Author Topic: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap  (Read 16200 times)

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Offline daqqTopic starter

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Offline TerraHertz

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #26 on: February 10, 2021, 02:16:57 am »
Pretty good test points:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gold-Plated-Small-Pins-for-Scrap-Gold-Recovery-249-grams/324479481544?hash=item4b8c7bf6c8:g:L~MAAOSwb71gIVGM

Yes. They look like they might be pins from DB connectors maybe?
Which make great mini-patch panel lead pins. A block of panel-mounted female DB-25 connectors, and flying leads with the male pins.
Too bad the lazy bastard seller doesn't have a closeup pic of one with a size scale.

I'd buy that bag of pins, if it was say $15. But US$60? GTFO.
(Seller auto-declined my offer of $15 btw.)

People selling nice electronics parts for gold scrap, whether overpriced or not, should be shot. Barbarians.
Like these guys:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gold-Recovery-Vintage-80s-Mil-Spec-computer-pin-Scrap-Refining-lot-100-Gram/184650569454
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gold-Recovery-Lot-of-25-Vintage-High-Voltage-7-Segment-Driver-297n-Refine-Scrap/184638025827
« Last Edit: February 10, 2021, 02:28:26 am by TerraHertz »
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Offline daqqTopic starter

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Offline daqqTopic starter

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Offline TerraHertz

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #29 on: October 18, 2021, 10:58:20 pm »
That area of ebay always makes me feel sick. Rare old parts and boards, getting crushed for a few cents worth of gold (after a lot of messy, polluting chemical processing, that might not even break even in costs.)

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=gold+recovery
Lots of brass being sold 'as gold' despite probably having very very low gold alloy concentrations.
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Offline daqqTopic starter

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #30 on: October 19, 2021, 05:32:01 am »
Quote
That area of ebay always makes me feel sick. Rare old parts and boards, getting crushed for a few cents worth of gold (after a lot of messy, polluting chemical processing, that might not even break even in costs.)
While I understand that sentiment and agree that a lot of people are using a really awful process and are only in it for the 'OMG SHINY!' feeling, there is a legitimate reason to recycle old electronics. Re-use is preferable, but if that's not an option...

Not saying that someone should not try to find a 'new home' for a lot of the stuff, but if you have 5000 pcs of a transistor that went obsolete thirty years ago, no one wants it, what are you supposed to do? Or wholesale quantities of EDO RAMs? Hold on to it till the end of time?
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Online PlainName

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #31 on: October 19, 2021, 08:11:43 am »
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Hold on to it till the end of time?

Of course not. Another curator will be chosen by my executor (so she says).
 

Offline Gyro

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #32 on: October 19, 2021, 08:42:17 am »
« Last Edit: October 19, 2021, 08:49:17 am by Gyro »
Best Regards, Chris
 
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Offline TerraHertz

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #33 on: October 20, 2021, 12:45:37 am »
Quote
That area of ebay always makes me feel sick. Rare old parts and boards, getting crushed for a few cents worth of gold (after a lot of messy, polluting chemical processing, that might not even break even in costs.)
While I understand that sentiment and agree that a lot of people are using a really awful process and are only in it for the 'OMG SHINY!' feeling, there is a legitimate reason to recycle old electronics. Re-use is preferable, but if that's not an option...

Not saying that someone should not try to find a 'new home' for a lot of the stuff, but if you have 5000 pcs of a transistor that went obsolete thirty years ago, no one wants it, what are you supposed to do? Or wholesale quantities of EDO RAMs? Hold on to it till the end of time?

Of course. Recycling in general and recovery of precious metals is good. I should have been more specific.

What bugs me about the ebay 'scrap recovery' area is the very high degree of irrational expectations. What's needed is a way for people with old junk to easily pass it to expert industrail scale recovery operations. Entities with sensible, non-poluting, economically viable production line processes. Where the price offered for items to be scrapped, would be an actual sane estimate of the value of recovered gold etc, minus processing costs, plus a profit margin.

Instead, in that ebay category it's the norm to see stuff listed for what must be multiples of the actual recoverable gold cost, because the sellers are idiots and have an audience of idiots, all with 'gold fever' - it's shiny, must be worth heaps!  Thus often pricing it out of the range of historical collectors.

