot dogs from the van on the way home is profitable.
eWaste Ben From my experience, the two can go very much hand in hand. For example, when I worked in IT asset management, there was always a tonne of gear that couldn't be sold, needed recycling. What would occur, is they would have some recycling partner who would take most of this gear by the stillage. But, effectively, I always thought that having some form of onsite recycling was a better method, or scraping. I used to strip servers, and had to cherry pick which had the most amount of resale vs the amount of time spent on each. When you consider that the IT asset management is your method of essentially getting companies to pay you to dispose of the gear, an unlimited supply of old equipment sitting in businesses all around the country in little basement rooms, then having the size and the scale to essentially get way better pricing for your commodities. I loved watching your video's, there's a lot I guessed about how the job should be done, but didn't quite know for sure until seeing your process. I am currently out of this industry though, but it was good fun.
There's a big step for me to play with the larger IT recyclers, I deal with some who handle large corporations IT assets, but they don't get paid usually, there's a lot of competition for IT at the high level so they're paying big bucks and bending over backwards for it. What I found is a much bigger pool of e-waste that big companies can't get too, and free aside from time. big co's don't send trucks to offices to pick up a trolley load of e-waste, think about your local business district, thousands of little offices in big buildings, all with that little basement room of e-waste. They are small biz' and generally understaffed and busy who are only looking for a way to free up room, they have no interest in e-waste aside from wanting it recycled properly but they don't want to pay, so the balance is they get free recycling, I get free e-waste that I either sell or scrap to get that value from. It may not be as big a biz' as it could be but it's a layed back biz' for me. I don't buy and I don't charge, so I have no need for invoicing, it's a simple biz' but it is a niche it itself that works. But I did once sell hot dogs out front of a nightclub, I actually made more money too :)
eWaste Ben Yeah, definitely, but I will tell you, there is one entity that takes the cake for eWaste, and that is definitely government. The amount of stuff that flowed out of our biggest government department was crazy. The vast majority being recycling. Anything goes. Free is a good, but another thing that works is when you charge a fee, but you tell them that the sales money will recoup enough so that you can return money back to them. I think from my experience, breaking into this area is not difficult, if you have all the infrastructure in place, a vehicle, storage and the contacts to sell the gear, it's not difficult, and it's highly financially rewarding.
Thanks again, Ben, for clarifying all this. Now I understand about the thick film resistors ( from your vid on the subject- went back and viewed it again last night) NOT being the MLCC's looking resistors. Other than removing the thick filmed, I'm not too concerned with mixing the others. I'll get what I get from a refiner at this point. But I will try to keep the resistors in the mix to a minimum. Are those occasional, bright red capacitors MLCC's as wel?
+pacoblancosmith They are Tantalum Capacitors if the code is "C" if the code is "L" they are Inductors and no value, usually the red inductors have black tops and red sides.
here in the philippines,this pc is precious as gold for me,i would never scrap it,ill use it,,im much of hobbyist and very fond of computers and i felt sad for the poor pc to be taken apart and sell for scrap only
So you don't really bother with the tiny ones....? I was curious if the metals in the MLCC's are separable from the resistors in your other vids at point of processing. Thanks
+pacoblancosmith Yeah good question, with the very tiny crumbles it may need to be sent to a pro refiner to process. each metal would be extracted in steps, so they might go for palladium, then go for silver etc. the mlcc's that don;t crush I seperate by hand, even tiny ones are still easy to spot if you have ay a magnifying glass to look.
Thanks for all the videos Ben, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence with my comment on using punches...it was meant for people just starting out. I've learned so much from you and appreciate it. Thanks
Thank you for sharing this free video learned from it and will share I too recycle and the information was much valuable. Thanks again from the Dominican Republic Guillermo.
my luck of course I went to open up an old pc only to find a huge wasp nest and I had pissed them all off. that hurt.
I'm so sorry for you
Wtf, that's some crazy badluck
@@jherb7159 That sounds like my kind of luck. I use to tear old computers down for the parts. You never know when someone may need something. Anyway I got tired of computer repair but if I would have known I damn sure what have kept every single parts. I think I may have a few cpu chips back there but not enough for me to get up and look
Awesome...I'll have to check it out. I know they're silver inn the sides and no markings on them.
