My first scrap!

Well decided to go to auction and get some computers to fix or to scrap. Ended up buying 80 servers for 200 bucks instead. Also got some nice cisco switches that will be scrapped as well.

I was luck to find a dell R715 with 32GB RAM and 2 1.8GHZ CPUs which seems to sell for 300 on ebay! Only issue is I have no idea how to ship the beast.

I found an apple server as well in the mix and need to do research on that. The RAM was taken out of it so I will have to see if it works with the other sticks I have got or if it is worth repairing.

Having a blast taking on these apart!

So far
45 pounds in pure copper heatsinks
70 pounds large dual socket motherboards
20 pounds telecom boards
2 pounds 512 ram sticks
bunch of slot cards (tons of gold)
20 CPU (XEON and AMD)
10 pounds aluminum




Pic
http://i.imgur.com/c4UYAjm.jpeg

Only issue is I have no idea how to ship the beast.

Check out our shipper for good freight prices.

Or you could charge the buyer. Some are willing to pay for shipping if they want that specific item.

BTW which Apple Xserve do you have? Some take only Fully Buffered memory. Check to see if any of the other servers you have has it. It has a metal heatsink and the speed is followed by an "F". I.e., PC2-5300F

Hey scrappy! Thanks for the heads up. I have yet to play with the apple server or even look to see if it was worth fixing. I have 4GB of 5300F so that is really good to know and will save me some google searching for sure.

We almost got through all the servers today (only a little blood was lost) and the pile is getting ridiculous. My scale can only go to 110 so I am above that in copper and the boards i can only estimate.

Aluminum is not common and I have only gotten 20lbs which is weak. Power supplys(with cables) I have gotten about 100lbs of as well.

Copper shot:
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Main boards I am getting plus 512mb or lower ram pile:
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I have about 12 of those telecom boards which I hope will go for $10 a pound as they are just coated with gold. The ram only goes for $12 a pounds the 512mb or lower pile that you see is only at 7lbs. I am considering trying to recover the gold myself as they contain around 3 grams of gold per pound ($120). My friend has taken chem 2 which is all about acids so maybe we can figure out how to do it without hurting anyone. I really hate to sell this much ram for a little 80 bucks when it has up to half an ounce of gold.

What is your opinion? Should I just hold the ram until I have 50-100 pounds (maybe two months) and try to recover the gold myself? Honestly the $80 bucks doesnt really help or hurt me so I think holding may be the best.

The only good news is that I have gotten about another 8 lbs of 1GB and 2GB server sticks! I think I can see these on ebay for $2-4 a stick making a clean 300-400 bucks. Does anyone have any experience with this?

We are taking a day of rest tomorrow and I will be contacting buyers to find the best price for my boards/copper. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read this and make comments/suggestions!

Also do you guys know if I need to remove them screws that are with those copper heatsinks to get candy copper status?

Originally Posted by BRASSCATCHER

It takes 10-11 lbs of ram to get 1 pound of fingers. One pound of fingers can yield up to 2 grams of gold for the experienced refiner, which you are not!!! So figure half of it lost to you making a mess of it, which you will make a mess of it.

Your friends Chem 2 class will not help you, as you have no knowledge of the process or how to properly dispose of spent chemicals which will be full of heavy metals that CAN NOT be poured down a drain or a sewer. That is unless you have $10,000.00 to pay a fine and another $10,000.00 for a lawyer.

Do yourself, your family, your pet and your neighbors a favor, lose the thought of refining before you poison or kill everyone I previously mentioned.

Welcome back BC!!

not apple but google servers can be quite annoying with that huge sticker covering the front you got to peel it back to get the cover off I got 150 of those a few months ago and found I had to use a iron with steam to make it easier lol

Hello!

Thank you for all the comments and thoughts! I have decided that attempting to kill myself by refining the ram boards is not a good idea.

I did however decided to get rid of the pile of steel cases / copper and took my first trip to a scrap yard.

