Maximising my $crap

I pull the boards and toss all the cd/floppy/zip drive guts in the shred pile, then put the HD boards in one bin, HD's in another and the other boards in yet another. The cd drives have a small motor on a low grade board, besides the logic board where the cable plugs in. I pop the motor out, toss it in a bucket and toss that board in with the low grade, and the logic board in its own bin. the logic board on a cd/floppy is graded different that the logic board on a HD. If I am not getting the best bang for the buck, somebody correct me here! Hope that helps. BroJer

I am pretty sure cdw boards are mother board grade.

I take the boards off the CD and hard drives, and break the gold connector off the floppies. The CD/floppies still get around .10/lb as shred, and hard drives around .50/lb as dirty aluminum. I also take the stainless covers off.

The CD boards come off really easy. They usually have 4 screws and the board pops right out. I have done hundreds of these in the last couple of months and I can do one in less than a minute.


I still think it is worth it to take the hard drive board off and sell it separately. The board is worth about 1.00, and the hard drive about .50. Most of the buyers pay around 1.00/lb with the board, and most of them weigh a pound or less.

Floppies are a PITA and yield very little. I sell them as a unit for .30 per # or put them on Ebay as a lot of 15 and try to get .50 per pound. As Auburn stated, CD boards are so easy to get too, that it makes sence pull them. I place the casing in the shred pile and the innards in another pile for when I have little work and feel like breaking them down in-between commercial breaks of a movie my wife and I are watching. If you got a lot of them, you should probably go ahead and shread the rest as the second step does't yield as much as taking off the board and its a lost more time consuming. I'm pretty sure you more than double your money this route althoughI can't remember the numbers.

HD boards are def worth removing. Given the PITA factor of hard drives, if your not worried about the information contents I would sell the HD as a whole aftetr you remove the board

Originally Posted by Mechanic688

Keep the heatsinks from the cpu's separate as their extruded and when you point it out the yard they should pay you for extruded, for us it's .10 - .15 higher.

I'm glad you brought this up, I pointed this out to my yard and they told me that that was incorrect. Should I have asked for the gun test?

Originally Posted by Mechanic688

Sure look extruded to me, my yard pays for extruded as long as I have it in a separate bucket

Good call, time for a new yard for heat sinks!

I found this information about heat sink materials pretty interesting


The most common heat sink materials are aluminium alloys.[5] Aluminium alloy 1050A has one of the higher thermal conductivity values at 229 W/m•K [6] but is mechanically soft. Aluminium alloys 6061 and 6063 are commonly used, with thermal conductivity values of 166 and 201 W/m•K, respectively. The values depend on the temper of the alloy.

Copper has around twice the conductivity of aluminium, but is three times as dense [5] and, depending on the market, around four to six times more expensive than aluminium. [5] Aluminium can be extruded, but copper can not. Copper heat sinks are machined and skived. Another method of manufacture is to solder the fins into the heat sink base.

Diamond is another heat sink material, and its thermal conductivity of 2000 W/m•K exceeds copper five-fold. [7][unreliable source?] In contrast to metals, where heat is conducted by delocalized electrons, lattice vibrations are responsible for diamond's very high thermal conductivity. For thermal management applications, the outstanding thermal conductivity and diffusivity of diamond is an essential. Nowadays synthetic diamond is used as submounts for high-power integrated circuits and laser diodes.

Composite materials can be used. Examples are a copper-tungsten pseudoalloy, AlSiC (silicon carbide in aluminium matrix), Dymalloy (diamond in copper-silver alloy matrix), and E-Material (beryllium oxide in beryllium matrix). Such materials are often used as substrates for chips, as their thermal expansion coefficient can be matched to ceramics and semiconductors.

Ive seen some that are both extruded and sheet. They will have a solid extruded base about an inch thick and then folded sheets much like the pic that pts posted.

we use 3 grades for our heatsinks

1) old aluminum - aluminum heatsinks other than extruded and extruded heatsinks with fans or screws (.50ish per pound)
2) extruded heatsinks cleaned (.70ish per pound)
3) copper aluminum heat sinks (1.40ish per pound)

http://s1183.photobucket.com/albums/.../heat%20sinks/

shoot, my yard wants to pay DIRTY aluminum price for copper aluminum heat sinks. i thought they should at least be paying extruded aluminum for them, but they won't listen to me. they also said that they are going to start paying LESS than sheet aluminum price for all heat sinks. ridiculous. guess I will just have to stockpile until I find another buyer that has a brain...