Video of Board Sorting and Depopulating with Air Chisel

[hills]

If you check out my thread "520s scrap finds" I broke down the numbers in a recent post.

As far as just the depopulating it is the least profitable part.

But considering I still need to put hands on my boards to sort them and also I need to strip a few transformers and larger pieces of metal to make some of the green boards qualify as midgrade I might as well do the low grade stuff while I'm at it.



I got about 2 lbs of ic chips not sure about the broken ones being accepted by buyers.

15 pounds of aluminum and 25 pounds of transformers. These are all estiments as I don't have my scale set up.

It's not a big money thing but i sounds like you're making something with it.

I tried depopulating years back but it turned out to be unprofitable for me. So much of it is situational. The nearest yard to me is a sixty mile run each way. It turned out that i was losing money after deducting travel expense from the pay out at the yard.

It was a good education though. It got me interested in all the little bits n pieces that make up the scrap value of the board.

Took it a little further and it gave me a better appreciation of the job hazards involved. I think that was the thing that set it for me. I didn't want to trash up my shop with all of the toxic metallic dusts and fumes that were being generated during the depopulating process.

There's got to be a better way of doing this job.

Some kind of a closed loop system that keeps everything contained ?

Maybe something like a hammer mill that pounds everything into a fine powder that could be assayed and sent out for further processing ?