Quote Originally Posted by oresteia View Post
Thanks everyone for all the answers. I've been looking through forums a lot lately. I only have one last question. Removing tantalum capacitors, crystal oscillators and smd ceramic capacitors devaluates boards? I've been trying to ask Mario, but got no response.
I remove all tantalum and have never been devalued. I send those in separately to another buyer. I really haven't seen a market for crystal oscillators, so I would just not do those (most likely not worth the time or effort otherwise buyers here would be buying them ), I can tell you from experience that pulling SMD was not a good use of my time. I weighed up what I had done and it was disappointing to say the least. Unless you are processing the entire board (say stripping it of all components, separating etc at a massive scale), it just will not work out for you. If you DID come across some old rolls of SMB capacitors (say someone who makes specialty boards) certainly do not get rid of them. There probably is a buyer somewhere, but I am betting it isn't for much...Mario does not buy SMD capacitors BTW (I asked him right before sending in my last load as I have a jar full).



Charles