I recently bought some 60's era test equipment from a customer for a song. After she came in like 3 times we ended up having close to 2 tons of the stuff. I had our electronics guy break like 3 down with visions of big silver contacts and boards dripping with gold dancing through my head. It took him an hour to break 3 down because of all the dang screws. We ended up getting some copper wire, a few transformers and some low grade boards out of them. At that point I determined that it wasn't worth our time to break them down (I was also leery of caustic stuff like mercury switches). In the end we ended up selling the whole lot and doubling our money.