My haul last spring cleanup week

I figured some might get a kick out of my haul from our spring cleaning week last year, cant wait for it to come up again this year. I've been picking up things for years at our spring cleaning but did not find out about the e-scrap thing until last spring, really kicking myself for leaving literally hundreds of towers on the curb in years passed (the only thing I didnt find on the curb is the sun microsystems server).

The first picture is the stack after gutting them, the second one is them on the curb waiting for the spring cleaning guys to pick up. Our garbage goes out the last day of the week and they generally take everything we have sitting out but it used to be maybe 5-10 towers. They must have just shook their heads and kept going when they saw this stack. I ended up driving them out to the electronics recycling center myself, oh well, live and learn.

You didn't sell these as steel shred??

Yep, I knew that was the first thing I would hear about the cases and power supplies ha. This was back before I ever knew about all the things I could do to maximize profits. I had only stumbled upon some ebay auctions selling ram and motherboards so at that time I was saving the motherboards, ram, cpu, cards, hdd and throwing the case, power supply and cd roms stupidly. Thank god for forums like this one, I must have read 20+ hours worth of threads and am still learning every day.

What made me not interested in turning these in for scrap metal is over the course of the winter before this I was saving all the metal off of the HDTV's I was parting out and repairing. I took a pickup box load down to my scrap yard and only got something like $25 for the load. (I live in North Dakota, our prices are likely not as good as yours).

Didn't seem to be worth the effort to pull all the plastic and whatnot, but I'm just assuming they want the plastic off, I know all yards are different but how "clean" do you guys have to make your cases before your yards take them?

Everything, including any brass stand-offs for the mobo are stripped and seperated to maximize the return. Living in the middle of nowhere with very few metals buyers you have to if you want to make a dollar. The yard I go to is receptive to learning about e-waste from me; a sure sure sign he'll be the one around for me in the years to come.

My yard's prices suck, but they are pretty good about not being nit-picky when it comes to stray pieces of plastic. I can leave the plastic fronts on my computer cases.

On a tower, I gut EVERYTHING. Mobo standoffs go into the brass bucket, fans go into their own bucket (I know some places will pay electric motor price on them, my place has a special "computer fan" category which is a hair less than regular motor price), and the rest get broken down for boards and motors: CD/DVD and floppy drives, HDD, and power supplies. All wire gets pitched in the bucket with the rest of my insulated copper (after I clip off any gold-bearing ends).

Since I don't get a ton of towers, I've started breaking them down fully as I go, instead of stacking them for later. I stuff the tower carcass with the shred off of the drives and power supplies, and whatever other little stuff I've got laying around.