Gyro's posted two fine examples of completely irrational pricing.

OK, it's a free market, but a very irrational one, because 'gold recovery' is such a cult of amateurs who have little idea what they are doing. Of course there are some who DO know what they are doing - some interesting youtube channels about gold recovery. Though I never saw one that added up their costs of chemicals, time, etc and worked out an actual operating margin.

In general irrational pricing in a market is no big deal - just a bunch of extortionists and suckers interacting. Except that in this case quite often there are real historical treasures being destroyed. With the sellers having no clue or care. Antistatic handling? What's that?

But hey, it's the same with everything isn't it? Ignorant bozos getting their hands on treasures they don't understand, and destroying them carelessly.


Also... every time I look in that area of ebay, I end up blowing cash. This time... 304188959597 Gold Plated Can and Transistor Legs Scrap Electronics 7.2 Oz  Price US$50!

For some metal can ICs with gold plated legs. Appear to be socket pulls. But I notice they are Burr Brown, and at least some of them seem to be INA-1xx  series. Looking them up, seem interesting.
I got them for $42, which is still way too much for a collection whim.

 Anyone care to make an estimate on how much (little) actual gold is there? Not that I really care.
« Last Edit: October 20, 2021, 01:02:25 am by TerraHertz »
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Online tggzzz

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #34 on: October 20, 2021, 09:33:13 am »
Anyone care to make an estimate on how much (little) actual gold is there? Not that I really care.

Plucking some figures out of the air for lead diameter (0.5mm), length (10mm), number of ICs (150), and assuming 3µm gold plating, I'd guesstimate around 3g of gold.

No, I haven't checked my arithmetic :)
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Offline TerraHertz

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #35 on: October 20, 2021, 02:13:18 pm »
I'd guesstimate around 3g of gold.

https://www.bullionvault.com/silver-price-chart.do#

Current USD gold spot price: $57,176/kg  or $57.18 / gram.  So maybe $172-ish worth of gold.

That's surprising. I think I'd better check that math. Later...
« Last Edit: October 20, 2021, 02:15:41 pm by TerraHertz »
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Offline daqqTopic starter

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #36 on: October 20, 2021, 05:52:15 pm »
I'd guesstimate around 3g of gold.

https://www.bullionvault.com/silver-price-chart.do#

Current USD gold spot price: $57,176/kg  or $57.18 / gram.  So maybe $172-ish worth of gold.

That's surprising. I think I'd better check that math. Later...
Assuming a pin is a single cylinder then:
Circumference @ 0.5mm diameter is: c = pi*0.5 = 1.57mm
Surface area of cylinder excluding top and bottom sides @ 10mm length is: S = 10 * 1.57 = 15.7mm^2
Assuming 8 pins per device, surface are of pins per device will be: St = 15.7 * 8 = 126mm^2
Assuming 150 devices, the total surface are of the pins is: Stt = 150 * 126 = 18900mm^2 = 0.0189m^2
@3um plating that's a total volume of: Vt = 0.0189 * 0.000003 = 0.0000000567m^3
Density of gold is 19,300 kg/m3, so weight of Vt is: mt = 0.0000000567 * 19300 = 0.00109431 kg = 1.09g

This is for the pins alone. The casing also seems to be gilded, could have a more area than pins together on the inside, not sure of construction. Wide bonding was done in gold as well, would assume that to be the case here. Assuming a 100% efficient process and not accounting for time and materials, then you are well in the plus.
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Offline TerraHertz

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #37 on: October 21, 2021, 02:11:38 pm »
Today has been a funny day. Maybe I have 2 or 3 grams of effectively unrecoverable gold. Whoopee. (Oh and btw another cost I never see any scrap recovery zealots mentioning, is the cost of purity assay.)

But thanks to ebay as of today I also own several tons of paper. In the form of thousands of equipment manuals. All in CA not Sydney Australia, which means the very expensive fun is just begining. Teaser photos:

(I can't believe they just stacked them right on the concrete. Sheesh.)

Edit to add: Update: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/urgent-request-for-us-west-coast-shipping-contacts/
« Last Edit: October 27, 2021, 11:06:54 am by TerraHertz »
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Offline helius

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #38 on: October 21, 2021, 08:09:45 pm »
Would importation of that kind of material even be possible without fumigating it?
 