I am a computer repair person and have saved all pc parts since the 80s just to scrap we have just started and already made enough to buy 3 new computers and are working on more so its worth it if you have lots of parts with gold that are sitting around collecting dust,
Do you need to isolate the gold out of the parts? Or can you scrap parts wholly?
Man its hard to watch you scraping good stuff
Yes
yeah I look to see if the hardware works before I scrap it, usually if it works it sells for more then the PMs on it are worth.
where do you sell your de-populated chips? or the circuit chips? or sell your gold recovery chips for that matter? thank you!
The rods in the DVD drives are sometimes Stainless, especially older ones. The motors is on DVD is actually really easy to pull and get into. A few screws and it's off. A quick hammer hit to pop the top off, then needlenose pliers to pull out the copper. The brass rod, though check it, sometimes those are aluminum rather than brass pops out. It has a small magnet at the tip that I crunch off with a hammer. The smaller board I put in my low value board pile. The hard drives are usually easy to take apart. The outer case on really old ones might be aluminum. They are usually low grade Stainless on newer drives. The platters are almost always aluminum. The tips of the heads have a precious metal, and that was why I watched the video, was I am trying to learn exactly what and how to remove but it's worth a lot of money. The rest of the heads are usually aluminum and steel.
Capacitors: The mid size and bigger if you take a razor blade and peel off plastic, they have a good amount of prime copper spool that is easy to remove and adds up pretty quickly. I would not recommend the small capacitors, as it takes to much work to retrieve the copper, but they have copper spool as well if you have the time. More FREE Copper to add to pile and a bit more $$$ squeezed out!
That crumble could take awhile. Looks like a lot of fun to sort through. Just sit back in the evening, maybe watch some tv. Have about 10 to 20 containers ready to put them in!
Oh man! That was a rare motherboard!!! You could rebuild th... an air hammer... Never mind.
right worth seeing if work and their value before ripping things apart
Have you thought about doing your gold and precious metal separation and extraction? It is a tedious process but it looks like you have enough supply to make it worth while.
I'd be all over those hard drives. Even 100 gbs would be a precious find. Data storage is expensive as hell, so anything that you can get for free is fantastic.
Kind of sad how much stuff we manufacture as a civilization that ends up as obsolete junk. That computer may still have functioned, but its utility probably isn't that good if you want to run modern software. All of those components are objects that took a tremendous amount of time and energy to design and manufacture, from mining the raw metals out of the ground to designing the circuits in a CAD program down to the assembly line that put it all together to sell to some customer. This is better than dumping it in a landfill though.
TheUndert0ker Very true mate, never really thought of it like that.
Ever heard of the buddhist practice of sand painting mandalas?
I think this can be viewed in a similar way.
Planned obsolescence
if you think about it in middle ages they made those fancy, high quality, totally handmade pieces of armor. Today it's only the historical value that makes them valuable. In fact a huge amounts of those were also scrapped and recycled back in the days. A worn and damaged beyond repair piece of medieval armor was melted again to make something else...
Ya, granted technology is always evolving. However 95% of the waste in the world is from planned obsolescence, or greed I guess would be a better way to put it.
on those sound card take some of the solder mask off to check if the whole board is gold plated. iv found a few nice creative ones that are just covered even the steel bracket is gold plated!!
DVD readers have 2 motors, laser diode, 2 small neo magnets, a bunch of optics, and a bit of aluminium for the carriage or plastic
I want all the hard drives from every computer
Why is that?
Keep the dvd lasers, build a death ray :P
I have a audio slot card that's entirely gold plated. Scrape the green if it's light green colored. Sometimes gold plated PCB layer underneath
This man reminds me of something, thats it a vulture. I'm here to learn as I am starting an e-waste business, I learned a lot.
those pins that are gold plated, the plating is only about 3 microns thick. just the same as the "fingers" (interface pins of addon cards). I have already once tried to isolate all the gold from all the parts that were gold plated from 9 motherboards (All ASUS P5-A) and used concentrated acids (nitric and sulfuric) to extract the net worth of gold from them. I ended up with (in total) a solid gold nugget that weighed 7 grams. that's it.
