Full PC Scrap for Gold & Precious Metals
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ม.ค. 2016
- This is how I generally scrap PC's for gold recovery items and stuff.
Modern pc's can be lower in value but there's still plenty of gold from pins, ic chips, ram and the cpu.
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Palladium from MLCC's are lower, probably less silver but still enough to make scrapping computers worth while.
To depopulate boards I use a cheap air hammer attached to an entry level air compressor, it's fast, easy and fun.
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Thanks for all the videos Ben, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence with my comment on using punches...it was meant for people just starting out. I've learned so much from you and appreciate it. Thanks
Thank you for sharing this free video learned from it and will share I too recycle and the information was much valuable. Thanks again from the Dominican Republic Guillermo.
great video Ben as always...thank you!
Thanks for sharing Ben
Capacitors: The mid size and bigger if you take a razor blade and peel off plastic, they have a good amount of prime copper spool that is easy to remove and adds up pretty quickly. I would not recommend the small capacitors, as it takes to much work to retrieve the copper, but they have copper spool as well if you have the time. More FREE Copper to add to pile and a bit more $$$ squeezed out!
Oh man! That was a rare motherboard!!! You could rebuild th... an air hammer... Never mind.
right worth seeing if work and their value before ripping things apart
where do you sell your de-populated chips? or the circuit chips? or sell your gold recovery chips for that matter? thank you!
Hey there Ben, i love the longer and more indepth vids bud, keep em comin.
Lpkkkkkp
Good video Ben, thank you
I am a computer repair person and have saved all pc parts since the 80s just to scrap we have just started and already made enough to buy 3 new computers and are working on more so its worth it if you have lots of parts with gold that are sitting around collecting dust,
Do you need to isolate the gold out of the parts? Or can you scrap parts wholly?
Man its hard to watch you scraping good stuff
Yes
yeah I look to see if the hardware works before I scrap it, usually if it works it sells for more then the PMs on it are worth.
There are two neo magnets in the lazer head of those cd drives. Usually a nice little rectangle around .25 in. I use them for all sorts of things. They are on either side of the lens, under that thin shielding.
I'd be all over those hard drives. Even 100 gbs would be a precious find. Data storage is expensive as hell, so anything that you can get for free is fantastic.
Keep the dvd lasers, build a death ray :P
my luck of course I went to open up an old pc only to find a huge wasp nest and I had pissed them all off. that hurt.
I'm so sorry for you
Wtf, that's some crazy badluck
@@jherb7159 That sounds like my kind of luck. I use to tear old computers down for the parts. You never know when someone may need something. Anyway I got tired of computer repair but if I would have known I damn sure what have kept every single parts. I think I may have a few cpu chips back there but not enough for me to get up and look
Hey ben, i was wondering how much money the gold pins on a cpu give. I havent gotten the pins and weighted them yet
The rods in the DVD drives are sometimes Stainless, especially older ones. The motors is on DVD is actually really easy to pull and get into. A few screws and it's off. A quick hammer hit to pop the top off, then needlenose pliers to pull out the copper. The brass rod, though check it, sometimes those are aluminum rather than brass pops out. It has a small magnet at the tip that I crunch off with a hammer. The smaller board I put in my low value board pile. The hard drives are usually easy to take apart. The outer case on really old ones might be aluminum. They are usually low grade Stainless on newer drives. The platters are almost always aluminum. The tips of the heads have a precious metal, and that was why I watched the video, was I am trying to learn exactly what and how to remove but it's worth a lot of money. The rest of the heads are usually aluminum and steel.
This man reminds me of something, thats it a vulture. I'm here to learn as I am starting an e-waste business, I learned a lot.
pc builders: careful, this is a very expensive part and we don't want to break it
pc scrappers: 𝕪𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕘𝕠𝕝𝕕, 𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕚𝕥 𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣
yeah that is right but they are old boards no one is gonna use them
Have you thought about doing your gold and precious metal separation and extraction? It is a tedious process but it looks like you have enough supply to make it worth while.
