# 20+ year old Telecom Scrap



## oldgoldman (Apr 13, 2011)

I'm thrilled to have found this group and look forward to a great relationship going forward.

I have located 8000 plus lbs of old teleom scrap in a field .. kind of like a 67 vette in a barn covered in dust.

Dynatech Racks, Cooke Engineering analog switching racks etc.

I want to make sure I'm maximizing the value from the various items, from white ceramic chips .. to PCBs with tons of gold plating .. to late 70s intel, TI and AMD chips and boards. 

I have 500 lbs of heavy duty green backplanes with black connectors .. some spring loaded type ready for refining now.

Picture attached .. what are my best options to maximize the refining .. Thoughts on value per lb net ??

Many Thanks


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## element47 (Apr 13, 2011)

You kind of have to decide whether you are going to get chemically involved or not. It is not an inexpensive hurdle to overcome; it includes safety gear, appropriate glassware, chemicals, it implies consumption of your time, and no doubt your first few efforts may not turn out optimal. And then you have some narly waste materials to contend with. 

I am in roughly your position with different input materials. The good news is that those materials will patiently await your decision, eg; there is no real hurry. 

When you say you wish to "maximize your yield" you leave out the consideration of "per unit time and effort". Many folks, myself included, have found that these materials are salable as they are to others who are a tad frenzied as to recovering gold scrap and that you may well obtain nearly full value just listing the stuff on ebay with the glowing description you posted! 

As I am no expert in this area, just an avid student at this point, I strongly recommend you perform the calculations as best you can as to "sell as is" vs "process". 

For example, I just sold some batches of gold bearing CPU chips on ebay. After fees, I got $100 / lb net net selling them on ebay. That was 3 separate auctions, all of which fetched just about the same net. (ref: search for completed auctions by "ttm44") By my calculations, admittedly inexact, I could have made $20-$35 more processing them, the cost of nitric being the main determining factor. For that amount of money, even though I'm eager to acquire the techniques and methods and skills of refining, it hardly seems worth it. With 800 lbs of input, I would imagine you would need large beakers, flasks, etc; and these are not cheap. 

I'm just urging you to contemplate the sell vs refine conundrum.


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## oldgoldman (Apr 13, 2011)

Thanks for the input. I should have made myself clearer. No .. I obtain the material, then I want someone else to deal with the chemicals, refining issue. I'm looking for a spot buyer, or someone who has experience with this very specific type of material and what type of $ / lb they received .. understanding they may not want to reveal that.

Will consider the ebay aspect .. more fun stuff to come.

Best


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## jimdoc (Apr 13, 2011)

You should post your location, as that may help you find a local buyer.

Jim


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## oldgoldman (Apr 13, 2011)

Upper Midwest .. Regards


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## Anonymous (Apr 13, 2011)

oldgoldman said:


> No .. I obtain the material, then I want someone else to deal with the chemicals, refining issue. I'm looking for a spot buyer, or someone who has experience with this very specific type of material and what type of $ / lb they received .. understanding they may not want to reveal that.
> 
> Will consider the ebay aspect .. more fun stuff to come.


Not trying to shoot down your ideas here,but you will definitely get more money from ebay.In most cases you will get more than the actual gold content.Most of us will offer to buy it outright,or give you a percentage of the yields,in both cases you will end up with an amount that would be equal to actual yield.....minus our time,trouble,knowledge,and chemicals.However on Ebay you most likely will recieve as close to the actual gold content as you can get,and as I said before,in most cases you'll recieve more than the actual content.
Most of us on the forum have a good idea of what the actual yield would be for those.Most of the buyers on ebay are investors,and people that buy material to process with the assumption that there is more gold contained within,than there actually is.
Save your time and money,and sell them on ebay!


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## oldgoldman (Apr 13, 2011)

Compelling .. Is the picture posted sufficient ? What other info is needed on eBay ( never done that before ) to make a buyer comfortable ?

Regards,


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## jimdoc (Apr 13, 2011)

The better pictures you can get, the more people will bid. You don't want to leave them guessing, as that will keep the bids lower.

Jim


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## Anonymous (Apr 13, 2011)

PM sent


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## element47 (Apr 13, 2011)

You're getting good advice, IMO. On ebay, search for "gold chips for refining" or "gold CPUs for refining" or "gold refining" and see what has been done (and is being done) as we speak. 

The prose in your initial post was great! Take some nice close-up pics in good light, show off that gold! I like to shorten the auction period from (default) 7 days to 5 in the listing. Generates a little urgency. I like your "70's, early 80's" line. Gold was CHEEP then (actually, not true) and thus heavily plated. 