Jay T do it with 1000 boards on an industrial scale.
I feel like if i could get all of the parts and knew how to do chemistry safely i would work so hard because that ball of gold only gets bigger.
You got 7 grams and think "that's it?" wtf did you think you were going to get, several ounces? Can you do math?
Isn't that like 300$ seems like a minimum wage paycheck for a week for practically doing nothing.
Yes people. There is better yield in CPUs than there is in traditional ore mining. It takes 1 ton of ore to yield 1 gram of gold. 6 gram yield from a CPU in your house is way more economical. The problem is scaling, sourcing and the environmental impact. E-waste is the largest growing waste sector and is estimated that 7% of the worlds gold is tied up into it. Invent a solution that strips gold off as soon as you dip the part into it, environmentally friendly and can be recycled. Boom. Billionaire.
I have an ewaste facility here in the US.
Yes you can scrap alot of old computers.
But refurbishing alot of them will bake you alot more money.
Selling each PC for at the lowest of $60-70. Make a windows bootable USB "its free" and off you go.
Scrapping them will only bring about $2k-3k usd monthly
But refurbishing and scrapping makes at least $8k monthly
pc builders: careful, this is a very expensive part and we don't want to break it
pc scrappers: 𝕪𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕘𝕠𝕝𝕕, 𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕚𝕥 𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣
yeah that is right but they are old boards no one is gonna use them
guessing the North and South bridge (the two big chips you hacked off) have silver under them.
Hey there Ben, i love the longer and more indepth vids bud, keep em comin.
Lpkkkkkp
I sell the components on ebay, always a lot more money than recycling them. Edit: yep just sold a 486 motherboard for 20 bucks shipped.
i think it depends on the amount you get your hands on. This guy obviously has access to tons over tons of old electronics so he makes the best out of it. You'll never find so many customers for all that old electronics.
However I'm certain best way to make $ out of it is to sell tiny bit on ebay and scrap the rest.
@@cccpredarmy yep, kinda like me. Buying stuff off eBay for this purpose. Lol.
There are two neo magnets in the lazer head of those cd drives. Usually a nice little rectangle around .25 in. I use them for all sorts of things. They are on either side of the lens, under that thin shielding.
Hey dude, I'm sure someones already said it or you've worked it out, but the "stuff" on cpus is thermal paste, the good stuff is made from silver.
Any chance of you keeping some of those vintage working graphics card's and selling them on eBay, cause if you find a Matrox card keep them their great for retro vintage gaming in dos.
Even keeping those older power supplies for bench power supplies, and use them to run a car amp and deck for house usages in a game room.
A question please i have been collecting, gold from tel, palladium silver platinum, ram boards, sailboat, monitor, tv, tablet, do you know a factory where it is made? thank you greece
so once you've made such a huge mess with that air chisel.... how do you clean and seperate all those pins that just scattered everywhere and got stuck in the carpet? in most cases with expansion slots and such, you can just work a flat head screwdriver under the plastic connector and slowly, carefully pry upward pulling the pins through the plastic, then take a pait of side cutters and clip them all off at the base pretty easily... much less of a mess to pick over with tweezers later on.
how do you sell boards with nothing left on it
Thank you for your informative video. Why do they buy the scrapped boards? What are they doing with them?
How do you differentiate the low grade boards,high grade boards. And how do you recover the gold. Not familiar with electronic scrap other then the cords.
Prescient, Ben! There are neodymium magnets in that dvd reader "eye" and the price of those has gone up 50% just this year (nearly five years after your video).
I wonder, why not take those copper spirals off of that?
Hello there from Montreal Canada 🇨🇦 I learned a lot from you is there another way of depopulating I don’t have that tool that you using love your videos and your work thank you for sharing 😃🍺👊🇨🇦
would a board heater be better ?