That crumble could take awhile. Looks like a lot of fun to sort through. Just sit back in the evening, maybe watch some tv. Have about 10 to 20 containers ready to put them in!
Thank you fore this clip👍😊
Hey dude, I'm sure someones already said it or you've worked it out, but the "stuff" on cpus is thermal paste, the good stuff is made from silver.
Thanks for sharing, I learned a lot. I don't understand why anyone would want to buy the ravaged motherboard after you're done with it though. Will they reuse the remaining components? Repurpose the board? Desperately recycle the remaining bits?
Kind of sad how much stuff we manufacture as a civilization that ends up as obsolete junk. That computer may still have functioned, but its utility probably isn't that good if you want to run modern software. All of those components are objects that took a tremendous amount of time and energy to design and manufacture, from mining the raw metals out of the ground to designing the circuits in a CAD program down to the assembly line that put it all together to sell to some customer. This is better than dumping it in a landfill though.
TheUndert0ker Very true mate, never really thought of it like that.
Ever heard of the buddhist practice of sand painting mandalas?
I think this can be viewed in a similar way.
Planned obsolescence
if you think about it in middle ages they made those fancy, high quality, totally handmade pieces of armor. Today it's only the historical value that makes them valuable. In fact a huge amounts of those were also scrapped and recycled back in the days. A worn and damaged beyond repair piece of medieval armor was melted again to make something else...
Ya, granted technology is always evolving. However 95% of the waste in the world is from planned obsolescence, or greed I guess would be a better way to put it.
I want all the hard drives from every computer
Why is that?
scraped my first PC was smiling thinking about a PC lol keep on scrapping
Good Work
I have an ewaste facility here in the US.
Yes you can scrap alot of old computers.
But refurbishing alot of them will bake you alot more money.
Selling each PC for at the lowest of $60-70. Make a windows bootable USB "its free" and off you go.
Scrapping them will only bring about $2k-3k usd monthly
But refurbishing and scrapping makes at least $8k monthly
Awesome...I'll have to check it out. I know they're silver inn the sides and no markings on them.
A question please i have been collecting, gold from tel, palladium silver platinum, ram boards, sailboat, monitor, tv, tablet, do you know a factory where it is made? thank you greece
on those sound card take some of the solder mask off to check if the whole board is gold plated. iv found a few nice creative ones that are just covered even the steel bracket is gold plated!!
Nice job
Informative thanks. Quick question for you do people really buy de-populated motherboards? I mean I honestly I don't see the value in it... saving the scrap board, unless you can go through and get some gold out of it maybe
Great video once again, Ben! How do you know what are MLCC's and the valuable resistors (from your other vids) after you've depopulated the board using this method? Or does this refining process(s) separate out the precious metals from both? Thanks!
+pacoblancosmith I just sort through the crumble and take things out, if there's a lot of mlcc's, i'll pick them off before I use the air hammer
Hi Ben, today I scrapped my first heat sink with the piece of copper rod inside. I put the heat sink on two bricks with the copper above the gap then I punched it out with a steel bar and hammer. What a lovely piece of copper, reminds me of an ingot. Looking forward to getting more of these. Great vids Ben. keep them coming.
+hucks33 I call them copper stackers because they're great to stack like bullion.
CPU fans/HS's cost £10+ in the UK. If the heatsink was undamaged I'd convert it into a funky desk clock or candle holder. Many things can & should be directly re-purposed by creative bods rather than be scrapped for raw metal ; ) Still a good video though!
Stripping out the pure copper from the wires all adds up.
@eWaste Ben. Ben, I like how you de-populate the motherboard's. I also learned about the MLCC's with palladium. What all contains palladium on motherboards and drive cards? Dan
palladium is mostly in mlcc's everything else is to hard to find palladium
is there a video on the best methods to collect materials? like maybe buying broken boards in bluk?
