scrap advice needed. newbie

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Joined
Mar 1, 2022
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15
these boards are from a broken 1988 Arium 4400 logic analyzer and pods. is this the type of good scrap I should be picking from cheap to free? is it worth 10 bucks?

I like to take apart things to keep up my hand dexterity. I doubt I'll ever attempt recovery as I hope to travel. any suggestions on what to remove? Are the chips worth spending time to lookup and check for value?

from past reading on the forum I am assuming the little 10" tube display is not valued.
thanks for any insights and the education.
tim
 

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Hello tsfarley.

I'm a noob to scrapping & pm recovery from e-waste. I'm pretty much still in the collecting, depopulating, and learning stage. I have a couple experiments going on, but mostly just test runs. I like the boards you have shown. I usually get my circuit boards for free, from other people's trash, but I don't come by anything like those. I think I'd pay 10 bucks for all those. I don't know if there is any collector value, but I would definitely check before dismantling. I see the gold-plated pins look nice. Any time I see the gold plating continue through the sockets, all the way to the board, I get excited. Manufactures must have used fully plated wire stock back in the day. Now days most pins seem to be plated only at the tips of the connection points. It's like they get dipped or something.

Besides the pins, I'll guess most of the ic chips contain gold bonding wires on the inside. The square chips inside the sockets look like they may be valuable, or at least worth checking the part numbers. If not, I'll bet they have gold inside them too. The board with 16 or so of the same chips, may be disappointing. If those are ceramic e-prom's, they may be without gold bonding wires. You might be able to tell by peering through the little window under the sticker. If they have only aluminum bond wires, hopefully someone will buy those too. I see lots of other nice, savable bits there too, including some tantalum capacitors.

Keep or sell. Either way, Good Luck!
mike
 
Those removable EPROM's may have some collector value or someone wanting to restore their antique project. Run those Part numbers on eBay and see if they have sold in the "completed" tab. Chances are those EPROM's don't contain gold anyway. The regular IC's may contain some gold....maybe.

Unless you can sell those EPROM's or you just want some material to practice with, I don't think there's any profit to be made.
 
Hi tsfarley,

Those boards are pre ROHS era so the solder is Pb based, no value in that, the IC chips may contain gold bonding wires, guessing about the quantity of the chips added with the quantity of the plated pins, it should yield the amount of 10$ in gold but no profits will be made.
I would check first if the boards as a whole would have collector value, then sell as it is for more than 10$, and make some profit.
If no collector value, i would separate everything from the boards and sell the parts in a pack for refining, for more than 10$ and make a small profit on it.
Attempting recovery and refining of gold from such a small batch will end you up in a large loss for the amount of gold and the amount of waste that this batch would generate.

Hope this helps.

Be safe

Pete.
 
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