Would you have an approximate dollar amount per computer that you scrap out you're way? I really like you're videos.
there is a small amount of platinum in the hard drives . easy google search , plus rare earth magnets that are strong enough to hold a sledge maker on you shed wall.
How much money can you make recovering this way?
ive gotten some big ass nuts of gold buying old cell phones for a buck from swap meets . it`s right by the antenna .
@brinbrin62 62200 unless you make your own acids.
Najbolji ste , pozdrav iz Hrvatske
CPU fans/HS's cost £10+ in the UK. If the heatsink was undamaged I'd convert it into a funky desk clock or candle holder. Many things can & should be directly re-purposed by creative bods rather than be scrapped for raw metal ; ) Still a good video though!
I get $7.50 a pound for the HD boards. Adds up really quickly.
hard drive is really worth selling, if you scrap it you can get a lot of money on the magnets
You probs already know, but in case, some of the parts in these older PCs are worth much more as a full unit than the gold you'd get off them. For example, 2nd hand DDR3 RAM is pricey still at the moment. £20-£30 per stick on eBay etc
Thanks for the video. I have a couple old computers to scrap. I am interested only in the precious metals (gold in particular) to salvage to use in a jewelry making hobby. I am not that interested time expended versus the value of my time. I just want all the gold. So having said that:
1. Are there parts that you scrapped to sell that I should keep for the gold. I will not be selling boards etc?
2. What carat of gold are the pins? Are they plated?]
3. About how many penny weights of gold did you recover from that computer?
4. Are there a lot of brass or yellow metals (plated) that I will mistake for gold?
I would like to process the gold to a powder to turn into precious metal clay. I have the time to do that, but not the money to buy Gold Precious Metal Clay. Alternatively, I would use the gold for lost wax casting. I've used a lot of dental gold this way and am not so concerned about the assay.
Thank you for your video! I will look forward to watching more of them.
PS. Is there something like (cell phones, charging cord plugs etc) that I should be saving for the gold? I'll see if you already have a video for that.
Thanks again.
Deborah Long there is about 0.00001 pennyweights
@@samn1794 Thanks. Good to know. I appreciate the answer.
So these gold pins... how much do you get for them by the kg when scrapping?
Is there a reason you scraped all the tiny parts into a carpet? It seems like it would be a hassle to pick them out.
stops stuff from bouncing too
and grips board when he jack hammers it
Hey ben, i was wondering how much money the gold pins on a cpu give. I havent gotten the pins and weighted them yet
Thanks for your useful video
I find a lot of motherboards"old/new/laptop/pc" and he sell them for 1.5$ for each one without cpu
is it a good deal?
Hi Ben those little fiddly motors are a bit of a pain ..true...but they can go in as a copper bearing motor ..25 Cents a lb vs. 4 cents a lb...same as the motors in the fans ...a little , but it does add up :) do you just leave the copper on the boards ?
+Thomas David yeah those little bits of copper are over ferrite so the price I get for the boards, it works out the same
ic ..unfortunately only 15c here ..
.
Gold plated pins, you don’t mention silver much?
Thank you fore this clip👍😊
ok.. so, if you were to take that computer that you did in this video, what would be the TOTAL weight of gold you get out of it?
ok i know this is old but first of all you dont just get gold out of a computer you get boards scrap steel copper aluminum silver platnum tantalum mlcc etc.... and also you can easily get a computer completely scrapped out in under 5 minutes once youve done like 10 and im personally able to get about anywere from 10 to 150 computers a week so in the end it is very profitable - also to answer your question i would estimate a quarter to half a gram out of evreything (obviously a backyard refiner could not get that much but a larger company can)
gold are use in internal ic conector, if you want gold, you broke the ic and try to get intermal conector..
is there a video on the best methods to collect materials? like maybe buying broken boards in bluk?
are there factories outside the opium canal with gold recycling? if so where and at what cost? Thanks in advance
@eWaste Ben. Ben, I like how you de-populate the motherboard's. I also learned about the MLCC's with palladium. What all contains palladium on motherboards and drive cards? Dan
palladium is mostly in mlcc's everything else is to hard to find palladium
we have scrap computer, but we dont know where can sell it or who needed and buy it from Jordan
build a bomb...
