Am I calling this stuff what it really is?

Ok, so im not really new to scrapping, but have just kinda been on the newbie side and want to double check some things.

http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/a...8/IMAG0385.jpg

I dismantle my HDD's for magnets and separate boards and tops. Boards are high grade right? Tops are Stainless no?

http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/a...8/IMAG0384.jpg

http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/a...8/IMAG0383.jpg

These are what people call finger boards, right? these are high grade?

http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/a...8/IMAG0382.jpg

RAM is sold as in lots right? No further sorting?

http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/a...8/IMAG0381.jpg

These are aluminum. I would think that they are considered cast or extruded? Are cast and Extruded the same?

I would assume this is cast aluminum?

http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/a...8/IMAG0380.jpg

Would these be considered Extruded or cast? All are AL heat sinks.

http://i981.photobucket.com/albums/a...8/IMAG0379.jpg


Just new to E-scrap.

Dont have a yard around that takes them unless they take them because they are AL. Will have to find a buyer.

Thanks for your information to follow.

James

That bottom picture looks like it might be mostly cast pieces.

The aluminum heatsinks that you see most often in (for example) power supplies or on mobos tends to be extruded. One way to tell is that it is usually flat (it may have punched-out bits or folds), and on unfinished extrusions is the lines/striations in the material where it was pulled/stretched through the dies (or whatever they're called.) It seems that extruded alu is very light for it's size (all alu is light, of course), but is fairly stiff. Recent price at my yard is $.50 per pound.

Cast aluminum is very dull, unless it's machined, in which case it can be very shiny. The hard drive case is a good example of this. Cast alu is used where complicated shapes and machined flats need to be made. Cast alu is very strong, but brittle (like cast iron)... hit it with a hammer, and it'll shatter, leaving a jagged edge. Doesn't fold like extrusions or sheet aluminum. Recent price at my yard is $.65 per pound.

Sheet aluminum is the stuff like your pop cans, pie tins, foil, etc. Bends really easy, is very malleable. The picture third from the bottom, the pink/purple things, look like they may be sheet. Recent price at my yard went from $.45-.55 per pound, depending on if it was clean sheet/ pop cans.

The tops can be steel, stainless steel and aluminum. I even have one that is plated brass. Check with a magnet first, then if no attraction hit with a grinding wheel (small sparks=stainless) (no sparks=aluminum). The plated brass one i have didn't spark but i could see the brass color after putting it on the grinding wheel.

Hard drive covers can be stainless or aluminum. Use the method that Hoosierdaddy posted above.The 2 pics under the hard drives are finger boards and should bring between 4.00-4.50# as scrap, could be more on ebay. The pic under the finger boards are sheet aluminum. The hard drive case is cast aluminum. The heat sinks, the 6 in the middle and the 1 all the way to the right are cast aluminum the other 2 look like sheet aluminum. The ram should bring about 16.00# as scrap or more on ebay.

Hard drive tops can be a complete PITA to deal with. Some tops are strictly Aluminum or Brass or Stainless Steel or just Steel. Some tops are mostly Aluminum with a Stainless Steel or Steel plate. You can also have a mostly Brass top with Stainless Steel or Steel plate. I grind every top because you never know what you're going to get. I also take a magnet to multiple spots on the top. If the magnet sticks at some places and not others, then you have an Aluminum or Brass top with a Steel plate. You can remove the Steel plate with a plyers and screw driver.

As far as the heat sinks are concerned, my yard takes most of them as extruded. There are some cases where they are considered sheet Aluminum(there is a difference with the heat sink fins). One thing you should do is take a grinder to them. Some heat sinks that look like they are all Aluminum are actually coated copper. In your picture, all look like Extruded Aluminum except the bottom right one(and maybe the 6 in the middle, they might be cast but my yard would probably take as extruded). Grind the edges and the fins on the one at the lower right. If everything is copper, then throw it in with number 1 copper. If just some of it is copper and the rest Alum, throw it in with Copper/Alum rads. If it appears to be all Aluminum, the I would throw it in with sheet. Reason being because the fins in the middle look like they are sheet.

Your hard drive boards are really high grade. Check the buyer's section here and you'll find some paying $10 or more per lb. There is a buyer now offering a premium for your finger cards that already have the brackets removed. Also in your hard drives are the platinum plated platters. They look good but don't have much platinum at all. The platters are aluminum that's been plated.

Memory you don't have to sort into types like size or laptop vs desktop, but there are different prices offered for the gold and silver(actually tin) finger types also different for rambus(aluminum plate on them) so keep all those separate. There are several buyers to check out for memory also.

I think everyone above nailed it!! I am an eWaste recycler as well. A great tip on the Al heat sinks is to sell them on ebay if they are not damaged. You can often get ten times the scrap value. Some heat sinks specifically the ones that cover the CPU can fetch up to $10-$15 each! They are right about the HDD cover, Fe or Al, test with magnet then grinder if needed. The hard drve casing is cast aluminum. As for the cards, they look to be PCI cards. You can do a few things with those...... One, you can sell them as a whole to places like b----s---.com for $3-$4 per lb, you can sell them on ebay, or you can trim the gold fingers off of them and those can fetch $74 per lb!!!! Once the fingers are trimmed, buyers would still buy the remainder of the card for gold processing for anywhere from $1-$1.75 per lb. THe same goes for the RAM chips. Pnutfarmer is right about the logic board as well. That is the circuit board found on the HDD with the gold plated pins. next to ceramic CPU's that board has some of the highest gold content in pc's and can sell easily for $10/lb!! Oh and don't forget the platinum plated HDD platters. Yes, it is an extrememly small ammount of Pt, but people are still paying for it on ebay!!! Keep this thought in mind. All of the gold ever mined on this planet would roughly fill two olympic sized swimming pools. All of the platinum ever mined on the planet would only fill a 30 cubic foot room. It is estimated that there will not be enough Pt produced to meet the demand in just the next 20 years. So as little as an ammount it may be, it is still Pt!!
PEACE!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by moosescrapper

Keep this thought in mind. All of the gold ever mined on this planet would roughly fill two olympic sized swimming pools. All of the platinum ever mined on the planet would only fill a 30 cubic foot room. It is estimated that there will not be enough Pt produced to meet the demand in just the next 20 years. So as little as an ammount it may be, it is still Pt!!
PEACE!