Here's a link to my just-completed (Mar 28) auction if that means anything: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=200590370007 

I would NOT list all your stuff at once; dribble it out in smaller lots. You want amateurs to buy your stuff. Amateurs cannot conceive of dealing with 800 lbs of stuff. 

Make sure you have some notion of shipping costs....freight has gone bananas expensive lately. 

Note that there was no particular shortage of bidders. My experience is that anything listed on ebay that smacks of "bullion" snaps to very-near market price.


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## oldgoldman (Apr 13, 2011)

Great .. Thank You .. just to be clear, it's 8,000 lbs .. not 800. All the better !! Actually it's overwhelming.

No harm in trying eBay. I'll stick say 50 lbs on their ( amateur size ) with good pictures .. and leave the bigger lots to the professionals I normally use for my business.

Regards


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## element47 (Apr 13, 2011)

If you are new to ebay as a seller, you *may* wish to check out auctiva.com. This is a listing tool that might make your (listing) task a tad easier. And there are other listing "tools" sites. They offer a 30-day/15 auction free trial (which you can use to produce actually-submitted-to-ebay auctions) I kind of like it and I use it for my auctions. It has some error-checking features and I believe it offers double the number of pictures (at no extra cost) at higher resolution, than what ebay itself offers. After 30 days, you can list 30 auctions per month for $3. Cancel any time. IMO the higher res could be of value if you really want to boast about the goldiness of your stuff. Take the time and effort to take-GOOD-pictures!! 

50 lbs at a whack might be a lot for an amateur. You *may* get better results getting down to smaller lots. You may get better results sawing off fingers (not yours!) or sorting the boards by backplane-dominated---chip-dominated---that kind of thing. Do *NOT* underestimate your freight burden! Freight on smallish boxes that don't weigh much has tripled/quadrupled in the past few years. You think "hey this should ship for $6" and you get to the PO or your local "UPS Store" and find the bill to be $27. You are probably better off reducing the size of those large boards (by sawing them in half or quarters) so that they will fit into USPS "flat-rate" boxes that they ship weight-independent. 

And finally, if you find some items that are in cherry shape, consider scrubbing the dirt off w/rubbing alcohol and selling them as the manufacturer part numbers they are. Somewhere, somebody may well have a repair job that needs what you have. You never know. It costs very little to give it a shot and to re-list the item if it doesn't sell the first time. 

And don't say in your auction that you have 8000 lbs of this crud you found in the garbage and you just want to get rid of it! It's rare! It's scarce! It's valuable!


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## oldgoldman (Apr 13, 2011)

Okay Element47 .. here you go. Part Number M-128937 ( Military Piece ? ). JAE Connector. 1.3 lbs for this piece. More goldiness pictures for you.


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## element47 (Apr 13, 2011)

The five rows of paired gold fingers at the right side of your pix appear to my eye to be identical to what is inside the other edge connectors. IOW, if you were to carefully pry off the long thin plastic rectangle(s) from the other edge connectors, you will find that structure of paired fingers inside. I *think*. Thus, this wouldn't be salable as a potentially functioning electronic part; because usually those rectangles cannot be put back on manually, non-machine-insertion style, without bending a pin or two and that's a no-no. Plus the wire-wrap pins on the backside are kind of helter-skelter. A scrapper/refiner doesn't care about this, a user of the electronic item who needs it to work does. I'm just saying, if you find one or two of these in beautiful, shiny condition, and can, after some modest amount of research claim that it is a backplane for a "Hulbert 2000 automated switch mainframe, mfr part no ABCDE rev 02" "removed from working equipment" then you might get $450 for it. I know, it's crazy, but I used to have a computer company that sourced most of its inventory from junkyards, and I sold that junk back to the actual manufacturer for the service work they had contracted to perform on large fleets of their own gear. Yes, I sold Tektronix equipment to Tektronix, and since they had to refurb it, I simply sent my shipping labels to the seller with a check and explained that my very picky customer wanted the gear they were buying to go through Tektronix factory refurb. The seller reported to me the serial numbers. My shipping labels had Tektronix' purchase order number to me, and my invoice had the serial numbers. The seller drop-shipped the items directly to Tek, I never touched them, I never had to re-box them nor scrape 7 asset-tag labels off them. I would buy them for $250 and sell them for $750, 10, 18, 30 at a time. I did that 5x a month and made $20K a month in my underwear. One day I hope to find as good a business as that was!


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