How does this drill called?. Great tool but couldn't find it online to order
It's called an air hammer.
@@DarkMatterX1 many thanks
@@kookia213
No sweat
Someone please mention opening a power supply can be very dangerous...
also please mention crossing the road can be very dangerous
scraped my first PC was smiling thinking about a PC lol keep on scrapping
Hello man!
What is the reference of your ryobi ?
I would have the same 🤗
How much grams of gold or maybe bricks can you get of gold you get from all the devices that you have and your storage
how much one depopulated mother board weights?
Hi ben. Where do u sell the boards after depopulation
if you remove all the good bit's then there's nothing left for a board buyer, a fully depopulated board goes as shred steel, I stuff in empty PC's
Stripping out the pure copper from the wires all adds up.
Say Ben would you find yourself harvesting components off of uma graphics desktop board's rather than that of dedicated graphics cards.
when you scrap pcs you should take tin snips and save the windows codes. someone will want em. Especially if it's win 7 and newer
What are windows codes?
The "key" on the label that you type in after installing windows usually from a disk so it will be recognized by microsoft as a legit version of windows. Used on all versions except windows 10 which they gave out for "free" so THEY could have control over the computer or laptop YOU bought.
This was done to have exclusive legal control over what you do on your device. Every "update" on windows 10 is simply gathering intel from what you have been doing and "Cortana" is not your friend. It is also a spy device. You cannot uninstall Cortana because it is integrated into the windows 10 software. Get rid of Cortana and you have destroyed Windows 10.
If I had a windows 7 disk for example, and no "key", you can use any key you can find for any other computer and it will activate my version that you downloaded from my disk.That is why people into computers still keep old windows version "keys".
If you don't have a key, you will find after 30 days, your "trial" version of windows will expire and no longer usable until you enter a legit key. I think they are 16 digits and usually on a sticker stuck on the body of the computer.
XP keys will not work on anything but XP. Vista cannot be substituted for windows 98. Windows 98 will only work with windows 98 not windows 2000 nor millenium. ETC ETC.
Hope this "too much information" helps somebody.
Yes these are OEM keys and cant be reused on another PC
@@henrysullivan189 but CAN be used on the same manufacturer comp (i.e. Dell w/ Dell, HP w/ HP, Toshiba w/ Toshiba, etc.)
@@TEXAS-SMITH thx man! very informative!
Btw there are pirated versions of windows out there which update just fine as original. No idea how they did it but i saw it worked!
What can I do with the ic chips
How much money you buy all computer unit
Thanks, Ben. I will follow your advice from your other vids as well and pick what I can prior to any scraping. I watched your MLCC's vs. inductors (?) again today and have made myself a chart based on all your info. Are all resistors marked with an "R" containing ruthinium? I will try to locate your vid on that. Cheers! Patrick
+pacoblancosmith no only thick film resistors have ruthenium, they are flat and have a number on top
+eWaste Ben but ben is that the flat black,green,n blue,n purples ones that range in size?
+Nate Chaps yep, with numbers like 370, 450 etc
@eWaste Ben. Hi Ben, I did learn a bit more from your video. One thing is I take out the hard drive platters and the drive motors and save them in other boxes. I'm up to 12 pounds in platters now. But here's two questions I wanted to ask you is, is there any silver on the motherboards and cards. Also question two, you mentioned you also take off the MLCC's, what's the story with them? Thanks for a great video, Dan
silver is all over circuit boards but it's too costly to recover for what it's worth, best going for gold, palladium from mlcc's etc but crystals might be worth picking off for silver
Ben, I never knew the hard drive boards have gold plate on each side.... I have 60 boards right now, so I'm gonna go to the garage to see what else I have tucked away. I edited this comment because i found my test kit and checked the hard drive boards, which turned out to be copper plating on both sides. Glad I watched this video because your way is the best by far when it comes to stripping off boards. I learned a lot from watching your videos.
