myne wrote on Today, 03:24:

Inductors are more or less solid copper wire.
Worth the 3 seconds to cut off.
Not worth the several hours to attack the rest of the copper.

When you say worth, do you mean like as scrap?

Copper is worth less than $6 US per pound. If you're trimming one off every three seconds (and someone is actively feeding you boards loaded with inductors), it'd probably still take hours to get one pound of copper from inductors on motherboards.

Anyway, yeah... a lot of scrappers would probably still do that for some reason. I have seen some boards that were demolished in so many complicated ways it was baffling. It must take a tremendous amount of time and energy to destroy some of this stuff. On the other hand it would take minutes to just look for the biggest name\words\numbers printed on the thing and search for it on ebay... and they don't even have to sell on ebay. Just take the pile of valuable stuff, dump it on FB Marketplace as-is and sell it for 10-20% of the ebay price to be done with it. They'll save countless hours, make 10x as much money and not have to destroy their hands, tools or the boards themselves.

Makes my brain hurt... 😵

The retro market is smaller than you think

I stumbled on a site selling "gold scrap" CPUs by the tonne.

https://www.tradeindia.com/products/ceramic-c … ap-8146593.html

20 tonnes of motherboards, 100tonne/m available:
https://www.tradeindia.com/products/motherboa … p-c5059008.html

myne wrote on Today, 06:14:

The retro market is smaller than you think […]
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The retro market is smaller than you think

I stumbled on a site selling "gold scrap" CPUs by the tonne.

https://www.tradeindia.com/products/ceramic-c … ap-8146593.html

20 tonnes of motherboards, 100tonne/m available:
https://www.tradeindia.com/products/motherboa … p-c5059008.html

Not sure what you mean.

Clipping inductors off of a ton of motherboards would not be a very effective way to profit from them.

I don't doubt that the vintage vs scrap value is different in many parts of the world, but I have a hard time imagining it ever making sense to individually harvest anything other than components that contain precious metals (silver, gold, platinum, etc.). The rest is probably best just ground up and processed some other way.

Besides, the person talking about the inductor being cut off was in the USA. It definitely doesn't make sense to spend any amount of time harvesting such tiny amounts of copper here. You could spend that time mowing someone's grass and make several times as much per hour.

EDIT: Also... I wonder what it would be like to dig through tons of boards in an Indian scrap yard. Do you think they actually have a decent amount of vintage (20+ year old) consumer or gaming stuff or just tons and tons of office PC and communications junk from the past 10-20 years?