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30 cubic feet of Pt is only around 578,500-ish ounces or so. Definitely lots more than that, many times more than that, has been mined.

Um, ok, that goes against just about every resource out there...... but if you say so...
Putting A Trillion Dollars Of Platinum In Perspective | Zero Hedge dates january 2013
Amerigold: Why Platinum
Platinum
HowStuffWorks "How much gold is there in the world?"
Platinum – The Other White Metal

if you follow the dates, it steadily increase the number of cubic feet mined.......but they all say less than 30cubic feet mined ever, and that was just a 2 minute google search...

The mistake stems from calling a cube that is 25 feet on a side a ""25 cubic foot room"".

While all-time platinum production estimates vary widely, backing into a guesstimate using the roughly 7 million ounces mined annually, and extrapolating that out over the past 100 years (admittedly, a very gross guessing tool) you'd get a total of 700,000,000 ounces produced all-time.

Platinum's specific gravity is 21.45, which means that one cubic foot of platinum would weigh 21.45 times as much as one cubic foot of water.

Water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot, therefore platinum weighs about 1338 pounds per cubic foot, which rounds out to 21416 ounces per cubic foot.

Plug that in to the 700,000,000 ounces we guesstimated was the all-time production of platinum above, and you get 32686 cubic feet, or a cube that's just a tick under 32 feet on a side.


And how this thread ended up here from the pics posted is a bigger mystery than how much platinum has ever been mined, that's for sure!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by moosescrapper

All of the gold ever mined on this planet would roughly fill two olympic sized swimming pools. All of the platinum ever mined on the planet would only fill a 30 cubic foot room.

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I heard the same quote, but they said that "The amount of Platinum would be 'ankle deep' in a Olympic sized pool...."
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NZ has changed its coins twice since bringing in Decimal currency in 1968. Every old coin found now is only worth its constitutant metals. Where does is value go?
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I often wonder. What would happen if America changed its coins/notes overnight & decided that "If you can't prove the old money was not illegally gained, we won't change it for 'new money' ".
All that paper money saved up by drug barrons etc etc would become useless, & valueless. What does that do to the actual value of the 'new money' ?
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On a side note.
At work we quoted on making some machines. Part of the machine was a arm which they had welded a 20cent coin onto its end, as the arm moved it travelled into a tube & also a switch contacted on each side of the coin.
So we get a quote for (X100) 20cent coin sized metal discs.
Quoted price was 25 cents each....

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Another side note.
We sell our metal in Kg's. If every amount of metal coming in was random, it would average out as 500gms, on average, extra on every sale. Every sale!
100 sales would have the scrapmetal dealer getting 50Kgs of free copper!
and 50 x NZ$7/Kg = free NZ$350!!!

(or NZ$3.50 per sale) NZ$ = US$0.81cents at the moment

The scrapmetal dealers could make a huge profit by just changing to Metric....... It'd make calculating a whole lot easyer too.

Also,I think thats why our scrapmetal dealer likes to put metals into their different catagorys

Quote:

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Originally Posted by eesakiwi

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Another side note.
We sell our metal in Kg's. If every amount of metal coming in was random, it would average out as 500gms, on average, extra on every sale. Every sale!
100 sales would have the scrapmetal dealer getting 50Kgs of free copper!
and 50 x NZ$7/Kg = free NZ$350!!!

(or NZ$3.50 per sale) NZ$ = US$0.81cents at the moment

The scrapmetal dealers could make a huge profit by just changing to Metric....... It'd make calculating a whole lot easyer too.

Also,I think thats why our scrapmetal dealer likes to put metals into their different catagorys

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Not sure how scales are calibrated there, but here scales round up/down, they don't just count the full units of measurements. For example, if you have 17.6 lbs. of copper, the scale will read 18, not just the 17 "full" lbs. This is on the pallet/platform scales, no idea if it also applies to drive-on scales.

Seriously, with the ""30 cubic foot room"" thing??!!

A 30 cubic foot room isn't a 'room' at all, but a box. A box just a smidgeon over three feet, one-and-a-quarter inch on a side.

An olympic swimming pool is 50mx25m... which for us 'mericans is 164'x82'. 30 cubic feet, spread out over such an area as the footprint of an olympic swimming pool, would be 0.027 inches deep... less than 1/32 of an inch. 0.68mm for you furrriners.

Assuming my back-of-the-envelope guesstimate of 32686 cubic feet is anywhere near accurate, spread out in an olymipic pool, it would be 2 feet, 5 &1/8 inches deep.... or .741m.

If the actual all-time 'platinum cube' were, in fact, 20' on a side, the depth would be 7 & 1/8 inches... or 0.181m.

Why am I posting pointless figures at 12:30 when I have a long day at work tomorrow? LOL

We'll never know what the actual amount of platinum ever produced is, but it's for darn sure more than 30 cubic feet. My guess is it would be somewhere between 20 and 30 feet on a side, but as we've seen, that's a HUGE range.

As of last week my yards paying $11 a pound for ram,