There is money in video game scrap.

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Malais

Active member
Joined
Feb 12, 2011
Messages
34
I've read a few threads pertaining to gold fingers on game cartridges, and the outcome of the conversations were pretty negative. Recently I bought 7 games at a yard sale for $7. I cracked the games open, cut the fingers, and ran them through an AP solution. Now these foils are huge! They are from NES games, so I can't vouch for the size of the different game systems. They contain 4-5 times the amount of surface area that RAM contains. The end result of my dried finger foils weighed in at .2 grams. This means that each foil contains 0.028 grams of gold. If gold is worth roughly $50 per gram, then each finger foil on the game is worth about $1.40. The boards have a couple chips that contain gold also, but I haven't attempted to process those yet. I did smash them with a hammer to verify gold content though.

I didn't mention the 8th game I bought which was Ninja Gaiden. I have reason to believe that I'll do better holding on to this one for a few decades than I would destroying it. The other games were very un-rare and nearly unsellable.

After this little adventure I went hunting on eBay for broken/defective game cartridges but people are beating my bids of $1 per cartridge. Why else would broken games be selling for more than $1 a piece? I'm gonna go to a few flea markets and try to score ancient games for .25 cents a piece.

Now I have to admit, I've only did the AP method 3 times in my life, this being the third. I've had some success with it. My first run I pulled 3.5 grams of foils from 1 and 1/2 lbs of random fingers from PCI cards, Motherboard fingers, and Riser Cards.

My second run was LCD boards, which was a disaster. They are still soaking with only about 1 gram of gold floating around (It's hard to guess really). I'm going to have to mutilate them before I try to reprocess because I think there is some kind of coating over the majority of the gold. These were those long strands of one sided gold fingers along with the plated squares on the thin boards.

The third run was the NES scrap I mentioned above. It was quick, fast, and done before I knew it. I think the hot day had something to due with the speed, along with the jar being placed on the hot hood of a junky truck.


I'm mentioning my other test runs to give you a back ground into my experience on the matter, which is slim to none.
 
It sounds like you have run your samples, determined your yield per piece, and know what the gold value is per piece.

In running your numbers simply calculate what you feel is fair for your labor as a profit. As to Ebay, it has little to do with gold content but more to do with high bidder and the value they place on product. If Ebay prices are too high, do not buy. If the prices are equal or higher than your gold yield value, sell your scrap there and save yourself time and chemicals.
 
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