Silver contacts holy crapman!!!

Look at these....

2 LBS Cleaned Silver Electrical Contacts for Scrap Recovery 910 Grams | eBay



Most I seen are little itty bitty dabs of silver on older washing machine switches and some circuit breakers, like the size of a ball point pen tip. WTF did those come from??.. lol....**** and 700 and change and counting. I want some. I will be rich I tell ya...wink wink lol

You can get contacts this size from fork lift trucks and big electrical bus bars.

$350 per pound, i think the buyer made good money on this, if i was the seller i wouldve cast it into bars and sold it off locally he couldve easily pocketed $500 a pound.

heres another one

SCRAP SILVER CONTACTS (cleaned) 324 Grams | eBay

I'm not so sure, when they are contacts the buyer -presumably a home refiner would at least know the approximate yield the contacts would bring. When cast into a bar, dishonest sellers can add extra copper to it if they wanted. Buyers know this and so will likely pay less. Also by melting the contacts you would release cadmium vapour as some of it sticks to each side of the contacts when sweated off.

So these types of silver contacts are found in bigger machinery? Just want to clarify because I'm a little confused about the ones I found recently

Pretty much yes, why what have you found recently?

I get these out of big breaker boxes and switches off industrial equipment. They are 80% siver and 20% cadnium (the cad prevents arc burns). From what I understand, when you heat cadnium the vapor can kill you so be carefull. Also, the smaller ones can be just a thin layer of silver over a steel or brass base so be careful buying them or you can get burned. Saving em up and selling on ebay is probably the best way to go.

Originally Posted by harrisvh

Pretty much yes, why what have you found recently?

I'm taking apart a CNC machine and all the wires hooked into this long line of connectors and they're not gold. The part that is gold colored is magnetic actually. The other metal parts are silver and light copper colored. As soon as I get a camera that is better than the one on my phone I'll get a picture on here. lol

Hey Julie, just remember that most gold plated items are magnetic also .....

Originally Posted by theelectronrecycler

Hey Julie, just remember that most gold plated items are magnetic also .....

Oh yeah that totally slipped my mind actually. But the rest of the metal in there isn't magnetic. It's weird. Ok here is the picture:

here is the tree it came out of

Looks like coated copper.

Looks good !!

I pull the contacts of, well everything, mostly whiteware & relays.

So far I have almost 61 grams of 'silver' contacts. 100gms of 'silver-copper' contacts & 30 gms of 'silver-magnetic' contacts.

And a small amount of contacts that are too 'goldish looking' for me to put them into the other bottles. Is ther a better way to disern between them?
Theres some really tiny bright gold contacts of the back of rotary dial telephones dials.

I find with the relays that if its just two contacts, they are copper/silver, but if theres three, the inside one will be all silver. Oh, the older the contacts, the bigger & silverer they are.