Ewaste Insanity

[holedigger]

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of what to strip off of boards and what to leave, I read about IC's, flatbacks, and eproms. Two weeks later I had a nice little bucket full and felt satisfied. Then I took a small load of CBM's to my yard and was told flybacks should just go with shred and not electric motors. The price difference isn't huge so not a big deal there, but what a waste of time! Now I just finished reading about capacitors for 2 hours and can't figure out what the hell is going on with those or if I should even care. I want to get every penny I can out of everything I can and ship only small profitable things. Pretty sure I am going to hire someone next week to figure out a few things for me so I can focus on other things. It kills me that I can build a house from foundation to roof and then rip it down again and basically build a truck from a pile of parts, but reading about about Ta Caps makes my head spin. Ugh

[Bear]

i give up trying to read about them. I haven't seen any posts on them that's understandable enough to even try to decipher. There's a crap load of em in my scrap metal trailer now

[Pnutfarmer]

Hey Holedigger, I'm with ya this stuff can get crazy even down to the more than 5 grades of Motherboards. I am building a 1968 Dodge Superbee ground up every nut and bolt, but took a while to figure out even the basics of the scrap circuit board scene.

I wouldn't throw the flyback transfomers in shred. You'll be able to either find someone to buy them as motors or transformers or whack em with a hammer, pull out the easy to get copper and then chunk em in shred.

Tantalum capacitors are tough to ID at first but I finally have a handle on some of them. The yellow(or black the same size) rectangles with only two leads are tantalum if they have a stripe on one end indicating polarity. Also the yellow torpedo shaped ones and bulb shaped ones that have polarity + marks on one leg. There are others that I'm not familiar with. However, even if you can ID them, they are so small that it takes from 100-200 of them to make an ounce (yes I weighed some batches of em). If they are $6 per lb, they just aren't worth getting. At $50 per lb, maybe.

I'm going to list some on ebay to see if I can get some bites at better prices.

[Mechanic688]

That's the only reason I pull my flyback transformers is cause my yard will buy them, Check around first, cause it doesn't mean that they all will.

[BroJer]

We admitted we were powerless over ewaste - that our lives had become unmanageable.

[jghilino]

Escrap is definitely one area where you have to have knowledge, patience and the space/ability to hoard material. Even low grade boards can be processed at the $10 hour rate over selling them as-is. It just comes down to knowledge and the ability to learn.

[happyscraper]

The best thing to do with e-waste is try to find a buyer in your area. This should not be hard if you live in or near a larger city. Look through the buyers here on the forum to get an idea of what you should get paid for you e-waste. When you find a buyer tell him you are new to e-waste and they should tell you how they want the boards. This is how I started almost 6 years ago and I didn't have this forum to help me and if I can do it so can you, it will get easyer as you go but you won't learn it over night. I don't take much off my boards unless my buyer dosn't want it on. I take off steel, aluminum. IC chips(low grade boards only) I pull the gold finger cards, prossecors and memory to sell seprate. Hope this helps a little, best of luck and happy scrappin.