I have been seeing more and more people doing like you described. Selling some of the towers to guys for far more than scrap prices.
What kind of guys do you sell to? Computer repair?
I am going to be start working on building my network of those kinds of buyers.
I did that for a short while. I was contacted by a young man (computer geek) about my parts. Then he would take a few computers and rebuild them with some of my better parts and we'd sell them and split the profit. He moved quite a ways away so I'll have to go looking around again for another hobby/tech because I knew some of the computers looked really nice to be junking them. I made $115 off of 3 pieces.