Thanks Ben for your time and uncensored knowledge. Always entertaining informational.

Nice video. Very instructive. I've been watching you for a year or so and scrapping, but I learn something new every time.

thank you for this sires of videos. was just what i needed for a good start. only one that takes the time to go all the way through. i watch them while im picking boards. learn something new every time.

Champion. Cheers for all the great info especially regarding the toxic dangers etc ; Nice work fella.

You are the "One" that I decided to subscribe ! Bravo👍

What a process Ben. You’ve got a great system there. I’m sure we all are all impressed

Only Ewaste Ben can make an hour and a half video about scrapping 😂

Great Depopulating video! Loads of info!!! 👍👍

I haven't read any of your viewer's comments but by the sounds of it, you've got one or two of those brilliant one's showing up for a visit. I, myself, have learned quite a lot from your videos. I can listen & occasionally view while I'm distracted on my projects. And you repeat yourself so damn much... something that would normally irritate me but being that circuit board components were foreign to me, i need it that way and it's working. Im finding that what you're teaching is starting to be understood and i appreciate that. Good job!

Great video and another one I enjoyed. Learnt a few things again. Your last 5 minute speech should really be at the beginning. I can't agree with you more on the dangers. Again thank you and well done

eWaste Ben, Good video, very informative. Look forward to the next episode

now thats cool! these depopulating vids are ace! yea i have quite a few years of electronic/computer/tv engineering and im thinking... your right, why the hell does it matter what the components do or how they work?! they are just scrap! your not fixing them! ben your an ace guide and advisor and teacher... and a great scrapper 😊 keep going, these vids are cool!

Great video. I come across boards all the time. Gonna start saving and harvesting

Great video. I'm an old skool scrapper that worked in a yard for 23 years i know all the big stuff but e waste is something in just learning.

Again Great video

I use wood chisels instead of screwdriver. Same difference but I can sharpen them. Like Original Fleets says: "Chisels are your friend". Thanks for the clear advice Ben.

MLCCs are magnetic. I use a little magnet to pick them up after removing them. Great Video!!

K is a relay. They are usually silver contacts but some need gold plating for corrosion resistance. Extremely rare are relays with mercury wetting but those will also have glass to hold the mercury and contacts.

LEDs, especially the older ones, have a secret treasure: RHENIUM!! It's usually alloyed with molybdenum.

Thank You Sir.....You have done a great job at teaching, I've learn something new each time I see a video.

On the very thin IC chips, just score one side of the legs with a utility knife and that side just lifts up easily. Then just twist a few times and the whole chip pops off. Works great for 4 sided surface mount chips.

Thank you for your patient steady insight

Hi Ben: Good instructional video. I Dont know if you knew this but Vice grips does have smaller sized pliers like the blue handled one you have, 2 sizes smaller then the pliers you are using in this video. Even though my hands still get fatigued,they are not as fatigued using the smaller sized(less weight) vise grips.

Great video very Informative. I am in the research phase on whether it is worth just depopulating or Just selling the boards. I am assuming the big refining are making most of their profit off the base metals and not the gold and silver. I am assuming maybe half the value of the board is actually the copper. Then you have the tin soldier with very trace amount of silver Of course they will process the silver platinum and gold. But the copper itself probably pays for the whole process. During my research on Resistors I did notice most of the brown ones are mainly base metals it is the blue rainbow resistors that have platinum and other precious metals. Now that being said I dont get many boards so I will desoldier all components and save soldier and components but I may want to play around with electronics and some of the components are expensive, Some of those components are worth more then the scrap value if they are working. On the practical level I may process the copper board by lye bath to get the green mylar off and save the tin soldier for reuse or scrap. Of course I will save the silver and gold to but more of a side product.

I like it when Ben says "Hamma Time"!!!!

I do gold recovery and you are right about the dangers and there being a lot to doing the process.

I have found when hand picking the ICs and VGA chips a sharp 5mm wood chisel works well. The chips you can use the chisel to cut the legs. A sharp knife will do as well.

Ben you might give a try different grade screens. You might get the gold pins with 1 screen and so on to help start somewhere! Oh yea you can make a new video about it and show us how it works. Man, you know you have some black tantalum capacitors in with your yellow tantalum capacitors. Great video Ben!

