What I got at local yard, vs what I could have got through an online buyer - Page 2

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Pallet is determined by weight and size.......(mainly weight but one time I got charged for an oversize pallet).........Just play with it I guess as far as DVD drives those have to be some of the most simple items to do.......The boards go for close to $4/lb and usually only 4 screws involved

Hmm might have to look into them then. I do harddrives since the boards are at like $10/lb.... But I did some drives and I remember them being frustrating.... And not trying them again deciding they weren't worth it. I may have just had some particularly troublesome ones. I have about 300lbs of disk/floppy drives so may give it another shot!

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

COPIED and PASTED from Ewasted buyers thread

$3.75 CD/DVD Boards (please remove ribbon wire and brown board if attached)

Oh yea I've seen the prices. I have his buy thread printed out in my garage. I know they are $4/lb.... I was just frustrated enough with them the first time around for me to say " this isn't worth $4/lb to me to do these".... If you're saying it's only 4 screws then I must have had some weird drives. I remember having to take off multiple layers of stuff, multiple types of bits (mixed size torx and Phillips) to get to the board. A lot more than 4 screws. But if some are 4 screws and that's all, I can always do the quickones, shred pile (or ship) the rest

Originally Posted by kss

Coming back to this thread.... y'all are right. It didnt take that long to have enough for a pallet lol. Doing a pallet to ewasted after a trip im going on this week. Still deciding on if some stuff should/shouldnt go on the pallet. itll all depend.


Things still on the fence about sending on the pallet are harddrives w/o boards, ac adapters w/wire, psus w/o wire, disk/cd/dvd/floppy drive. But all my boards are for sure going.

It's like hills said above. Do the math once you have your shipping quotes and if you'll make more sending to your buyer do that. If not sell locally.

"this isn't worth $4/lb to me to do these"

I think some of you are looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it's me.

An example would be Saturday. I had some computers in the garage and I went out and pulled the ram and processors. I brought the good ones in and checked the buyers list. WoooHooo, I made $175 in an hour.......no I didn't because I'm not done. I still have to finish the computers and then add everything up. It won't add up to $175 an hour but it dang sure won't be $4 an hour.

Quit grabbing all the good stuff and selling it first. It sucks when you let the power supplies and cd drives pile up.

Just my 2 cents.

I'll second what everyone else is saying about the cd/dvd drives. Couldn't be any easier, though i will admit that the circuit boards seem to be getting awfully small these days. The older tape drives (pre y2k ?) can be challenging but you don't see them very often nowadays.

It's generally not that hard to do a full teardown of HDD's. I save those for when i have some dead time. They're a pleasant distraction when i've got a few minutes to kill. It's purely speculative, but there could come a time when the neodymium magnets have some value. I read somewhere that neodymium was close to 300.00$/lb back in the early days. China saw the opportunity and ramped up production. The prices gradually fell to what they are today. China had the market cornered on rare earths now. Prices could go back up again if there were ever a disruption in the supply chain. Something like a war or a pandemic ?

Anyhow, they've got most of the technical problems with recycling neodymium sorted out now. The magnets don't take up much space in the shop so i just squirrel them away for a rainy day when they might be needed.

It's just my thing, but i prefer to ship high value items and not ship the lower value items. It's just a game, but it's fun to figure out ways of increasing your average net profit per pound. Just a couple of hypothetical examples:

A pallet of Ram:

Ram pays 14.50 / lb

Shipping cost .20 / lb.

Net profit per lb is 14.30 / lb. ( Shipping costs are negligible in this case. )

A pallet of power supplies:

Power supplies pay .25 /lb

Shipping cost .20 /lb

Net profit is .05 / lb ( Shipping is a significant expense in this case !)

In the real world ... you're shipping mixed loads so it all averages out.

Does it make sense that the lower value items thrown into a load tend to pull down your average net profit per pound on a load ?

Originally Posted by hills

I'll second what everyone else is saying about the cd/dvd drives. Couldn't be any easier, though i will admit that the circuit boards seem to be getting awfully small these days. The older tape drives (pre y2k ?) can be challenging but you don't see them very often nowadays.

