News from the swamp - Page 2

I sold a 40gb drive on ebay a few weeks back for $11 after fees and shipping I made $4. Not bad for a couple mins work. Definitly better than scrap value.

yes you can get your money out of most comps very easily, only problem is it can be alot of extra some times of just a little, rarely have i had a computer that came in at under 5$ value.

One I got from the trash co. was only the steel carcass and a power supply. I didn't pick them apart, I just paid $1. ea. for them all. I wasn't going to pay much more cause I'll have time in them cutting them apart to get the goodies out.

Also any dvdrw drives I sell for $18 to $20 bucks shipped on ebay and have no problems

PTS, do you use a flat rate small box to ship those dvd drives, or a padded bubble envelope?

now i just need 7 more gigs of ram 2 processors of the right size and i got my first trash built gaming system

You might check with Escrap, here was his post earlier;

You know, we have been thinking about hiring a person just to list things on ebay. We could start with this bucket of over 400 sticks of DDR 512mb ram

I double them up in flat rate padded envelopes. Havnt had a single complaint yet about them breaking in shipping. they dont fit in small flat rate box.

Originally Posted by Dunemaul

yup totally agree with you there. i got a spiffy new 4-1 inkjet printer today that goes for like 250 retail, gonna get that baby on CL for 50 bucks and see if i can get 4x what i paid for the entire lot. Also got some with weird light wand that says it kills germs. If i could figure out how to work it id resell it but for now i think its just gonna be my new light saber for now. What kind of system are you using to test ur drives? like just setting them into a test server workstation or they got a spiffy device to tell if they are still good. also anyone know a good way to test video cards? i hate that im scrapping 250$ cards that might still work. But i am super stoked that i got the Mobo i been wanting for my new gaming computer and it wasnt fired. now i just need 7 more gigs of ram 2 processors of the right size and i got my first trash built gaming system. thing would easly retail round 800$ when im done with it.

I use my desktop to check out drives. Use one of these and just plug them into your usb drive.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-2-0-IDE-...item2a09a0a1f8
Than I use diskwipe and HD tune to dod wipe and error check the drives. Both free programs. As far as video cards go I have an old AGP machine that my kids still use set up in my office. So i can test agp/pci/pcie video cards. I plan to build a test rack out in my shed with a few of the more popular motherboard sockets so I can test ram and cpu's. I can test ddr and ddr2 ram in my current 2 machines. As well as any pentium4 up threw quadcore preI3 I5 I7 stuff.

Now talking about trash computers I did a thread on this a while back but I still have this board that the guy just handed to me on a cl pickup. I got 3 or 4 towers from him then he hands me this thing. Got it all for free. Went home looked up all the resell value and he ended up handing me $200 bucks if memory serves me right.

Im an intel guy but im going to use this to build my HTPC. It has a amd athalon 64x2 6600+ cpu with 8gb of nvidia sli ready pc2-6400 ram. I cant wait to build this puppy and hook it up to the big screen and surf the forums on the couch.

Maaaan i forgot about this place. Were to even start, o wow it died in February. Ok time to give the run down and horror stories from the last 6 months or so.

Feb- Normal month just tried to get my feet wet in the Ewaste business i was getting mostly hits off of free sites and 1 time stops from scrappers i find. Not a great month but not bad either.

March- Started to make normal rounds and meeting people from the forums to buy there ewaste and send to my buyer. met some good people made decent money nothing to brag about.

April- And this is were it really started to get good. I partnered up with scrapyaherd giving me acces to a truck on friday and weekend. So i have had larger jobs on the back burner and we go out and hit one. We spent $300 and ended up getting over a grand. I had family death so rest of the month was kinda shot. Now the gears start ticking and the pebble starts to gain speed.

May- Did a warehouse clean up over 3 days did ok, 1 nice pickup every friday. No regular calls coming in, Im still curb shopping in my free time.

June- I made up flyers and a price sheet started email blasting and cold calling. Alot of we will call you back yadda yadda but still manage to fill the truck bed twice that month. Summer is in full effect so i slow down breakdown wise.

July- Make it or break it-
- We pulled in 7500lbs of E-waste this month and ended up getting bogged down due to payment issues with my previous buyer. I cut it down to the wire with all my rent and bills, man it was close but i juggled everything together and made my network. We now have a small but regular clientele. So we stay busy and then i am contacted by a new buyer just about to open. To say the least everything sounded great and I start building up the piles for August. (thank you Kyle, Happy made this a great month {and cant forget JAWS])

August- Was stop and go for the first 2 weeks of the month nothing to great is coming in but i do start to establish state wide sellers. Then we hit the inner circle of computer repair persons, last 2 weeks of this month have been insane. Not only do we have pickups constantly we have people dropping off tons of equipment every afternoon.

To say the least I dont curb shop for hours, and I have a pile of ewaste that could smash me to a pulp to break down. Even though we just sent out a few 1000lbs last week. Hard work, networking, alot of luck can build you something you can be proud of.

The Ewaste gods are looking down on me 6 Pentium pros in 1 week and paid 55$ for everything in including 10 servers, 15 computers, boxes of boards, laptops the works. Keep the storm going im gonna stand out in it with my bucket and catch it all.

My company has become a official LLC finally. Finally moved out of a house that was costing me way beyond what it was worth. Moved into a 12x36 workshop located 1 mile from our scrap yard. Starting advertisement with bandit signs next week. just about done working through thousands of pounds of ewaste i had stored around my old house. Need to start hitting the road to find the next good score. That last one took use 18 days to clean out and break down. Funny he still gets us a truckload a week. Also we haave a in house ITguy and Computer repair. So now everything that can be fixed gets fixed and listed on ebay/craigslist for 2-4 weeks. and scrapped only if broken or taking up to much space. I cant wait were gonna need the 7,500 sq ft warehouse across the street sooner then later and best of all it has a loading deck. Well back to work just thought i would share whats happening in my neck of the woods. more more more i want it all.