My first day as a Scrapper

Well today I actually started breaking down the 9 computers that I had in my closet and garage. My wife is actually very happy about this since I have freed up some room. Today after working in the yard and doing my honey do list I sat down with a few hours before my kids baseball game. I really wanted to see how fast I could break these down to see how this was going to work as a part timer. This is what I ended up with after about 2 hours while watching TV.



I've been reading the forum a lot since yesterday and all I gathered in this picture was the stuff that was easy to deal with. I have to refine my collection and sorting process and go get some bigger bins and tubs to put stuff in. Right now I have a bigger rubbermaid tub that has power supplies, wire, and other misc junk that I need to sort out later into other sections.



I dont have a good location yet to put all the aluminum heat sinks, DVD Drive, Hard Drives, and floppies but I'm working on that. All in all I think this is something I can do in my spare time. I reached out to a few friends to look at their work place and see if they have any old equipment. I do have to develop a decent process for erasing hard drives because some of my customers have sensitive info on them and I dont want to pass out drive with SSN and stuff on them.

I have to go onsite to a customers work on Monday so I'm going to load up what I can at their place and bring it home to process this week. I'm hoping within a week or two I will have enough to send off. I've never been to the scrapyard so once I clean my junk hauler truck bed out Im going to start putting the computer cases in it and plan on a trip up there. Another weird thing though was as I was telling a friend about this at the ballpark today I ended up with 2 pool pump motors for scrap and possibly an old washer and dryer so this might end up being slightly more than just escrap.

nice craasher I been ewasting for awhile and in time you will figure out what works for you as for hard drives i bought me a cable set that hooks up via usb and i can wipe them twice and have them clean in no time i have a wipe gaurante to my clients and this gets me more buisness all the time the cable also helps me sort the good from the bad which saves me time lol the ones under 40g i take the boards off and stash the rest in a bin for cleaning up later always remember no matter if u have bad teeth or not always smile when talking to potential clients lol

Good going!! not bad for a couple hours !!

you could maybe save one of those computers for a workstation, (all you need is the basic tower, monitor, keyboard, and mouse) in a corner of the garage. Almost every HDD manufacturer has disk drive tools available for free download. You don't really even need an operating system on the pc as the HDD tools work from floppy or cd in DOS mode. You can do a quick format that will dispose of any viruses, or you can do a full write 0's to the disk (if it takes all night to write 0's let it, normal "run" mode is generally less than 150 watts power consumption). Depending on the promises you made and the info on the hard drives these should be sufficient to protect you and your clients from future "trespass"? If you're dealing with banks and hospitals I'd destroy the hard drives, probably removing the platters and shatter with a hammer

Be carefull becuase this scraping gets in your blood and you will fill up your back yard real fast, it can get out of hand trying to do the honny-do-list and keeping up with the kids. Just a worning.

Thanks for the encouragement yall.

Bear- yeah that was my plan. I use Active Kill Disk at work. The free version lets you use 1 pass to write all 1's or 0's to a drive to overwrite any info on it. I spent today getting my station set up and I have my first hard drive on it running it through now. My biggest issue is limited space. I'm scrapping this stuff out in my den so I'm trying to keep it as compact and clean as possible. I ended up using a KVM switch at the same place I use my laptop for work to switch between the laptop thats running my monitor and the hard drive wiping machine. This doesn't use up any more space than I was taking up originally so my wife is happy about that..

I have read pretty much every post a few pages deep in each forum now and man there is a lot of good information here. I know a lot of it doesn't really click to me right now but I think as I go to the scrap yard and actually start trying to sell some of this stuff that I will understand more. Terminology is the biggest gap. When the posts start talking about all the different grades of scrap and stuff I'm just not making the connection mentally.

One of my customers today is going to let me break down her old equipment at her office. I usually spend most of my week there so at lunch I can break down her equipment and bring it home in smaller batches. I can see a lot of equipment that I can get my hands on right now but once that is gone it might slow down for me. So I'm starting to put some feelers out to other people about their equipment.

Your right happyscraper. I already ended up with 2 electric pool pump motors today to scrap and its not something I never thought I would end up with. In my mind I thought I would only scrap computers in my spare time. Also talking to my father in law today and telling him what I was doing he is going to save me all the lighting ballasts and any other scrap that he has at work. He runs the building maintenance for a large rehab facility in my home town.

man, that's cool! congrats! just keep "branching out" and you won't have to worry about it drying up ; )

It was such a great experience for you.

Originally Posted by drozenski

From looking at your pics i see you removed the alum from the boards.

Leave it on. alum @ 3.50 a pound is > alum @ 0.60 a pound.

I get a different price for having my boards be free of heatsinks and batteries, ends up being well worth it for me to have my boards clean.

I like to get the gold. King of the metals that I find on trash night.

Originally Posted by drozenski

From looking at your pics i see you removed the alum from the boards.

Leave it on. alum @ 3.50 a pound is > alum @ 0.60 a pound.

Hmm i thought it had to be clean to be able to send it in. This is the stuff I'm having a hard time figuring out. There seems to be a lot of difference from the people that buy the stuff that some want it one way and others another. I guess I need to contact a buyer and ask them.

Craasher if you really want to SCRAP and tear apart Computers and such then do as I say (I am not yelling at you ) GET IT OUT OF THE HOUSE,,, Rent a small storage building or something ,,, This will save your Marrage later... or many problems... trust me.....

I understand what you mean trashmaster but I don't keep anything in the house. I break down one or two computers a night and put all the pieces in a big Rubbermaid bin. Then I take it out to my tool shed out back, and split it up into its containers for each piece. That way everything I do is clean and doesn't aggravate the wife. Its only in the house for about an hour or two. The only stuff that's in the house is the hard drives I haven't processed yet. As soon as they get processed they go outside., and before that they stay hidden under my work desk.

Since all of this is in my tool shed space is always at a premium but I read on here about some people using those plastic 55 gal drums and that might be the ticket for me. It would allow me to go higher than I can now. My old tubs I have now are not all the same size and dont stack very well.

I had to go to a clients site on Monday and was out of town all day. While I was working on her server I asked about any old workstations they wanted to get rid of and ended up with 4 towers to take home. I will have to go back in a few days and they had some other stuff upstairs that I will probably pick up. I'm still real hesitant about the CRT's because I just dont have the space to store them. They had a lot of phones that I will probably grab also and break them down. I have to get these 4 towers broken down tonight because tomorrow I go to another customers site and she has 8 in her junkroom. I'm hoping to have enough broken down in a week or so to try and cash out with.

I suggest plastic garbage cans for aluminum and steel, as well as plastic containers or if you have a place to put up a couple shelves for the rest. As for erasing harddrives you can buy a device that will reformat them for you.