DVD readers have 2 motors, laser diode, 2 small neo magnets, a bunch of optics, and a bit of aluminium for the carriage or plastic
Thank you for your informative video. Why do they buy the scrapped boards? What are they doing with them?
How do u tell the difference of all the different type of aluminum
I sell the components on ebay, always a lot more money than recycling them. Edit: yep just sold a 486 motherboard for 20 bucks shipped.
i think it depends on the amount you get your hands on. This guy obviously has access to tons over tons of old electronics so he makes the best out of it. You'll never find so many customers for all that old electronics.
However I'm certain best way to make $ out of it is to sell tiny bit on ebay and scrap the rest.
@@cccpredarmy yep, kinda like me. Buying stuff off eBay for this purpose. Lol.
Thanks again, Ben, for clarifying all this. Now I understand about the thick film resistors ( from your vid on the subject- went back and viewed it again last night) NOT being the MLCC's looking resistors. Other than removing the thick filmed, I'm not too concerned with mixing the others. I'll get what I get from a refiner at this point. But I will try to keep the resistors in the mix to a minimum. Are those occasional, bright red capacitors MLCC's as wel?
+pacoblancosmith They are Tantalum Capacitors if the code is "C" if the code is "L" they are Inductors and no value, usually the red inductors have black tops and red sides.
eWaste Ben
How do you differentiate the low grade boards,high grade boards. And how do you recover the gold. Not familiar with electronic scrap other then the cords.
Thanks, Ben. I will follow your advice from your other vids as well and pick what I can prior to any scraping. I watched your MLCC's vs. inductors (?) again today and have made myself a chart based on all your info. Are all resistors marked with an "R" containing ruthinium? I will try to locate your vid on that. Cheers! Patrick
+pacoblancosmith no only thick film resistors have ruthenium, they are flat and have a number on top
+eWaste Ben but ben is that the flat black,green,n blue,n purples ones that range in size?
+Nate Chaps yep, with numbers like 370, 450 etc
are there factories outside the opium canal with gold recycling? if so where and at what cost? Thanks in advance
Any chance of you keeping some of those vintage working graphics card's and selling them on eBay, cause if you find a Matrox card keep them their great for retro vintage gaming in dos.
Even keeping those older power supplies for bench power supplies, and use them to run a car amp and deck for house usages in a game room.
so once you've made such a huge mess with that air chisel.... how do you clean and seperate all those pins that just scattered everywhere and got stuck in the carpet? in most cases with expansion slots and such, you can just work a flat head screwdriver under the plastic connector and slowly, carefully pry upward pulling the pins through the plastic, then take a pait of side cutters and clip them all off at the base pretty easily... much less of a mess to pick over with tweezers later on.
Where do you get all those computers? Cool videos btw! really helpful!
I have a audio slot card that's entirely gold plated. Scrape the green if it's light green colored. Sometimes gold plated PCB layer underneath
Thanks for your useful video
I find a lot of motherboards"old/new/laptop/pc" and he sell them for 1.5$ for each one without cpu
is it a good deal?
What do u do with Ic chips when you take them off
I wish we could get payed for scrap steel in Norway but here we have to pay to deliver it. Isn't that a bit crazy.
Love to see your videos. Currently it is -12 celsius out in my scrapper garage so not much fun scrapping here now even if I really should have gone through all the motherboards I have stockpiled.
Oh, Good Lord, I'm not doing any processing beyond the AP method to strip gold from the boards....I'll find someone else to buy my stuff, etc. although I am going to try the reverse electroplating method soon....
hard drive is really worth selling, if you scrap it you can get a lot of money on the magnets
Is it worth depopulating instead if selling it just as boards ? How much you get for depopulated board ?
So these gold pins... how much do you get for them by the kg when scrapping?
wow.. you hit the motherload. good vid Ben.
+bantalee2002 thanks, you should see what I picked up today, was a megga motherload
+eWaste Ben what did you pick up today?
