Printable View
I have a question…I guess mostly for the buyers on the forum. I have read a lot of the threads in the forum and I see people are pulling off the eproms, plated pins, fingers and even the surface mounted caps. Does this have an impact on the price per lb. of the high end mb? I was intrigued by the statement of the kid holding a mb over a fire to heat it up and banging the components off the board.
Stoke
Depending on the type of motherboard - or board for that fact.. my immediate answer is yes. We are a processor of nearly 400,000 to 500,000 lbs of various printed circuit boards annually. We are not paid per lb on the material, but on the recovery. Some of the buyers on here who move material to companies in our space, can get away with smaller quantities of "cherry picked" boards. However once you start to increase your volumes, for sake of story, a thousand lbs at a time, the buyer will typically start deducting for it.
We have a certain science to our blending here, so we are comfortable mixing some low end with high end material and not hurting our refining rates.
But to answer your question, dealing in smaller quantities yes, but should you increase your volumes, "cherry picking" will no longer be a good strategy.
Back in the day, when I was involved in recovery, we would send the boards up to Sabin and they would issue us stock in all the different metals they recovered...after taking their cut of course. We would also cut and save fingers and the epoms until we had about 5 - 10 5gal. buckets and throw them in a small ball mill and cook the mix producing a copper bearing gold bar. Do you do any smelting?