Ribbon Cable / Connectors - Page 2

Originally Posted by BarrenRealms007

Not all of the pins from the connectors are fully plated.

The ones that just the tips are plated you can just trim off the tips with wire cutters. It really depends what grade you are shooting for though. If your selling them to a base rate buyer that says xx dollars per pound there is no incentive to trim and cut off just the plated areas. You are implying that just the gold plated areas of the pins be cut off or what is your policy barren? You buy pins by the grade?

I cut 'n keep, when gold goes to 15k oz everyone will want my sexy pins.

Just did a test run of 10# of assorted ribbon wire with various amounts of connectors attached (with a piece or two of ferrite that we found later). At $.80 per pound, that is $8.00 as is at my local yard.

Spent about 50 min cutting off the connectors and came up with 4.3# @ $2# = $8.60 plus remaining wire of 5.7# @ $.80 = $4.56 totalling $13.16.

50 min of labor for $5.16 minus the cost of shipping to buyer. I dont add in the cost of taking wire to yard as I go there often and wire is very small percentage of my total load.

Hope this information helps anyone trying to decide what route to take.

Probably netting around $3 hour to cut connectors.

I had a little over 90 pounds of ribbon cable from the last batch of computers I did. My yard offered .45 a pound for it as dirty comm wire. Took my trusty free scissors (free from harbor freight) and cut the ends off. Took 4 hours and ended up with 61 pounds of clean comm wire at 1.10 a pound and 32 pounds of gold ends. I figure I made 90 bucks for 4 hours of work and got to listen to Micheal Savage for a couple of evenings to boot.

Another option is making a gold pin ingot. Looks like many go for around a $1 a gram on ebay. Over $400 a lb just add heat.

Originally Posted by freonjoe

I had a little over 90 pounds of ribbon cable from the last batch of computers I did. My yard offered .45 a pound for it as dirty comm wire. Took my trusty free scissors (free from harbor freight) and cut the ends off. Took 4 hours and ended up with 61 pounds of clean comm wire at 1.10 a pound and 32 pounds of gold ends. I figure I made 90 bucks for 4 hours of work and got to listen to Micheal Savage for a couple of evenings to boot.

funny how that works, though. You take the most expensive part off of the wire and then they pay you more for the wire.

Sometimes the ribbon has silver wire. If the wires are internal and the electronics sensitive, like ground terrain radar for example. When I first opened up a ground terrain radar, I couldn't believe all the gold connectors. I was shocked. But I was even more surprised by the amount of silver wire they contained. So I wouldn't just write off the ribbon cables, they very well might be silver.

Scott

I had a long cable from a 1982 Texas Instruments peripheral box that had tiny silver wires, but about decided they were aluminum, along with discovering a number of IDE ribbon cables were silver-ish also, about decided the silver ones were tin plated copper, or aluminum

Originally Posted by Scrap Master J

Another option is making a gold pin ingot. Looks like many go for around a $1 a gram on ebay. Over $400 a lb just add heat.

You could do that but all you accomplish is taking a calculatable amount of recoverable gold and mix it to almost impossible-to-recover-the-gold lump. All to get a few extra dollars from someone who doesn't know that they will end up spending 3x what the gold is worth in chemical and time. Anyone that would do this doesn't know what they are doing in the first place and will probably screw things up, creating a toxic waste mess in his yard. (Hope he's not your neighbor!)
Sell it as it is; fair representation for a fair dollar.