+geneticrabbit A whole load of pc's & servers
geneticrabbit That is great and good for you. It appears Australia has an abundance of e-waste and it appears your timing is right being in the right business.
About a year ago a small e-waste recycler decided to rent a tractor trailer,he advertised via radio that his truck will be parked in the lot of a shopping center in my village town. My god he made at least 3 hauls over the weekend. Have you given that a try?,.because i bet you would have enough work cut out for you for at least a couple years. good job Ben keeping the stuff out of the ecosystem.
Prescient, Ben! There are neodymium magnets in that dvd reader "eye" and the price of those has gone up 50% just this year (nearly five years after your video).
Say Ben would you find yourself harvesting components off of uma graphics desktop board's rather than that of dedicated graphics cards.
@eWaste Ben. Hi Ben, I did learn a bit more from your video. One thing is I take out the hard drive platters and the drive motors and save them in other boxes. I'm up to 12 pounds in platters now. But here's two questions I wanted to ask you is, is there any silver on the motherboards and cards. Also question two, you mentioned you also take off the MLCC's, what's the story with them? Thanks for a great video, Dan
silver is all over circuit boards but it's too costly to recover for what it's worth, best going for gold, palladium from mlcc's etc but crystals might be worth picking off for silver
Ben, I never knew the hard drive boards have gold plate on each side.... I have 60 boards right now, so I'm gonna go to the garage to see what else I have tucked away. I edited this comment because i found my test kit and checked the hard drive boards, which turned out to be copper plating on both sides. Glad I watched this video because your way is the best by far when it comes to stripping off boards. I learned a lot from watching your videos.
those pins that are gold plated, the plating is only about 3 microns thick. just the same as the "fingers" (interface pins of addon cards). I have already once tried to isolate all the gold from all the parts that were gold plated from 9 motherboards (All ASUS P5-A) and used concentrated acids (nitric and sulfuric) to extract the net worth of gold from them. I ended up with (in total) a solid gold nugget that weighed 7 grams. that's it.
Jay T do it with 1000 boards on an industrial scale.
I feel like if i could get all of the parts and knew how to do chemistry safely i would work so hard because that ball of gold only gets bigger.
You got 7 grams and think "that's it?" wtf did you think you were going to get, several ounces? Can you do math?
Isn't that like 300$ seems like a minimum wage paycheck for a week for practically doing nothing.
Yes people. There is better yield in CPUs than there is in traditional ore mining. It takes 1 ton of ore to yield 1 gram of gold. 6 gram yield from a CPU in your house is way more economical. The problem is scaling, sourcing and the environmental impact. E-waste is the largest growing waste sector and is estimated that 7% of the worlds gold is tied up into it. Invent a solution that strips gold off as soon as you dip the part into it, environmentally friendly and can be recycled. Boom. Billionaire.
How much grams of gold or maybe bricks can you get of gold you get from all the devices that you have and your storage
How much gold can you get from one pc? On average
I Really Wan’t To Buy All Of You’re Scrap Hard Drives And Some Heat Sink’s!!!
Is there a reason you scraped all the tiny parts into a carpet? It seems like it would be a hassle to pick them out.
stops stuff from bouncing too
and grips board when he jack hammers it
Thank you
how do you sell boards with nothing left on it
How much money you buy all computer unit
where do you sell depopulated boards
Najbolji ste , pozdrav iz Hrvatske
guessing the North and South bridge (the two big chips you hacked off) have silver under them.
Where do you get so many PC from?
How do you process (if at all) your GP material?
+Jonathan Holt (JHunter) I don't yet, that's a couple years away for me
how much one depopulated mother board weights?
Hi Ben those little fiddly motors are a bit of a pain ..true...but they can go in as a copper bearing motor ..25 Cents a lb vs. 4 cents a lb...same as the motors in the fans ...a little , but it does add up :) do you just leave the copper on the boards ?
+Thomas David yeah those little bits of copper are over ferrite so the price I get for the boards, it works out the same
ic ..unfortunately only 15c here ..
