What to sell? What's worth it?

Ok so I'm suffering from a bit of informational overload. I'm trying to figure a concise list of what is worth collecting and selling vs what to just sell to the scrap yard as boards. I've gathered some general stuff from reading dozens of posts. Chips with gold marks in the corner mark high grade boards, gold pins and lots of chips tend to mark mid grade, and low grade boards are almost always yellow. I know tantalum caps are good. However, especially on low grade boards, what is worth keeping? I've seen debates on whether to pull the transformers or not, aluminum heatsinks or not, etc.

I suppose what I want to know is do all of the components have value? The common black capacitors? If I just depopulated every board I come across, seperate out the components, would it make more than just handing the scrap yard a tote full of power boards and stuff from vcrs and tube tvs? My local yard is only giving 10 cents a pound on low grade. Would love some guidance from the more expierence guys out here.

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Originally Posted by Skytex

I suppose what I want to know is do all of the components have value? The common black capacitors? If I just depopulated every board I come across, seperate out the components, would it make more than just handing the scrap yard a tote full of power boards and stuff from vcrs and tube tvs? My local yard is only giving 10 cents a pound on low grade.

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How much is your time worth ? Are you willing to spend hours of your life for a couple $ worth of scrap ?
Work smarter, not harder.
Most components can be sold on Ebay or a specialty electronics forum - however you must decide what is worth the time & money investment to harvest.
*Example: ruthenium resistors are worth roughly $16 /lb, but it can take hours to harvest a few grams worth.

On a side note: brand name VCRs that still work can worth quite a bit on Ebay.

Does your local yard only buy boards at .10 or do they buy other grades of boards?

Please don't depopulate whole boards. There are certain components you can remove to get better prices but I wouldn't completely strip a board.

You didn't mention whether or not you would be selling on eBay. If you did choose to use eBay, then there is a whole learning curve involved for getting used to how things work. You need to be able to create a good listing with the right keywords to attract the right potential buyers. You have to write a decent listing and typically will have to be proficient with taking and publishing photos. I'm not sure at this point whether you'd have to charge sales tax and remit it to the government- I'll leave that to others, as I've never sold anything on eBay and laws have changed fairly recently. You'd need to package something well enough so that it could be shipped without getting damaged. You've have to decide whether or not to pay insurance for your shipment in case it gets lost or is damaged. You have to be concerned that a single bad feedback from the biggest jerk of a customer could make it difficult to sell after that. After all that, you'd have to pay a fee to eBay- I think it is around 11% or so. I think most would say that eBay isn't worth doing unless you make decent money (in other words, have a lot of transactions).

Whether you use eBay or not, good luck in your endeavors.