Enjoy mist if your videos. To depopulate, try using a wood chisel ( sharp edge) instead of a screwdriver, dull edge just Pushes parts off instead of getting “under” the parts. It moved much easier Tried it and works better in practice Once you do, you won’t go back. I also sharpened my blade on my air hammer but parts “GO EVERYWHERE “ as you probably know already. 🙂

Its good idea, im doing that, to have magnet when u take off mlcc and just take magnet and when u take mlcc from bord pick up with magnet, myb this will help u to do it faster not picking it from desk.

Good Video Ben, thanks

Anyone who claims that obtained a marketable measure of precious metals from carbon (rainbow) resistors is trying to sell you the Sydney Harbor (our) Bridge.

I found a trick for getting the tiny components off: weak HCl with a tiny bit of EDTA dissolved in it! Leave it in a warm place. The EDTA acts as a catalyst, slowly stripping away the base metal. Copper will dissolve, redeposit, and then redissolve as the solder and more reactive metals are eaten away. When it's all done, the little components will all just fall right off and you're left with a very weakly acidic solution of base metal chlorides in an organic salt (EDTA). If you're really into cleaning up after yourself like I am, it's easy then to hit it with sodium carbonate to drop pretty much everything (most transition metal carbonates are insoluble), and then dry them out and roast to non-reactive oxides for disposal.

I wish there was better KZfaq video on grading circuit boards. Ben goes over the components really well and I have learned alot from his videos but I mean for example I accidentally sold a bunch of telcom grade boards from the 70s as gold finger cards because they had gold fingers I didn't realize they were actually telcom so I mixed them in with newer ones that weren't telcom and devalued them. Then afterwards the guy showed me. And also he pulled a bunch of stuff out of my mid grade and put it in low grade. Like boards that had heavier plugs and ones that were less populated with chips.

what is the total dollar value of recovery on a board like that? and how much could you sell the board for whole? I'm trying to figure out if it's worth it for me to collect the more particular stuff rather than just the copper and aluminum and sell the rest of the board to a scrap yard. I'm also having trouble finding an ewaste buyer or more specifically one who pays an ok price. I don't even know what to look for in a buyer.

Good video Ben, but i'm not into gold recovery so that being said i had to fast forward to the things i'm into. I like the parts where you take things apart or picking up scrap. Thank you for sharing your video.

scratch at the surface where it is bright green and under that is gold

Hi, Ben. Thanks for producing all of this content. Great channel. Can you do a video on your current game plan/goals or your overall approach to e waste handling? Like, what are you in it for? What do you hope to do with all of these tiny bits of gold? You rock. Thanks.

your a life saver, thanks .

Love the videos

Thanks for another interesting vid Ben. I hand depopulate boards. I don't get the volume you do, so easy enough.

Very informative thanks

Important chemistry note: the ruthenium resistors are ruthenium oxide, which does not react with most acids. HOWEVER!! It DOES react dangerously with STRONG ALKALIS!! So, to depopulate the tiny components completely, it's best to use weak acid to remove the solder. Then you can capture the MLCCs with a magnet after filtering out the solid parts from the solution. The ruthenium-containing resistors will be left behind in the pile of solids. All MLCCs from boards with ruthenium resistors will be magnetic, as ruthenium wasn't used in the old boards with non-magnetic MLCCs. Make sure you sort the old boards from the newer ones, obviously. Mainly anything post-2000 is 'new'.

Great video keep them

Great video bro

thank u sir for teaching me so much

The 'silver' fingers and contacts are tricky. They can have one of several types of plating: palladium, silver, platinum, rhodium for the good ones; tin, chrome, nickel for the crap ones. I'm developing a chemical reaction series to deal with them and recover the actual precious metals as a powder, while leaving most of the copper or brass cores behind! It's based on partial dissolution and then redeposition and displacement. Most of the precious metals flake off as the copper goes in and out of solution, while the base metal platings stay in solution. Then you can shake up the solids and filter through a nylon screen. You'll have a solution with grey and silvery dust (virtually all the precious metals), and copper cores (and some copper crystals).

