Scraping my crap for precious metals #1 - Copper, lots of copper :D

So, if you follow my recent posts you have probably noticed that I have taken the hobby of picking nice stuff people throw in the trash or donate to me. And even more recently I started scraping electronic stuff for precious metals. 

Today, I will present you the first thing I have scraped, two days ago, which is the CRT monitor I featured in this post! 

However, here's a quick fun fact first! Scraping CRT monitors is actually really dangerous if you don't know what you are doing! For starters, these monitors can hold several of "THOUSAND volts of electricity in their flyback circuitry." This is more than enough to kill you! And this electricity can stay for weeks or even months even if the CRT was plugged out all this time. But that's not the only thing that can kill you while scraping a CRT! CRT screens have a vaccuum inside which means that if you accidentally crack the screen or the neck in the back, there is a small chance the screen will implode, sending small sharp glass pieces to all directions. And even if these pieces of glass don't kill or blind you or cut your penis, they are still quite nasty as they are full of lead and other toxic shit. Sounds fun! Having said that, most of the recent CRT monitors are highly resistant to implosion but still, you have been warned!

Now, here's another fun fact. I only learned of the fun fact above after I scraped my CRT. Luck was on my side  and thankfully I didn't die despite doing everything wrong!

Now, let's see some highlights of the scraping process.

The tools

Greek Frappe is probably the most important one. I was super sleepy when I started so it gave me the energy boost I needed. The cheap chinese electronic screwdriver came quite handy, since there was a shit ton of screws on the outside and the inside. Also I later used a hammer. I found out that many times it's just faster to break something instead of unscrewing it.

Hera, my trusted helper

Hera, my helper is very helpful when I do stuff. In this case, she wouldn't stop licking my face, hands and foot while I was unscrewing or breaking stuff. She also stole various tools from time to time, like my hammer, and chewed the various pieces of plastic. Very helpful.

The victim

This is how my victim looked before I took care of it. As you can see it's a brand new HITACHI monitor from the early 2000s, perhaps late 1990s. My friend who donored it couldn't remember.

Here's how it looked after I removed the plastics:

The Gutted CRT

Now, this is how the monitor looked after I took all the external plastics out and removed the main board and stuff. The thing on the right (tv yoke) was on the end of the tube's neck as the arrow indicates. Guess what?

Since I didn't know about the dangers I mentioned before, I wasn't really careful and cracked the tip. When it cracked I heard a fssssssssssssss sound and immediately started running away thinking a toxic gas may have been released. Later, after some googling I found it was just the air going inside the CRT and also learned about the various dangers of CRT scraping. Glad I got lucky, otherwise I might had been a nominee for the next darwin award!

Here's another photo showing the electronic parts, all together:

The next thing I did was to put the CRT monitor (without its guts) back in the plastic lid. I could try and sell it on EBAY as slightly used but instead I will take it to a recycle facility that buys stuff like that by the kilo. It's about 20 kilos, so I will get about 2 euros. Alternatively, I could dump it somewhere, and break the screen. As we all know, mother nature loves lead, phosphors and the other toxic shit CRTs have!

Copper extraction

I was really excited to find out  that CRT monitors have a LOT of copper, my guess is that they are one of the best items to loot for that specific metal. In my case, I collected almost 1 kg of copper which mainly came from two parts:

i) The tv yoke, or deflection coil. Now, the tv yoke is a kind of magnetic lens, used in cathode ray tubes to scan the electron beam both vertically and horizontally over the whole screen. In simple words this means...Well, I have no fucking idea what it means, I just copied the first sentence from wikipedia. If I knew, I wouldn't be scraping junk.

ii) The big rectangle copper cable (see picture above). That shit is heavy and full of copper too. I have no idea what it's called but all CRT monitors have it.

There was also some copper in many small coils that were on the main board. You can untwirl them but I found the fastest way to get the copper was to simply smash em with the hammer. 

Of course there is some copper on the power supply cable, and the other small cables. But I decided to strip them some other day along with other cords I have collected.

All in all, my copper turned out to weight approximately 900 g, which translates to roughly 4 euros. Here's how it looked when all in one place:

Other metals

Copper is probably the most valuable metal when scraping a CRT monitor. However there is also some aluminium (heat sinks) and plain old tin:

Of course there are other leftovers, like the mainboard that can be sold to a scrape place. There were also some gold-plated pins. Not worth much, but for every 100 g of them you can extract 1-3 g of pure gold. That's something I plan to do when I will have amassed about half a kilo of pins.

 Oh yeah, there was also this thing inside that I don't know what it's called:

Now, this thing is full of copper inside but getting it out is impossible with the tools I have. Not even hammering helped. It's quite heavy, at least 2 kg so I guess it's worth something!

Was is worth it?

So, all in all, I think I will make 6-8 euros from the junk above. It took me about 2 hours to take everything apart, which is not bad considering this was my first try scraping something! For Greece, it's probably minimum wage work but I am mainly doing this for fun, not the moneyz.

Actually, now that I think of it I will not even sell the copper! I have a friend who has a melting furnace, maybe  I will melt it and cast it into a nice copper bar. :)

Ok, that's all for today!

Enjoyed the post? Then don't miss my  One man's trash.. is my treasure series:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4