.
Some real tweeker stuff right here.
Hi Ben so after de populating the board would you call it mid grade???!!!!
I now get brass from power rails and copper slabs off CPU’s n now I will get boards n brass rods from optic drives and I thank you for that
at best mid grade, just depends on how much it's depopulated but some buyers won't buy them so you need to work it out with them
You probs already know, but in case, some of the parts in these older PCs are worth much more as a full unit than the gold you'd get off them. For example, 2nd hand DDR3 RAM is pricey still at the moment. £20-£30 per stick on eBay etc
The thing is, PC scrapping is awesome, server scapping definitely is more profitable. But, I think your missing out on a great option here, and that is IT services. Business has a bunch of computers, they pay you $3 per unit for freight, $8 to test / document the system, $8 to wipe the hard drive 3 pass. Then, if it's working, you take a 30% commission on the sale. Anything that works, you sell, anything that doesn't, you scrap. But, at the end of the day, you earn way more money without ever having to open a single case up.
that's a different business, there's many things an e-waste recycler can do like data destruction, de-racking, De-commissioning servers etc for an hourly fee, also selling hot dogs from the van on the way home is profitable.
eWaste Ben From my experience, the two can go very much hand in hand. For example, when I worked in IT asset management, there was always a tonne of gear that couldn't be sold, needed recycling. What would occur, is they would have some recycling partner who would take most of this gear by the stillage.
But, effectively, I always thought that having some form of onsite recycling was a better method, or scraping. I used to strip servers, and had to cherry pick which had the most amount of resale vs the amount of time spent on each.
When you consider that the IT asset management is your method of essentially getting companies to pay you to dispose of the gear, an unlimited supply of old equipment sitting in businesses all around the country in little basement rooms, then having the size and the scale to essentially get way better pricing for your commodities.
I loved watching your video's, there's a lot I guessed about how the job should be done, but didn't quite know for sure until seeing your process. I am currently out of this industry though, but it was good fun.
There's a big step for me to play with the larger IT recyclers, I deal with some who handle large corporations IT assets, but they don't get paid usually, there's a lot of competition for IT at the high level so they're paying big bucks and bending over backwards for it.
What I found is a much bigger pool of e-waste that big companies can't get too, and free aside from time.
big co's don't send trucks to offices to pick up a trolley load of e-waste, think about your local business district, thousands of little offices in big buildings, all with that little basement room of e-waste.
They are small biz' and generally understaffed and busy who are only looking for a way to free up room, they have no interest in e-waste aside from wanting it recycled properly but they don't want to pay, so the balance is they get free recycling, I get free e-waste that I either sell or scrap to get that value from.
It may not be as big a biz' as it could be but it's a layed back biz' for me.
I don't buy and I don't charge, so I have no need for invoicing, it's a simple biz' but it is a niche it itself that works.
But I did once sell hot dogs out front of a nightclub, I actually made more money too :)
eWaste Ben Yeah, definitely, but I will tell you, there is one entity that takes the cake for eWaste, and that is definitely government. The amount of stuff that flowed out of our biggest government department was crazy. The vast majority being recycling. Anything goes.
Free is a good, but another thing that works is when you charge a fee, but you tell them that the sales money will recoup enough so that you can return money back to them.
I think from my experience, breaking into this area is not difficult, if you have all the infrastructure in place, a vehicle, storage and the contacts to sell the gear, it's not difficult, and it's highly financially rewarding.
would a board heater be better ?
Great video Ben. U might need a bigger truck!
+Tom Geer thanks, yeah my van gets smaller everyday it seems
So you don't really bother with the tiny ones....? I was curious if the metals in the MLCC's are separable from the resistors in your other vids at point of processing. Thanks
+pacoblancosmith Yeah good question, with the very tiny crumbles it may need to be sent to a pro refiner to process.
each metal would be extracted in steps, so they might go for palladium, then go for silver etc.
the mlcc's that don;t crush I seperate by hand, even tiny ones are still easy to spot if you have ay a magnifying glass to look.