Great Video your so helpfull thank you

excellent video thanx a lot!

when you said 'new subscribers' it sure sound like new scrappers

one salute to you sir your great love your video..

You should try one of those vibration saws, you can get thin blade scrapper tools with them.

Thanks for sharing

or what you could do to depopulate the boards on a much quicker scale... grab a large metal pan and fill it with a $4 bag of play sand and put it on your gas grill outside on high and stick the whole boards in it, the sand doesnt melt and it will melt the solder off and then take a metal ruler or an old large knife to just "wipe" the pieces off the board

Good info Ben, at 21:53 you single out a small white box component. That’s a relay from what I’ve researched and I was wondering if you knew if there are computer relays that contain mercury. I’ve read up on relays in other industries containing mercury for conductivity without spark/arc risks... but I haven’t been able to find solid info pertaining to computer scrapping. Thanks and happy scrapping!

Those specific resisters you pointed at specifically have tantilum in them which is 1850. a pound but you have to find a specific tantalum buyer which is fairly difficult to locate

There's a washing machine down saltley street if you want mate rode past it a couple hrs ago looked untouched

Another great video ty Ben. Is the board still worth low grade after hand picking good stuff on it?

The resistors and all the electronic components are still useful for other projects.

The brassy bits on the TeV boards is just brass. I tested several from different boards in weak nitric acid, which should not touch anything gold. They completely dissolved into blue copper nitrate and some tin nitrate goop. Nothing else was left. The inner pin can be gold-plated, but the casing is just cheap brass.

I depopulate boards while watching eWaste Ben videos.

do you ever use heat to remove IC memory chips?

is there anytype of place you could send the things that u take off the boards that have gold/silver precious metals etc,that will recover the precious metals.then refine it and send it back in bar or button form.maybe charge you a price to do it or take some of the recovered precious metals for payment???

What do you do with all the components? I scrap the IC, Copper, Aloi , Goldpins. for the rest i have never found a recycler or acquirers, i sell this bords as low grade bords to my recycler.

i liked the video..but i have aquestion how much gold in 1kg. of rams , processores and mother boards..

CAN they Supplying e waste for the Recycling purpous ?

I fully strip boards but i do it with a heat gun, everything comes off quick and easy, then i sort out the good stuff then use a magnet to pick the magnetic stuff and throw it into my light shred. Anything left is random non magnetic non ferrous metals. Although i havnt done anything with the non ferrous i am contemplating melting it into ingots and try to process by electrolysis. By doing electrolysis should be able to separate and purify the individual metals. Things like copper. Tin, nickel amd any others left.

Where is the best place to sell this stuff at???

Found a gold base crystal oscillators in those small slot cards from laptops.

I'm the rotary style switches I often times see a solid piece with indents where the silver contact would/should be. They are either brass or gold plated but i find them randomly in high grade and low grade boards. I've always assumed they were just brass bit now I'm wondering. And the same ones that are silver colour with the indents does that mean the whole piece may be silver? Or I can a switch just be nickel plated?

My biggest issue is grading my boards. Yellow, brown boards .. low grade, right? Are all green on green mid grades?

i dont know why but now i love crumble :D

for me the crumble would go in a hammer mill then process the powder

I save all the ceramic capacitors and components of red, blue, yellow, brown, green, and even black. You never know which could have some precious metals in them, as manufacturing changes so much with them. If they're aluminum, then it's no problem. The first step is ALWAYS to clean base metals from the components with HCl after smashing them to bits, and that will completely dissolve aluminum away. Pure aluminum chloride aqueous solution is colorless to very pale yellow. When highly concentrated, it can even become a translucent gel. It's actually rather neat to toy with, and can be reacted with sodium hydroxide to make super-pure alumina powder for making ceramics and artificial rubies and sapphires (you can even get all the doping metals out of your base metal solutions!)

What the purpose of the gold cap, when it is not for contact

Are capacitors worth scraping?

Gold Gold Gold Gold 😂👍👍👍

How can you tell if it is white gold?

Have you thought about using electrolysis?

How much do you make? What is your cost to get the boards? Is it worth your time verses a minimum wage job?

