cell phone board weights

[GeorgeB]

does anyone have a rough estimated idea of how many cell phone boards would equal 1lb?

[Gravitar]

does anyone have a rough estimated idea of how many cell phone boards would equal 1lb?

Depends on the kind of phone. A Blackberry board will have a completely different weight than a Nokia board. There are too many variations, it'd be REALLY hard to find a solid average.

[mikeinreco]

It's alot and it also depends on the size of the phone........If your breaking down old school brick phones probably not as many

[Gravitar]

old school brick phones

You mean these??? Yea, they have a pretty heavy board in them. lol

[nebrs13]

A good avg to go off of is hmm 40k lbs. Its a semi load it sounded good 2 minutes ago

[happyscraper]

Get a bunch of cell phones, take them apart, weight them then post what you find out.

[phildogg]

I bought a bag phone over the weekend and the board weighed 5oz. Now the board is bigger than the phones we carry now.

[GeorgeB]

Guys and girls,

I realize that every cell phone board, unless you have 2 identical phones, will weigh differently. I was just wanting like an average or something.

Reason for it, I was searching on ebay the other just for random stuff, and I typed in cell phone boards and saw tons of posts. Some of the offers looked slightly reasonable, and others seemed more than far fetched to me.

This is why I was asking, to see if any of them would be worth while to go after.

[oldtoothlessbassmaster]

george, i was given a bucket full of flip phones and batteries a few weeks ago.
http://i1151.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3c35c655.jpg

i took 1 phone and completely broke it down only to find out i had to weigh the board on a old school balance beam gram scale.

my scratch paper with the math is long gone but it was a no brainer that sending out the phones complete (no backs no batteries) per pound price was way better than breaking them down for the light weight board.

"IF" i remember correctly it was like 13 phones totaled 2 pounds and it would have taken 31 phone boards to make a pound

im about 1300 miles right now from that scale so this is the best i can tell ya right now

[oldtoothlessbassmaster]

update: still stuck in florida waiting for sandy to move on.

i had the board from the single phone i broke down in the back of my camera bag so here are the weights both in grams and ounces from a small digital scale.

12.8 grams
http://i1151.photobucket.com/albums/...oard-grams.jpg

also read as 0.45 ounces
http://i1151.photobucket.com/albums/...ard-ounces.jpg

and a link to a conversion table
Grams to Ounces conversion table - Weight conversions

fuzzy math: 16 ounces divided by 0.45 ounce = 35.5556 cell phone boards needed from that style flip phone to make 1 pound or $11.50 @ todays price

or sell them whole without backs and batteries for $7.00 a pound

[theelectronrecycler]

that is actually a really good deal. $7 per lb without the plastic back cover and the battery. Cause you can still sell the batteries to certain buyers and the plastic can be added to your mixed plastics pile and while the back panel of any phone is incredibly light it still all adds up. Mixed plastics from e-waste goes for around $0.08 per pound, so it is still some added profit. My main question would be, can you find a buyer that would buy undamaged LCD screens for a decent price per pound and if so, how much that would change the total outcome of breaking the phone all the way down... Hrmm , looks like I have something to research.

[drozenski]

Guys and girls,

I realize that every cell phone board, unless you have 2 identical phones, will weigh differently. I was just wanting like an average or something.

Reason for it, I was searching on ebay the other just for random stuff, and I typed in cell phone boards and saw tons of posts. Some of the offers looked slightly reasonable, and others seemed more than far fetched to me.

This is why I was asking, to see if any of them would be worth while to go after.

My average is 1 gajillion per 10 boards.. but i always weigh on the gajillion scale.

[smvulture]

update: still stuck in florida waiting for sandy to move on.

i had the board from the single phone i broke down in the back of my camera bag so here are the weights both in grams and ounces from a small digital scale.

12.8 grams
http://i1151.photobucket.com/albums/...oard-grams.jpg

also read as 0.45 ounces
http://i1151.photobucket.com/albums/...ard-ounces.jpg

and a link to a conversion table
Grams to Ounces conversion table - Weight conversions

fuzzy math: 16 ounces divided by 0.45 ounce = 35.5556 cell phone boards needed from that style flip phone to make 1 pound or $11.50 @ todays price

or sell them whole without backs and batteries for $7.00 a pound

hmm... where are you selling these phones for that price. The closest yard to me says $1 per lb on their webpage.... typo or are they ripping people off?

[NobleMetalWorks]

I have run a lot of cell phone boards, if done right, as a refiner, they can be very good to process. There are a lot of other metals besides the gold. To get an average on how many are in a lb however is impossible to be honest. If you are only talking about the boards themselves, you have to consider the year they were made, and the country they were made in. For example, right around 2002 the Nokia 3310 was a very popular phone in third world countries as well as in the United States. In third world countries, like South America, most of the phones were actually knock offs that came from China, and although they were able to perfect copying, they didn't use nearly as much precious metals and the boards are actually much lighter than the real Nokia phones that were being made in Finland at the time.

Other things to consider is the frequency the phones operated at, the technology used in the radio, if they have more buttons like a smart phone has gold under each button on the phone, etc. It stands to reason the more buttons, the more gold, the heavier each board will be, the fewer boards in a lb. Another thing to consider is the year they were manufactured, if before 2002 the technology to plate gold wasn't nearly as advanced as it is today for example, but when gold prices jumped in 2002, industry responded immediately by using methods that deposited far less gold, and in the years since the plating technology has become better and better, so newer phones have far less gold, and thus you should have more per lb than others, unless it's a smart phone in which case the gold under the buttons increases the weight significantly. And on and on.

Even figuring out how much gold you can extract per lb is almost impossible. You really have to know the material well, to understand which types are the better phones to purchase. And the only way to really know that is to talk with a refiner who does a lot of cell phone boards. But even still, I couldn't give you any accurate count, nor yield, I can eyeball something and approximate fairly well, but that's just an educated guess.

A ton of used mobile phones, (for example - approximately 6,000 handsets, contains about 3.5 kilograms of silver, 340 grams of gold, 140 grams of palladium, and 130 kg of copper. But that still doesn't really answer your question, those figures are for the complete phone, not just the boards. And those numbers are approximate and can vary greatly. You can figure approximate value per lb from this point. I don't really think knowing how many cell phones in a lb matters, when I was buying them I was paying per lb, not per board.

Scott

[Mechanic688]

hmm... where are you selling these phones for that price. The closest yard to me says $1 per lb on their webpage.... typo or are they ripping people off?

look at our buyers section, check their prices, then ship. rinse and repeat.

Scrap Buyers & Sellers

[oldtoothlessbassmaster]

hmm... where are you selling these phones for that price. The closest yard to me says $1 per lb on their webpage.... typo or are they ripping people off?

that bucketload of phones & batteries was shipped off to one of the buyers listed here in the link Mechanic688 posted.
the buyers current price for the phones with no backs & batteries is higher now.

you need to pay a little bit of shipping money to get the big bucks and the buyer gets excellent shipping rates so the hit is not too painful

[happyscraper]

Maybe I should lower my prices, I pay 2.00# for cell phones.

[kane333]

Nokia's, I've found so far, have the best boards per phone. I can't tell you how many boards it takes to make a pound but some of the older Nokia models had 2 boards per phone, both boards nicely plated, whereas the newer style phones had very little plating.

Some Nokia's that had 2 boards per phone.






Compared to some newer style flip phones, there's no comparison in size or gold plating to the older Nokia's, Audiovox's, or Sony Ericssons.





The gold plating under the buttons of some of the older models were almost 3x the size of the newer phone keypad button contacts. As with any electronics, I usually look for older models.