How much coast gold of 1 PC - $5? I think u can take much more sell by parts, but however..
Who, or where do you sell the boards to?? I have always wondered about that. I never thought about actually doing any of this (process) till I started watching your channel. Thanx man, got a sub. 👍
in the states there's boardsort.com
That air hammer idea is awesome and works great. Did you ever think about trying to put a sharper edge on the chisel and that way maybe it would cut the pins better instead of bending them down. Just a thought since I learn a lot from you, I thought I'd try to offer my thoughts.
+zackcat276 The point of the chisel gets blunt doing a lot of boards but yeah, sharp is good for those pins, some still bend but not as many
+eWaste Ben yep i got ya. like I said before, just trying to share my opinions to a fellow scrapper. have a good one
Would you have an approximate dollar amount per computer that you scrap out you're way? I really like you're videos.
there is a small amount of platinum in the hard drives . easy google search , plus rare earth magnets that are strong enough to hold a sledge maker on you shed wall.
How much money can you make recovering this way?
ive gotten some big ass nuts of gold buying old cell phones for a buck from swap meets . it`s right by the antenna .
@brinbrin62 62200 unless you make your own acids.
When watching this I got an ad for planet gold rush lol
great vid mate. how do u pick up all the pins?
+Wyde Awake usually use a little vacuum cleaner, when you do many boards at one time the pins build up high so just pick 'em up by hand
ok.. so, if you were to take that computer that you did in this video, what would be the TOTAL weight of gold you get out of it?
ok i know this is old but first of all you dont just get gold out of a computer you get boards scrap steel copper aluminum silver platnum tantalum mlcc etc.... and also you can easily get a computer completely scrapped out in under 5 minutes once youve done like 10 and im personally able to get about anywere from 10 to 150 computers a week so in the end it is very profitable - also to answer your question i would estimate a quarter to half a gram out of evreything (obviously a backyard refiner could not get that much but a larger company can)
What do u do withe the ic chips
Ryan House nothing, they’re wrecked from the air hammer
You would get allot more for the power supply if you would sell them with the cables still attached!
yes, this is idiot.... You can reuse those componentrs or sell those.... It´s idiot
He does it primarily as a hobby, not money. He has stated endlessly that yes, he does resell some bits and pieces that he finds, but he's not interested in opening up a used old junky PC parts store. He'd rather scrap out all the components and get some enjoyment out of it. Besides, it's all taken from piles that are destined for a landfill anyhow, so he can do what he wants with them. Getting precious metals and parts out of a PC is infinitely better than letting it rot in a garbage heap.
OEM power supplies from Dell HP Acer Asus or other companies like that don't ever do much and are usually the first thing to be replaced anyway
I've taken used PSU's that I've purchased and a month later the motherboard got fried. I was told if you leave a used PSU sitting too long, it can go bad. The capacitors go bad if left too long without being used. The thing is, can I trust someone I don't know who's claiming the one I just bought has been used till 3 days ago, or was it actually sitting in some guys closet for 9 months.
Thats ok. He has unlimited resources...
Nice video ..Tnx
we have scrap computer, but we dont know where can sell it or who needed and buy it from Jordan
Thanks for video I like
salve chiedo informazioni il metallo giallo un orefice di ce che e rame e vero per me e oro ma io ho fatto il test con acido 18 carati ma sparisce mi dai una risposta grazie
About how many pc’s is it worth to start scrapping?
eWaste Ben by the time you scrap the whole thing out and get all the precious metals out, how much are you making off of 1 computer? I just want to know if tearing all that out is worth it or not.
No one ever tells you how much they make. With the hours spend I'm sure he has a day job!
@@sjagain No but I went to the landfill the other day and I know they had at least 500 or more towers that hadn't been touched yet. I'm like you, I can't it being worth it unless can scrap them down 1 every few minutes but with all that casings and copper and gold, it made me a little curious.