Youtube videos that show you how to maximize the profit from scrapping a computer emphasize segregating metals.
Aluminum heat sinks in one pile, plastic coated copper wire in another. The internal cooling fan can be sold as an electric motor. Gold skim coats on the “fingers” of certain wire connections and platinum on the mirror finish of the hard drive’s internal optical component.
So many elements come together to create a google search. It feels more like plastic, glass and magic to the average user. Metal is the magic.
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Anytime junkman gather, they talk of scores. Much like football fans talking in points for victories, remembering good plays and bad games. Junkmen are private though. Solo artists perhaps. Not team players. More like distance runners than basketball players. They compete against each other every Saturday morning, sprinting from garage sale to garage sale, sunday they line up for the flea market gun to fire and they hurtle through the darkness over rolled up rugs trundled together with string and they pull open boxes with two hands by the light of a headlamp.
They push against one another like horse jockeys on the rails and they cuss each other like trash talk you’d hear in Harlem ball courts.
Pat is one of those men. He specializes in wooden stringed instruments, British car parts and espresso machines.
Those are three categories with potentially high resale value and he is a master craftsmen, mechanic and barrista.
However, he will strike at any good deal. Recently he recounted a sale of items belonging to a man evicted from a catholic charities rooming house.
Perhaps it’s turned to legend and characters have been given supernatural powers, but to hear it from Pat, nuns in full uniform presided over the sidewalk sale. He found a duffle bag with some jars he wanted to inspect, so holding it aloft he asked the price.
“2 dollars,” came the holy reply.
Pat is the kind of patient junkman who waits until he is home before fully investigating.
Inside the jars he found cocaine and rattling in the corner of the duffle bag was a ZZ Top coke spoon.
He did a fat rail and thanked the sisters.