12 v relays

[Ohiogoldfever]

So I happened across several hundred relays. Tons of silver and gold contacts. The weight starts adding up pretty quick. It’s got me thinking.

Has anyone ever propositioned a junkyard for collecting relays? If you could get them cheap enough I’d think you could collect several buckets full from a decent sized junk yard.

 

[Martijn]

A lot of work for little return and if your'e buying, not much profit there i'm afraid. It all depends on the price you pay and your labor and material costs.
The gold contacts are gold plated silver. Not solid gold.

Martijn.

 

[galenrog]

A lot of work for little return and if your'e buying, not much profit there i'm afraid. It all depends on the price you pay and your labor and material costs.
The gold contacts are gold plated silver. Not solid gold.

Martijn.

I have to agree. Unless the relays in question have very large contacts, it is a waste of my time. Scrap yards I deal with do not sell to public. Most of what comes in goes out within a few days. The remainder never stays more than a few weeks. Also, having an employee pull relays is a money losing exercise, unless the buyer is willing to cover those costs, which in any business are roughly twice the employee hourly rate, plus any tools and materials used to pull relays.

If you want to pull relays yourself, that is your decision. Have fun.

Time for more coffee.

 

[alexxx]

You can buy from small peddling yards the copper bearring boxes by the full load for maybe 0.30 - 0.40 / #
If you are not willing to buy that kind of volume nobody will bother sorting them relays. With luck you can buy maybe 4-5 gaylords from smaller yards.

Buying the copper bearring scrap has been a money maker for me for the last 10 years, good upgrades to be made if you buy at the right price from the right places. You need space and need to be able to sell pretty much everytghing ugraded in there at the dealer price (coppers, brasses, wires, aluminums and exotic alloys). You need to know your alloys and be able to sell weirtd stuff from nickel to ac adapters no cords to inconel 800. Labor intensive but there's treasures to be found all the time.

Doing that the right way should at least double your money on base metals + free precious metals from your work.

Gold plated contacts are not profitable (for me in any case), silver contacts, well, depends...

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

Thanks gents. Contact size surly makes a big difference. I have happened across a few in this group that have the smallest dang contacts, it’s clearly not worth messing with. I’ve tossed those straight into my copper bearing bucket. Some however have some pretty nice 2 gram contacts. Those start adding up pretty quick when each relay has 6 or 8 of them.

 

[FrugalRefiner]

Understand that when pursuing gold plating, smaller is better.

If you have one gigantic gold plated contact, let's say 1 inch x 1 inch x 1 inch, you have six square inches of gold plating (the surface area of the contact, each surface being 1" x 1" square times 6 sides). If you cut those contacts in half each direction (assuming all surfaces are plated), you have 8 pieces 1/2 inch x 1/2 inch x 1/2 inch. Each piece has a surface area of 1-1/2 square inches (1/2" x 1/2" x 1/2"(1/4 square inch each side times six sides). But you have 8 pieces, so 1-1/2 square inches per piece times 8 pieces equals 12 square inches.

When talking about gold plating, the smaller the pieces, the more gold per unit of weight.

I hope that makes sense.

Dave

 

[acpeacemaker]

I actually had an in and out conversation whis Chris (Gsp) before he left us, about these types of contact points.

I ran into a mom and pop shop that was an auto parts "you pull and pay" place. They just gave them to me if I pulled them. They said they never resold them because a lot of times they wouldn't work. But people looking around pulling parts would sometimes just take them anyway.

I was going to make a post on 2 five gallon buckets in weight. Basically pros & cons to give a little more defined answer of why it's not really worth it. I never got to make the post though. I haven't had a lot of free time anymore. My wife decided she wanted to go into Air Assault for Army, and I got left with everything else...

Screenshot is just a bit from a message from GSP

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

Yes sir. It makes sense to me. Some of these are gold plated and that’s a bonus but with these I’m more relying on the silver weight and volume for values. The plated gold is just a bonus.

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

I am sure that for many people messing with silver points is likely not worth it. I am sure I can understand that many of you are guys who run sterling, karate scrap, gold filled or what have you. For a guy who doesn’t have high grade scrap all the time extracting $600-800 of silver from a pile of relays is turning some decent money. Surely not from anything other than a hobby stand point though.

I’m not looking to be contradictory in any sense, just pointing out that what is a decent payday for puttering around in my garage might be considered total loss or failure for a guy looking to make a living as a refiner is just accustom to working larger runs or high grade stuff.

 

[butcher]

I have several pounds of silver collected from scrap electrical contacts and switches, I have collected over the years, mostly from stuff we would normally throw away, I always saved any switch, motor contactor, fuse, or relay or part that I could, working or not, for reuse in repairs or for the scrap, working parts are normally more valuable as working parts, many contactors can be rebuilt (keeping the old contacts for the silver scrap) rebuilding the motor contactor with a new set of points and springs making it valuable as a new motor starter...

If you work in a field where you run into a lot of this type of scrap and you can use the parts, or acquire enough to make it worth saving for little bit of silver, if you have to pay for the scrap and it is difficult to find then well then it is not worth it.
Old forklifts can have an ounce of silver in their contacts, Old telephone switching beside some silver and some gold, also was a good source for some palladium) industrial electrical equipment cabinets sometimes would have several motor large contactors, hundreds of relays, several electronic circuit boards, timers as well as other valuable parts and other metals like large silver plated bus bars and wiring...

It all depends if you can find it in bulk (preferably free) if it is worth it or not.

 

[BShan]

Different models, types, etc., will have different compositions too. You can look on their datasheet to find what the manufacturer claims the points are made of. Sometimes they will have details, other times not. Interesting where Cd shows up. Wish I'd looked up all my relays before dumping all the contacts in one container.

Often, relays belong to a series, and a majority of the part number you can cross reference within the datasheet to the configuration, sometimes down to the varying contact materials.

 

[Ohiogoldfever]

That’s good thinking. I’ll sort all my contacts before processing. I’ll still need to do some fine tuning, clipping away in needed materials. Most of my current supply are all the same. Nice thick heavy silver contacts, then a bunch that are gold plated.

 

[vestport]

Not sure if they were 12VDC but some older relays (very old) can be solid contacts. I remember getting some and dunking in nitric to melt off the copper. What was left was 22K pure gold. 99.9% otherwise are plated. This stuff is pretty much impossible to find and probably came off old military or telephone equipment. When I say dunking into nitric, what I mean is that the tips were cut off as close to the contact as possible and then dunked into nitric under a fume hood of course! Labor intensive and you certainly don't want to dunk the whole relay!

Anyways, some relays did have solid contacts!