Just wondering is it mandatory that you clean all the boards or can you just leave it all on the board and sell those thing cuz I don't get that much stuff like that to be taking everything off of it I just wondering if it would be better just to sell the whole board as is

Good day buddy? I have a few ceramic GPS patch antenna chips. Do you know if they contain any precious metals?

I do hand-pick all the big stuff. While watching anime. Perfect use of time! ;D

i hand pick everything off it i want and its usually a lot or most of it just not the tiny tiny stuff t hen can sell the boards with the rest on it. also when i'm doing it i get about 20 boards and put in a pile then i take off all of one thing from t hem all and do that through out the process so all mlcc,chips,and so on if you get what i'm saying so its kinda like ur draws of stuff ur making but i make a pile of everything and then add it to my jars. one day ill make a little video for you or youtube to see all the stuff i've collected so far. but like your new style of depopulating as i didn't like the air tool way or many other ways other then hand picking them but i wasn't gonna say it in your video a year ago was just gonna let u say what ever you say in your videos. :P

Please forgive my ignorance. I just started scrapping. What are mlcc’s? The soldering materials?

Hey, new to the game. I have enjoyed your work and learned much. How do you get the MCC's off by hand? Right now, and some may remember being at this point..I just stare at the board thinking ok, what do i do? What is that? Try a few things that never work, throw the board to the side for later. LOL I have found that using finger nail clippers to remove gold pins works well.

Sir How much 1kg price tantalum capacitors

Just wondering if you scraped the boards clean, separate out the obvious stuff, through everything else into a crumble bucket. Couldn't you recover the solder off the boards ? Tin is $24.86 usd per kg. I saw the guy from Mt. Baker mining run e-waist through a hammer mill onto his shaker table, which seemed to do a good job separating the heavy metals. From there, guess it would go to a refiner to separate the metals. That way you're getting more out of the boards. Looks to me in order to make a decent profit, you need to be able to mass process. I can see if you're processing a few and there, exactly as you demonstrate, but doesn't seem like a viable business, unless you can easily process thousands of boards at a time with not much effort.

Get a huge bin and start keeping those aluminum capacitors. Takes 5 seconds to rip them off. Will add up over time.

I like to save up all the big aluminum capacitors and smelt them all at once. Easy to do in just a steel drum with holes in the bottom and a wood fire. End up with a blob of highly-pure aluminum, since those capacitors are about 99.6% pure aluminum. The electrolyte is almost always nontoxic these days, just a simple salt.

I don't really see the problem with the air hammer smashing everything up. I don't know how Ben does his precious metal recovery but with the acid baths I use the smashed up ones give up more of their goods. It exposes more surface area for the acid to act on which means I'm not potentially leaving something behind in undissolved IC chunks - which there always are. I don't throw anything out. It's as much a hobby as side hustle for me so I take everything off and kind of sort it while I'm watching TV or feel like tinkering in the shop without getting into something I can't drop at a moment's notice. very can capacitor and transformer gets cut open and the aluminum and copper bits get tossed into my piles for melting later. Shockingly the completely depopulated boards still sell for a bit on sleazebay afterward. I mean not for much but they're trash I paid nothing for to begin with so anything is really gravy.

36:34 pretty sure that a bios chip .

Hi Ben at about 4.20 you mention a processing machine. Does such a machine exist? Cheers

Dear Sir I want to start off my E waste recycling business with a refinery. It can refine only silver and gold. Can you tell me which components of a PCB board the most amount of gold and silver. I would like to know. Thank you.

i would like to see a speedrun of this

Anyone else triggered by the wrong fitting on the air tool?

Partial plated pins like you showed removing the plastic can be easily cut off with your snips. Here they are called aviation snips. They are right handed and left handed. Go for it What are those loud birds

We do care what they are and what they do. Theyre useful for building your own circuits. But i understand some people dont do that.

Its actually not difficult at all to recover and refine gold and silver from boards lol I learned on KZfaq, it's very possible to learn on KZfaq, and now have a business refining for others. If you have a basic understanding of safety practices and what acids can do it's easy to do

I like using a oscillating saw