That air hammer idea is awesome and works great. Did you ever think about trying to put a sharper edge on the chisel and that way maybe it would cut the pins better instead of bending them down. Just a thought since I learn a lot from you, I thought I'd try to offer my thoughts.
+zackcat276 The point of the chisel gets blunt doing a lot of boards but yeah, sharp is good for those pins, some still bend but not as many
+eWaste Ben yep i got ya. like I said before, just trying to share my opinions to a fellow scrapper. have a good one
One more thing....can I trouble you to point me towards the identification process on which IC's to save for gold content? Or steer me to one of your existing vids on the subject? Thanks again for all the tremendous help to all of us getting started!
+pacoblancosmith all ic's can have gold, from crt tv's to pc's to anything, so we keep all ic's
How do u tell the difference of all the different type of aluminum
Is it worth depopulating instead if selling it just as boards ? How much you get for depopulated board ?
Hi Ben 1pc evreg gold recovery minimum
would you make more money from scraping it rather than selling the computer?
depends on the computer, usually I sell parts like ram, cpu & slot cards, if it's very late model i'll sell the pc but most pc's I get are end of life or not working.
right on. thanks for the reply
It is always better to fix computer and sell it, than waste time with scraping.
burn
Not true.
I wish we could get payed for scrap steel in Norway but here we have to pay to deliver it. Isn't that a bit crazy.
Love to see your videos. Currently it is -12 celsius out in my scrapper garage so not much fun scrapping here now even if I really should have gone through all the motherboards I have stockpiled.
I Really Wan’t To Buy All Of You’re Scrap Hard Drives And Some Heat Sink’s!!!
Hi Ben, today I scrapped my first heat sink with the piece of copper rod inside. I put the heat sink on two bricks with the copper above the gap then I punched it out with a steel bar and hammer. What a lovely piece of copper, reminds me of an ingot. Looking forward to getting more of these. Great vids Ben. keep them coming.
+hucks33 I call them copper stackers because they're great to stack like bullion.
Informative thanks. Quick question for you do people really buy de-populated motherboards? I mean I honestly I don't see the value in it... saving the scrap board, unless you can go through and get some gold out of it maybe
Oh, Good Lord, I'm not doing any processing beyond the AP method to strip gold from the boards....I'll find someone else to buy my stuff, etc. although I am going to try the reverse electroplating method soon....
and the red yellow and white cords not damaged
Great video once again, Ben! How do you know what are MLCC's and the valuable resistors (from your other vids) after you've depopulated the board using this method? Or does this refining process(s) separate out the precious metals from both? Thanks!
+pacoblancosmith I just sort through the crumble and take things out, if there's a lot of mlcc's, i'll pick them off before I use the air hammer
Thanks....so crush them, incinerate them, etc....and go from there? Whatever gold comes from it, we're good? It will yield what it will yield, yes? Thanks
+pacoblancosmith yep but do a lot of reading before you use chemicals, gold is no good to you if your dead
Thanks for sharing, I learned a lot. I don't understand why anyone would want to buy the ravaged motherboard after you're done with it though. Will they reuse the remaining components? Repurpose the board? Desperately recycle the remaining bits?
The thing is, PC scrapping is awesome, server scapping definitely is more profitable. But, I think your missing out on a great option here, and that is IT services. Business has a bunch of computers, they pay you $3 per unit for freight, $8 to test / document the system, $8 to wipe the hard drive 3 pass. Then, if it's working, you take a 30% commission on the sale. Anything that works, you sell, anything that doesn't, you scrap. But, at the end of the day, you earn way more money without ever having to open a single case up.
that's a different business, there's many things an e-waste recycler can do like data destruction, de-racking, De-commissioning servers etc for an hourly fee, also selling hot dogs from the van on the way home is profitable.
eWaste Ben From my experience, the two can go very much hand in hand. For example, when I worked in IT asset management, there was always a tonne of gear that couldn't be sold, needed recycling. What would occur, is they would have some recycling partner who would take most of this gear by the stillage.
But, effectively, I always thought that having some form of onsite recycling was a better method, or scraping. I used to strip servers, and had to cherry pick which had the most amount of resale vs the amount of time spent on each.
