Hard Drive Arm

What do you all do with them?:confused:

I have a small bag of them. I pop the copper of the end and throw that in my #2 bucket, but still have the rest in a bag in the garage. Will probably end up with the mixed aluminum when there is enough.

I read they are made from magnesium.

'Ping' it, the sound goes on for ages compared to Ali, sorta like a tuning fork.

Originally Posted by eesakiwi

I read they are made from magnesium.

'Ping' it, the sound goes on for ages compared to Ali, sorta like a tuning fork.

Yet another reason that I pop the copper out of the end and save the rest on the side for later.

Great question, I was thinking about it yesterday. I hope we get a definitive answer. Mike.

tryin to save enough og those to make $ would be kinds like savin enough bees knees for dinner.

mmmmmmmm......bee knees......yum

Magnesium will do these things and is very flammable as you say, however these are not the properties of it's alloys. Most of its alloys are alloyed with aluminium anyway, increasing its strength whilst keeping its low density. It's alloys are perfectly safe to store as normal. It is highly unlikely that the average person will come into contact with pure magnesium scrap as it will come with a highly flammable hazard symbol and isn't used to make items on it's own. If you do it is most likely you will see it in flares as it is used in powder form in the signal flare cartridges. Aluminium will react with silver nitrate though how long it takes depends on how thick it's oxide layer is.

Lol, well I'm glad someone asked this and I'm still confused but I had just been tossing them in with my aluminum after popping the centers out.

If it's magnesium, grind it up and mix with rust to make Thermite and sell at gun shows.

Some arms have a gold plated ridge on the bottom side. I keep mine with the little ribbon wire and the end connector, which is usually gold plated as well......

Here is the most informative answer I have come across on hard drives. A long read, but worth it.

Let's start by looking at the phsycial structure of a hard drive. The
drive comes in a metal enclosure that's usually made of aluminum. On
the back of the drive are various connectors for power and data which
are made of aluminum and plastic (occasionally there's a bit of gold
coating the connectors). The bottom of the drive often has an exposed
circuit board which may in some cases have extremely small amounts of
gold in the traces, though more usually the traces would be aluminum.
This gold (if it's present) is wedged between the plastic layers of
the circuit board and would be nearly impossible to access. Attached
to the board are a few integrated circuits (black squares or
rectangles) that may contain extremely small gold wires. Again,
accessing them would be nearly impossible.

Inside the drive sits a motor to spin the platter, one or more
platters that store data, and an arm that moves across the disk to
read and write data. The motors, while of extremely high quality,
would not have any material of value. The arm is made of aluminum or
other lightweight alloys. At the tip of the arm sits the read/write
head which would not typically be composed of particularly valuable
materials either. Attached to the arm is a ribbon cable which may have
some tiny amount of gold in the traces, but again it would be
impractical to retrieve it. The movement of the arms is controlled by
a voice coil actuator, an electromechanical system that uses magnets
to position the read/write head on the drive. The mechanism uses
strong magnets but does not involve any precious metals.

The final major component of the hard drive, as well as the most
prominent one, is the platter (or platters, as some drives have
multiple platters stacked above each other). In early hard drives
platters were made of aluminum, but in newer drives they're made of
glass or a glass composite. Information stored on hard drives is
stored magnetically, so an extremely thin (just microns thick) layer
of magnetic material is applied to the glass. The material on older
drives is mostly composed of iron oxide, more commonly known as rust.
This is, as you can guess, pretty much worthless. Newer drives use a
thin film technology that applies different magnetic materials (cobalt
alloys) to the platter. In order to achieve higher data density a
further layer of material is added that stabilizes the magnetic
properties of the magnetic layer. This additional layer is composed of
Ruthenim, a Platium group metal that is very valuable. But here again
it's applied in such minute quantities that retrieving it would be all
but impossible.

I use them for making models. Bikes and power claws for my 40k orks

Or the misc alu bucket.

Leave them inside the hard drive. I still don't understand why people want to turn a brick of dirty Aluminum into a pile of dirty Aluminum before they sell it. To each his own

what tips do you mostly use for those ? they're much tinier than tips i've got

you need to buy tips 6/7/8/9/10 i bought the bit drivers to use on the drill at harbor freight. I gave up tearing them apart a long time ago. Most e waste buyers are paying close to cast price for the whole unit minus the board