# Business of buying scrap



## julius (Dec 28, 2013)

Hello all, first post here. I looked on ebay at scrap and saw an auction for 20lbs of scrap fingers from RAM. I saw a thread in the tutorial section just now and the person in that thread recovered about 3.75 grams per pound of fingers and CPU bits if I am not mistaken. I see an ebay auction for 20 pounds of finger scrap closed not long ago for $1500. At 3.75 grams per pound, that is 20lbx3.75grams=75grams of recoverable gold. Current price of a gram is about $39. So $39x75grams= $2,925.00. So assuming I paid $1500 for that scrap and got 3.75 grams of 24k per pound, I would profit $1425 less chemicals and other small expenses. Lets just say I got only 3 grams per pound, that is still $2340 or a profit of $840. 

So RAM fingers must have much less than 3 grams per pound of just finger scrap? Or for some reason people who like home refining (anyone on this board) figured it wasn't worthwhile to make a pretty good profit and inexplicably only bid that 20lb auction up to $1500.

Market dynamics indicate that that gold should have been bid up to what it is worth minus a small refining fee, but not $1425 in profit for the refiner. This seems like an asymmetry to me. So did people miss a deal or is it likely that fingers on average hold much less than 3 grams per pound?

Thanks.


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## jimdoc (Dec 28, 2013)

Don't trust other peoples numbers. Unless you are just in it for fun and have way too much money already!

Jim


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## propellanttech (Dec 28, 2013)

julius said:


> So did people miss a deal or is it likely that fingers on average hold much less than 3 grams per pound?



Although I'm a new guy here, I'm not new to pcb's.

There is no "average" for anything dealing with pcb's. This is due to the quality of the board and who made it. 

For example: If you take all ASUS ram and recycle the gold fingers you would probably recover more gold than if you recycled the gold fingers from some third party unknown Chinese brand of ram. 

Also, you must remember that the more perfect your recovery process is, the more gold you will recover. Perfection takes constant accurate practice. 

I don't think I would even take anyone's calculations but my own for those kind of purchases. You should know how much gold you get from a general run of the mill set amount of fingers. Only *you *know how much *you *can get from them.

James L


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## artart47 (Dec 29, 2013)

Hi Julius !
I've done alot of ram fingers over the past few years. The sources I have give me and sometimes pay me to dispose of their equipment. because of the situation,an area filled withold abandoned builddings that the people want cleaned out or the new business moves in and there is equipment that has been there for decades, I get a large percentage of old computor stuff. When I get a few pounds of fingers ready for the AP they are very good quality.
I have never gotten three grams/pound. Average is two and a quarter. I have done two groups of fingers that were from all the stuff from the computor stores and hand-ins from everyday people ( the garbage they sell at best buy to the peasants. made in china and called "computors" ) The returns with out looking in my notes was bout a gram and one half.
I have run into two people who have been collecting fingers. One is an imigrant guy who worked for the scrap yard. Had 15lbs. fairly close cut. The other guy is an insane guy who says "I got alot of those but doesen't produce them so you can get a sale going. I offered them $35/pound, I figure one gram X spot per pound. That is more that what I would ever pay unless I came across a gaylord or hundreds of pounds and I could do a real fast recovery, refine and gold sale for some quick money
If you are going to buy, buy cheap or you'll lose money.
artart47


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## macfixer01 (Dec 29, 2013)

Julius, I see you just joined. I have to say, you sound more like an Ebay seller who's trying to figure out why his auction didn't make obscene profits? If every scrap auction sold for the value of the gold less a small refining fee as you suggest, why would anyone want to participate in that? Although it's great for the seller I guess. Any idiot can clip fingers off a circuit board. Isn't the person investing his time, knowledge, and chemicals to turn trash into cash due some profit also? Anyone who truly knows what he's doing would never be still bidding if there was no profit left to be had.

That being said, as was already mentioned there is a lot of variety in circuit board finger quality. How closely they're trimmed matters a lot in terms of worthless circuit board weight. If the fingers are on thick circuit boards vs thinner boards, yields will also be lower since again there is more useless board weight per finger (this is one area where RAM has an advantage since DIMMs are thinner than say PCI cards). Older circuit boards especially say pre-1980 generally have thicker plating than newer boards. Newer boards are also more likely to have empty gaps in the fingers which lowers the yield, although it used to be common to always have a full set of fingers on a board even if several were not being used. Last but not least whether it's due to economics, logistics, or just who the board production was outsourced to, board quality can vary over time. Hewlett Packard boards are generally assumed to be very good quality and in their test equipment anyway, boards were often made with all the traces gold plated. However I've had exactly the same boards of similar age (based on IC date codes) where some have traces with just a thin gold wash, and other boards have traces plated nearly as thick as the fingers.


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## chlaurite (Dec 29, 2013)

julius said:


> Market dynamics indicate that that gold should have been bid up to what it is worth minus a small refining fee


As your primary mistake, you have left out the risk-cost associated with imperfect information, both about the product itself and about the future price of gold. Last week gold took a nose-dive; someone buying scrap on the presumption of 20% margins would have taken a bath. Add to that the wildly varying quality of "fingers" - Single sided, sparsely populated, less than perfectly cropped, unknown gold thickness... That all adds up to a *huge* variation in potential yields after processing. With perfect product, you might have gotten 3.5g/lbs; worst case (short of outright fraud, which you can never rule out on EBay), you could realistically end up with under a gram per pound.

Somewhat less important but still considerable, you have assumed the existence of a sufficiently large pool of buyers - Buyers capable of recognizing the value of what that auction had for sale, and extracting that value into a marketable commodity - To drive the price up to near-spot minus a reasonable processing fee. Look at the active members of this forum, compared to an infotainment forum like Fark (as a random example). That gives you an idea of the size of the pool of potential buyers - Not very big. Lots of people have gotten the gold bug in this economy, but only a tiny fraction of them can process fingers.

Further, my previous sentence included an assumption of its own - Your calculations price that scrap as though a buyer could actually get near-spot prices for the theoretical gold content; in reality, no small-scale refiner could get that even for numbered PAMP bars, much less a random chunk of home-melted gold of unknown origins and purity.

Finally, you need to recognize the reality of the "product" here. Essentially, that auction had hazardous e-waste for sale - Literally garbage that most towns still charge people extra for disposal. With waste stream processing, the ability to sell that garbage, rather than _pay_ to dispose of it, depends wholly on finding a customer who believes the work needed to convert it into something of value exceeds the cost to acquire it. In this case, no such customer came forward.


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## macfixer01 (Dec 29, 2013)

Good point Chlaurite. You can never rule out fraud on Ebay, or even just ideas so strange that they may not be obvious unless you read the descriptions very carefully. Like those folks who were trying to sell pre-processed fingers. Someone here likened it to selling ashes and calling it pre-processed wood!


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## sharkhook (Dec 31, 2013)

There is also a growing group of people like me. My main interest is not to make money, or own gold. So I have spent exactly $11.30 on buying gold. $0.50 on silver. Why? My interest is mainly in "How" it is done. If it happens to make me a few bucks, great. The stuff I am learning to process comes 99.999% (pun intended) from other peoples trash. When the trash stops coming in, then, if I know the processes well enough, who knows, I may buy items to process. But what do I know, I am just a newbie, :lol: .


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