What do you get from scrapping a computer?

This may seem like a ridiculous question but I've never scrapped electronics. To me it seems like too much prep time, however I do have access to a large amount of e-scrap. I know the heat sinks are copper/brass or alloy but what else from a computer is scrappable? The cables I'd imagine obviously when they're stripped. What's a good price to pay for a junk computer and how much profit can you get from one computer?

Depends totally on how much you choose to do, As a whole the towers bring @ 30 cents a Lb., but if you choose to break down ,sell the drives'cpu's M-board,and memory seperately for a bit more,you know how it is the more you do the more you make ,if not,find somethin else where your time's worth it. Hope this helps.
Lucky

Originally Posted by Lucky

Depends totally on how much you choose to do, As a whole the towers bring @ 30 cents a Lb., but if you choose to break down ,sell the drives'cpu's M-board,and memory seperately for a bit more,you know how it is the more you do the more you make ,if not,find somethin else where your time's worth it. Hope this helps.
Lucky

It does help, are people selling the memory/cpu/hdd online as a whole or are they breaking those down into even smaller parts of certain scrap metals?

I will take the bait.

Start here: http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/showt...identification

After you get a handle on whats what, start breaking down systems and sorting the components into different bins. Once you have over a few dozen pounds, start looking here: http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/forum...rs-amp-Sellers

Pick a buyer, talk to them, make a deal, and ship your stuff out. It's not hard, friend.

I'm getting the impression that theres about 0.2 grams of gold in each computer. (0.1 in the CPU & 0.1 in the rest, fingers etc)
Thats computers from 1990-1999.

After extracting it myself, I'd expect to get 0.1 gram of gold.

I needs 320 computers to get a ounce of gold.....

Is this correct?

hey blackwell! This is happyscraper, i have been scraping electronics for about 4 years. i started out waer your at ,not knowing nothing and nobody would help me out . like it's a big secret or something. beacuse of that i am willing to help all newbes as much as i can. i'll tell you how i do computors but it might not the way every body does it. first of all with all electronics you have to look to see how it is but together. open computor and unplog all the wires. the gray flat wire is called ribben, scrap yeards in my area call it data cable and only pay .15 cents for it. the rest of the wires are conected to the power suply unit, do not cut them off. unscrew the power suply and remove it. i am in the prosse of getting a new buyer but use to get .27 cents a lbs. for them whole. next take out the disk drives, sell them whole, was getting about .29 cents a lbs. take out little black fan, i sell them as electric moters .25-.33 cents a lbs. take out baords ,mother baords 2.50-3.00 per lbs cards and memory stick sell for much higher. steal .11 cents per lbs. you can try selling on ebay or graigs list, might get more. i hope this answers your questions. good luck.

Originally Posted by Backwell

To me it seems like too much prep time, however I do have access to a large amount of e-scrap. I know the heat sinks are copper/brass or alloy but what else from a computer is scrappable? The cables I'd imagine obviously when they're stripped. What's a good price to pay for a junk computer and how much profit can you get from one computer?

It takes less than 5 minutes to strip down a computer and have $10 worth of stuff ready to sell. The thing you need to wrap your mind around with these is you are recycling precious metals, not so much the brass and aluminum and steel, etc.

It's the boards and the chips that make them worth scrapping beyond just throwing them in the shred pile. Not too mention some reusable parts here and there that you may find, but that is for a different thread all together. There are many threads discussing what is resellable in the electronics section that are good reading as well.