I started with getting rid of the steal first. For those that do not know how this works you drive up on a ramp that will weigh your truck before you head into the hard. I then dove around and after a while a gentlemen directed me to where i should dump the steel at. I unloaded it from the bed (played a game of who could toss it the farthest) and headed back to get the truck weight checked again. Turned out one truckload was 700lbs! NICE!

Took the ticket to the cashier and got paid $35 for my trouble. Next came my copper pile. I went to the copper area where i just poured everything i had into a barrel for them to wheel away and weight. They didnt inspect my copper really and just went with it. I ended up having 119lbs total and the yard paid 1.70 a lb which brought the total to $202.30

Total revenue for this adventure: 237.30

We are still in the red for this little project but tomorrow I will begin to sort the boards and approach buyers. I am guessing I have somewhere around 200lbs of large dual socket boards and anouther 20-30lbs of high quality telecom boards (the whole freaking things are plated with gold). I hope I can get close to a $1000 with this amount of material.

The other thing I have is RAM. I have 8lbs of 512mb or lower boards. These are valued at $12 a lb so around $100 bucks. I have another 6 lbs of 1GB -2GB which I think are worth more then scrap. I need to do some research to find who to sell these to. Ill work on that after I sort the boards.

Thanks to everyone who reads and makes suggestions!

Hi all!

Just got done organizing everything and back from selling all the power supplies. I got 9 cents/lb for the power supplies which was pretty bad but I did not find anyone else around here that would take them for cash. Total wieght was 248lbs which gave me like $23 bucks. I also took the aluminum heatsinks and got .40 a lb. Total was $8 bucks from all those servers.

I still have another load of steel to do as well so that should be another couple of bucks.

Power Supplys
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Here is all the motherboards! I would love help grading these and getting an idea on what I should accept from buyers.

the dual socket medium size boards we have about 100lbs. The telecom cisco boards we have 26 lbs. The large dual socket boards are 21lbs. The single sock boards are 20lbs.. The cards are around 60lbs.

I will get the cpus ready for you all the help me grade next. Should I document each cpus model or will they all be the same price really?

MotherBoard/Telecom board/Cards Album:
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I also have 12lbs of RAM that seems that will all be scrap value .

Thanks to everyone who is helping me!

So we got everything shipped out and to Ewasted who is currently processing our material. It came out to a little over 200lbs of motherboards/RAM/CPUs/Cards so I hope we cant hit 4 figures for the shipment but it does not seem likely from what I have been reading.

Shipping itself was painful. I went with fedex and the ground shipment cost me 226 bucks. With gas prices being so low I am surprised shipping is so freaking high. I have been looking for a buyer closer to NM in order to bring costs down but have yet to find anyone. There is a refinery in CA that looks promising and I will look into if that would be a viable option.

The other issue that is coming up is my ebay listing are not selling. I wish I knew what I could do to get these units out. I have 10PCs completely refurbed and ready to go but even at prices where i barely make 20 bucks in profit I am not selling.

The 2 server I got listed are not getting any action either. These are priced a hundred below competitors and I did a ton of pictures/testing (48 hours of stress test proven) to make sure the buyer knows these things work. Not sure why they are not selling but it really hurts.

Any suggestions on how I can approve my listing would be grateful! Dell PowerEdge R715 Server 32GB RAM 2X 146 HDD 2X 1 8GHz 8 Core CPUs | eBay

Ill update the thread once I see how much we made from ewasted. Currently I am not sure if I would do this again as we may not see a profit for the 50+ hours of work that was put into this project.

Originally Posted by datRayRay

Also do you guys know if I need to remove them screws that are with those copper heatsinks to get candy copper status?

Yards normally don't use ISRI terms to define the material they are buying. It would probably be beneficial to use terms that most people are most familiar with. Yes, 'candy' is a grade of copper, but most are familiar with #1, #2, #3, sheet and bare bright.