Offline thm_w

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #39 on: October 21, 2021, 08:59:57 pm »
Wow, looks like a storage locker. Wonder who the heck would have that many manuals and why.
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Online PlainName

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #40 on: October 21, 2021, 09:07:12 pm »
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Wonder who the heck would have that many manuals

Let me think... TerraHertz?
 

Offline wkb

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #41 on: October 21, 2021, 09:21:13 pm »
Offer them to Google on the condition that they scan them all and make 'm accessible online?

Wilko
 
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Offline daqqTopic starter

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #42 on: February 19, 2022, 06:54:25 pm »
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Offline thm_w

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #43 on: February 22, 2022, 11:39:28 pm »
Recently suggested videos from this Australian scrap guy:



He gets roasted in the comments occasionally for scrapping tons of valuable ICs. He's tossed pallets full of LGA CPUs.
I don't blame him, he doesn't have the time or knowledge to sort through all of this stuff or test it, most of it is really only worth scrap value.

On the other hand, it might be worthwhile to hire someone with technical knowledge that could sort through, test, and sell off some of the valuable parts or equipment.
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Offline TerraHertz

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #44 on: February 25, 2022, 11:24:32 am »
For the microwave diode connoisseur: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284658931801?hash=item4246fe9859:g:FaAAAOSwLehiD3wZ

Well shit.



That's the first time I ever saw Bidnapper fail to register a snipe bid. Would have won easily I think.
Hopefully someone here got those. Quite an assortment of types. Perhaps they are all dead... but most likely not.

That seller thought they were 'contacts.'  Good grief. This is exactly the kind of ignorant scrapping I hate.



Update: I'd guessed it was something like eBay chosing to pull that "are you human? Please click on all the images of boats" rubbish just then.
Digging into why my bid failed, the reason is even more stupid. Extract from the eBay automated bid response: "Failure eBay Trust & Safety Error Filter Id: In certain categories, including the Bullion category, selling internationally isn't allowed. ... "
I had my delivery address set to my reshipper in LA. But eBay has a bug... sometimes it gets confused about delivery address and you have to reset your current address in the listing when buying, before it 'remembers' your currently set address. Just one more reason to hate eBay.
No, TWO reasons. Their considering this item 'bullion'... bah. And why would that be a problem anyway?
« Last Edit: February 25, 2022, 06:34:09 pm by TerraHertz »
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Offline helius

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #45 on: February 26, 2022, 11:19:45 pm »
No, TWO reasons. Their considering this item 'bullion'... bah. And why would that be a problem anyway?
The category the seller chose to list under is "Coins and paper money > Bullion > Gold > Scrap and recovered gold". So that is why. As to why that category would be restricted, I'm sure you already know.
 

Online tszaboo

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #46 on: February 27, 2022, 11:02:25 pm »
I'm slightly confused by this PCB gold recovery business. I've ordered edge connectors with gold plating, and calculated that the gold was worth something like 10 cents for a dozen PCB. So how is this even worthwhile to ship somewhere by post. Someone is asking 20 USD for a kg of PCB, that has to be a scam, or bad valuation, right?
 

Offline daqqTopic starter

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #47 on: February 28, 2022, 05:59:00 am »
Quote
Someone is asking 20 USD for a kg of PCB, that has to be a scam, or bad valuation, right?
There are various plating thicknesses - the older the better. You can have some really thick plating on the older high end stuff. For instance you have almost a gram of gold on a Pentium Pro. Also, there's bonding wires on ICs made from gold, not only PCB fingers, connector plating... For the new stuff the yield is very small IIRC though.
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Offline daqqTopic starter

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #48 on: March 01, 2022, 06:31:59 pm »
Not gold, but a whole lot of seemingly new parts such as trimpots:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/115272971967?hash=item1ad6cdf6bf:g:wjMAAOSw6RFiHV2j
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Offline PaulAm

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Re: Goodies on ebay disguised as scrap
« Reply #49 on: March 01, 2022, 06:56:41 pm »
It didn't sell at $0.99 so it got relisted for $280.00  :-DD
 
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