Finding gold in ribbon cables

Here is a very useful youtube link for looking for and finding gold in ribbon cables




Hope this will help answer your question about ribbon cables. Also, for the new E-Scrapper's out there, this guy has about 85 "E=Cycling" videos with a lot of useful information.

Now i know how to process those, just been saving them up. Those gold plated pins will bring $50 per pound

I took one apart. 0.273 ounces as is for connector grade scrap, it yielded 0.039 ounces of pins. As weighed on my jewelers scale. The pins look like low grade or base rate pins. If connectors are $5 per pound and pins are $80 per pound i can do the math.

1/16x.273x4= 6.875 cents complete connector
1/16x.039x80= 19.5 cents gold pins only

so yes its worth it to take them apart, but you are gonna have to process 400 of these to get 1 pound worth of pins, 7 pounds of connectors to yield about 1 pound of gold pins, 3 pound of insulated wire, 3 pounds of plastic. I think i could process 400 of these in about 2-3 hours. Not the most efficient use of time to make money, but its still way better than hunting for aluminum cans. $20 an hour cash is not a bad gig.

Originally Posted by shendog

Does every ribbon cable conntector have gold? I took some apart and they looked more like silver color with a slight tint of brassy-look. Also seems like a whole lot of effort, and not sure I could do 400 in the time you mentioned. Let us know how you come out with it.

Yes these are low grade, there is only one small contact spot on the metal part that is gold plated. But still considered to be gold plated metal/pins. They are nowhere close to the grade of the pins on the motherboards these ribbion cables connect to.

at 3 per minute you can easily do 400 in 3 hours, this guy spends more time jacking his jaws than working

Here's one more way of getting to the pins;
http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/tools...-pins-atm.html

http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/disma...s-soforth.html

I've taken some of those IDE cables apart that looked to be completely covered in gold plating. But there were also the ones that had a mere spec of (I believe you call that "flash plated") gold on them. However, I think most of them (if not all) should contain a small (at least) amount of gold on their pins.
Thanks for the question, thanks for your time,

there is gold in them but its certainly not a gold mine, it pays about double by processing them than selling them as connectors though

I took some apart and they looked more like silver color with a slight tint of brassy-look.

I have also noticed that the older the computer the better looking the gold color is on the pins you pull out
Some of the old ones look to be completely covered.