Am I calling this stuff what it really is?

Ok, so im not really new to scrapping, but have just kinda been on the newbie side and want to double check some things.



I dismantle my HDD's for magnets and separate boards and tops. Boards are high grade right? Tops are Stainless no?





These are what people call finger boards, right? these are high grade?



RAM is sold as in lots right? No further sorting?



These are aluminum. I would think that they are considered cast or extruded? Are cast and Extruded the same?

I would assume this is cast aluminum?





Would these be considered Extruded or cast? All are AL heat sinks.




Just new to E-scrap.

Dont have a yard around that takes them unless they take them because they are AL. Will have to find a buyer.

Thanks for your information to follow.

James

I think everyone above nailed it!! I am an eWaste recycler as well. A great tip on the Al heat sinks is to sell them on ebay if they are not damaged. You can often get ten times the scrap value. Some heat sinks specifically the ones that cover the CPU can fetch up to $10-$15 each! They are right about the HDD cover, Fe or Al, test with magnet then grinder if needed. The hard drve casing is cast aluminum. As for the cards, they look to be PCI cards. You can do a few things with those...... One, you can sell them as a whole to places like b----s---.com for $3-$4 per lb, you can sell them on ebay, or you can trim the gold fingers off of them and those can fetch $74 per lb!!!! Once the fingers are trimmed, buyers would still buy the remainder of the card for gold processing for anywhere from $1-$1.75 per lb. THe same goes for the RAM chips. Pnutfarmer is right about the logic board as well. That is the circuit board found on the HDD with the gold plated pins. next to ceramic CPU's that board has some of the highest gold content in pc's and can sell easily for $10/lb!! Oh and don't forget the platinum plated HDD platters. Yes, it is an extrememly small ammount of Pt, but people are still paying for it on ebay!!! Keep this thought in mind. All of the gold ever mined on this planet would roughly fill two olympic sized swimming pools. All of the platinum ever mined on the planet would only fill a 30 cubic foot room. It is estimated that there will not be enough Pt produced to meet the demand in just the next 20 years. So as little as an ammount it may be, it is still Pt!!
PEACE!

The mistake stems from calling a cube that is 25 feet on a side a ""25 cubic foot room"".

While all-time platinum production estimates vary widely, backing into a guesstimate using the roughly 7 million ounces mined annually, and extrapolating that out over the past 100 years (admittedly, a very gross guessing tool) you'd get a total of 700,000,000 ounces produced all-time.

Platinum's specific gravity is 21.45, which means that one cubic foot of platinum would weigh 21.45 times as much as one cubic foot of water.

Water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot, therefore platinum weighs about 1338 pounds per cubic foot, which rounds out to 21416 ounces per cubic foot.

Plug that in to the 700,000,000 ounces we guesstimated was the all-time production of platinum above, and you get 32686 cubic feet, or a cube that's just a tick under 32 feet on a side.


And how this thread ended up here from the pics posted is a bigger mystery than how much platinum has ever been mined, that's for sure!

Originally Posted by moosescrapper

All of the gold ever mined on this planet would roughly fill two olympic sized swimming pools. All of the platinum ever mined on the planet would only fill a 30 cubic foot room.

I heard the same quote, but they said that "The amount of Platinum would be 'ankle deep' in a Olympic sized pool...."
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NZ has changed its coins twice since bringing in Decimal currency in 1968. Every old coin found now is only worth its constitutant metals. Where does is value go?
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I often wonder. What would happen if America changed its coins/notes overnight & decided that "If you can't prove the old money was not illegally gained, we won't change it for 'new money' ".
All that paper money saved up by drug barrons etc etc would become useless, & valueless. What does that do to the actual value of the 'new money' ?
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On a side note.
At work we quoted on making some machines. Part of the machine was a arm which they had welded a 20cent coin onto its end, as the arm moved it travelled into a tube & also a switch contacted on each side of the coin.
So we get a quote for (X100) 20cent coin sized metal discs.
Quoted price was 25 cents each....

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Another side note.
We sell our metal in Kg's. If every amount of metal coming in was random, it would average out as 500gms, on average, extra on every sale. Every sale!
100 sales would have the scrapmetal dealer getting 50Kgs of free copper!
and 50 x NZ$7/Kg = free NZ$350!!!

(or NZ$3.50 per sale) NZ$ = US$0.81cents at the moment

The scrapmetal dealers could make a huge profit by just changing to Metric....... It'd make calculating a whole lot easyer too.

Also,I think thats why our scrapmetal dealer likes to put metals into their different catagorys

Seriously, with the ""30 cubic foot room"" thing??!!

A 30 cubic foot room isn't a 'room' at all, but a box. A box just a smidgeon over three feet, one-and-a-quarter inch on a side.

An olympic swimming pool is 50mx25m... which for us 'mericans is 164'x82'. 30 cubic feet, spread out over such an area as the footprint of an olympic swimming pool, would be 0.027 inches deep... less than 1/32 of an inch. 0.68mm for you furrriners.

Assuming my back-of-the-envelope guesstimate of 32686 cubic feet is anywhere near accurate, spread out in an olymipic pool, it would be 2 feet, 5 &1/8 inches deep.... or .741m.

If the actual all-time 'platinum cube' were, in fact, 20' on a side, the depth would be 7 & 1/8 inches... or 0.181m.

Why am I posting pointless figures at 12:30 when I have a long day at work tomorrow? LOL

We'll never know what the actual amount of platinum ever produced is, but it's for darn sure more than 30 cubic feet. My guess is it would be somewhere between 20 and 30 feet on a side, but as we've seen, that's a HUGE range.