Quote Originally Posted by hills View Post
I'll second what everyone else is saying about the cd/dvd drives. Couldn't be any easier, though i will admit that the circuit boards seem to be getting awfully small these days. The older tape drives (pre y2k ?) can be challenging but you don't see them very often nowadays.

It's generally not that hard to do a full teardown of HDD's. I save those for when i have some dead time. They're a pleasant distraction when i've got a few minutes to kill. It's purely speculative, but there could come a time when the neodymium magnets have some value. I read somewhere that neodymium was close to 300.00$/lb back in the early days. China saw the opportunity and ramped up production. The prices gradually fell to what they are today. China had the market cornered on rare earths now. Prices could go back up again if there were ever a disruption in the supply chain. Something like a war or a pandemic ?

Anyhow, they've got most of the technical problems with recycling neodymium sorted out now. The magnets don't take up much space in the shop so i just squirrel them away for a rainy day when they might be needed.

It's just my thing, but i prefer to ship high value items and not ship the lower value items. It's just a game, but it's fun to figure out ways of increasing your average net profit per pound. Just a couple of hypothetical examples:

A pallet of Ram:

Ram pays 14.50 / lb

Shipping cost .20 / lb.

Net profit per lb is 14.30 / lb. ( Shipping costs are negligible in this case. )

A pallet of power supplies:

Power supplies pay .25 /lb

Shipping cost .20 /lb

Net profit is .05 / lb ( Shipping is a significant expense in this case !)

In the real world ... you're shipping mixed loads so it all averages out.



Does it make sense that the lower value items thrown into a load tend to pull down your average net profit per pound on a load ?
Yep 100% makes sense. You gave the example of $0.20/lb shipping cost. I just need to find what that actually ends up being (per lb) to determine which items are/are not worth it to ship. My guess is most of the lower value doesnt make sense to ship, especially if I have a local buyer for some of the stuff (even at lower prices, the lower price would still be better than the higher price minus shipping, all will be found out soon when I get some actual numbers in the coming weeks)