Reelman...I have been doing much the same thing you are, except I am hoarding gold plated metal such as pins and etc.
I don't devalue boards, but whenever I find gold plated pins on small components, I pull them. One example is the IDE connectors on 3.5" drives. Often they are very nice pins, fully plated, attached to a junky brown board. Rather than sell the whole drive for pennies a pound, I pop off that connector and then toss it into my shred pile. Then, at my leisure, I go at a pile of connectors with a small set of clippers and needle nose pliers while watching television. The primary reason I save these is to build up a decent amount of feed stock for a reverse plating cell. These are easy to build, and easy to run. After filtering the product, one could either break out the real chemistry and refine it to 99.99% pure Au, or take the lazy way out and melt it into a button that will stand up to an acid test, and could therefore be used in TEOTWAWKI trade as caret gold.
Here is a pic of what I have piled up recently......
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