It's generally not that hard to do a full teardown of HDD's. I save those for when i have some dead time. They're a pleasant distraction when i've got a few minutes to kill. It's purely speculative, but there could come a time when the neodymium magnets have some value. I read somewhere that neodymium was close to 300.00$/lb back in the early days. China saw the opportunity and ramped up production. The prices gradually fell to what they are today. China had the market cornered on rare earths now. Prices could go back up again if there were ever a disruption in the supply chain. Something like a war or a pandemic ?

Anyhow, they've got most of the technical problems with recycling neodymium sorted out now. The magnets don't take up much space in the shop so i just squirrel them away for a rainy day when they might be needed.

It's just my thing, but i prefer to ship high value items and not ship the lower value items. It's just a game, but it's fun to figure out ways of increasing your average net profit per pound. Just a couple of hypothetical examples:

A pallet of Ram:

Ram pays 14.50 / lb

Shipping cost .20 / lb.

Net profit per lb is 14.30 / lb. ( Shipping costs are negligible in this case. )

A pallet of power supplies:

Power supplies pay .25 /lb

Shipping cost .20 /lb

Net profit is .05 / lb ( Shipping is a significant expense in this case !)

In the real world ... you're shipping mixed loads so it all averages out.

Does it make sense that the lower value items thrown into a load tend to pull down your average net profit per pound on a load ?

Yep 100% makes sense. You gave the example of $0.20/lb shipping cost. I just need to find what that actually ends up being (per lb) to determine which items are/are not worth it to ship. My guess is most of the lower value doesnt make sense to ship, especially if I have a local buyer for some of the stuff (even at lower prices, the lower price would still be better than the higher price minus shipping, all will be found out soon when I get some actual numbers in the coming weeks)

Originally Posted by kss

I dont care too much about the profit and money, it is just a benifit of me doing this. I do this as a hobby and for fun. I didnt have fun tearing apart the CD drives before, even if the boards were worth $1000/lb (ok, then I might regardless of "fun"). As I am taking stuff apart, sometimes in the middle of it I will say "f" this thing Im tired of messing with it and throw it into the shred pile. I know I leave money on the table sometimes, but if it stops being fun then I'll stop doing it all-together.

I will give them another shot though for sure.

If it's okay i'll borrow / steal the sig line from one of the other members.

" Anyone who says scrapping isn't hard work ain't doin' it right. "


Lol ... more true words were never spoken. I'm learning that more and more as i go along. The old man was right.

You might look at it this way. It's a lot of time and energy invested to earn the skill of doing the CD/DVD breakdown. It gets much easier once you've mastered the skill. You can bang the work out like nobody's business.

It's like that with everything isn't it ? Bigger companies invest millions into research & development just to acquire the method of making a better mousetrap. The payoff comes after they've done the work. Some projects are a dead end so you learn what doesn't work. Some projects have a payoff. Either way you gain.

I know i'm going through this with the new electric wire stripping machine that came in a few weeks ago. There's a certain learning curve. It will take awhile to work out the best methods for my particular shop. Next step after mastering the skill will be to source more material but that's a ways off right now. I'm still in the R&D phase.

Personally, i enjoy the R&D part the most. I like the challenge of solving problems & figuring out the most efficient way of doing a job.

Originally Posted by hills

If it's okay i'll borrow / steal the sig line from one of the other members.

" Anyone who says scrapping isn't hard work ain't doin' it right. "


Lol ... more true words were never spoken. I'm learning that more and more as i go along. The old man was right.

You might look at it this way. It's a lot of time and energy invested to earn the skill of doing the CD/DVD breakdown. It gets much easier once you've mastered the skill. You can bang the work out like nobody's business.

It's like that with everything isn't it ? Bigger companies invest millions into research & development just to acquire the method of making a better mousetrap. The payoff comes after they've done the work. Some projects are a dead end so you learn what doesn't work. Some projects have a payoff. Either way you gain.

I know i'm going through this with the new electric wire stripping machine that came in a few weeks ago. There's a certain learning curve. It will take awhile to work out the best methods for my particular shop. Next step after mastering the skill will be to source more material but that's a ways off right now. I'm still in the R&D phase.

Personally, i enjoy the R&D part the most. I like the challenge of solving problems & figuring out the most efficient way of doing a job.

All very true. I have mistakenly written off the drives since I didnt want to put in the effort. I will give them a second try for sure.