When you consider that the IT asset management is your method of essentially getting companies to pay you to dispose of the gear, an unlimited supply of old equipment sitting in businesses all around the country in little basement rooms, then having the size and the scale to essentially get way better pricing for your commodities.
I loved watching your video's, there's a lot I guessed about how the job should be done, but didn't quite know for sure until seeing your process. I am currently out of this industry though, but it was good fun.
There's a big step for me to play with the larger IT recyclers, I deal with some who handle large corporations IT assets, but they don't get paid usually, there's a lot of competition for IT at the high level so they're paying big bucks and bending over backwards for it.
What I found is a much bigger pool of e-waste that big companies can't get too, and free aside from time.
big co's don't send trucks to offices to pick up a trolley load of e-waste, think about your local business district, thousands of little offices in big buildings, all with that little basement room of e-waste.
They are small biz' and generally understaffed and busy who are only looking for a way to free up room, they have no interest in e-waste aside from wanting it recycled properly but they don't want to pay, so the balance is they get free recycling, I get free e-waste that I either sell or scrap to get that value from.
It may not be as big a biz' as it could be but it's a layed back biz' for me.
I don't buy and I don't charge, so I have no need for invoicing, it's a simple biz' but it is a niche it itself that works.
But I did once sell hot dogs out front of a nightclub, I actually made more money too :)
eWaste Ben Yeah, definitely, but I will tell you, there is one entity that takes the cake for eWaste, and that is definitely government. The amount of stuff that flowed out of our biggest government department was crazy. The vast majority being recycling. Anything goes.
Free is a good, but another thing that works is when you charge a fee, but you tell them that the sales money will recoup enough so that you can return money back to them.
I think from my experience, breaking into this area is not difficult, if you have all the infrastructure in place, a vehicle, storage and the contacts to sell the gear, it's not difficult, and it's highly financially rewarding.
The Pentium D processor IS a Dual- core processor. Just to let you know.
+The E- Scrap Man oh ok I didn't know that, thanks
The E- Scrap Man hey to e scrap.waste buddies that's a sight
Yeah and it is a flaming piece of shit.
Thanks again, Ben, for clarifying all this. Now I understand about the thick film resistors ( from your vid on the subject- went back and viewed it again last night) NOT being the MLCC's looking resistors. Other than removing the thick filmed, I'm not too concerned with mixing the others. I'll get what I get from a refiner at this point. But I will try to keep the resistors in the mix to a minimum. Are those occasional, bright red capacitors MLCC's as wel?
+pacoblancosmith They are Tantalum Capacitors if the code is "C" if the code is "L" they are Inductors and no value, usually the red inductors have black tops and red sides.
eWaste Ben
Great video Ben. U might need a bigger truck!
+Tom Geer thanks, yeah my van gets smaller everyday it seems
Where do you get all those computers? Cool videos btw! really helpful!
How much gold can you get from one pc? On average
great video Ben as always...thank you!
here in the philippines,this pc is precious as gold for me,i would never scrap it,ill use it,,im much of hobbyist and very fond of computers and i felt sad for the poor pc to be taken apart and sell for scrap only
Agree
rob garcia if you want to buy pcs.. ill hook u up
I would..
Totally agree
Yeh maybe you should try getting people to send them to you they throw them out all the time. You can buy them buy the tons at school auctions.
So you don't really bother with the tiny ones....? I was curious if the metals in the MLCC's are separable from the resistors in your other vids at point of processing. Thanks
+pacoblancosmith Yeah good question, with the very tiny crumbles it may need to be sent to a pro refiner to process.
each metal would be extracted in steps, so they might go for palladium, then go for silver etc.
the mlcc's that don;t crush I seperate by hand, even tiny ones are still easy to spot if you have ay a magnifying glass to look.
How much coast gold of 1 PC - $5? I think u can take much more sell by parts, but however..
In my case my computer stop working and I took it to my mechanic and he told me that needed new transmission
🤣
How much can you and one computer
1:48 and wouldn't you rather sell computers in bulk on the internet? someone might still use them, even though they are slow and very old