Scrapping for SILVER. It’s everywhere and it’s free!

hello scrappers and planet lovers tin man here with another video so today what i want to do is talk about places you can find silver when scrapping the price of silver has gone up which means it is a great precious metal to start collecting and the nice thing about silver is you can find it in almost any electronic and appliance we use every day so what i want to do today is i'm going to show you the different places you can find it how to identify it and more importantly how to build up that silver content and hopefully you know help you maximize your profit so here we go the first place the most obvious place is on circuit boards in the form of silver contact boxes so they come in blacks they come in whites and they're very easy to identify because they are a plastic box this one has one two three four on here this one off of a different circuit board has one two three four five six seven of them okay this one off of a washing machine these are a different color so you've got four there and three there and oh there's two more so there are a lot of them sometimes they'll have one and the nice thing about these boxes is not only is there silver inside but there's also a small spool of copper and copper prices are going up as well it's not much but it definitely adds up and just to show you and bring my point home this is a 10 liter bucket as you can see inside i've got a number of different silver contact boxes that have come off of different appliances i have not broken those open yet hopefully i will do that when it's a rainy day but every one of them will have copper and silver inside what i'm going to do for you right now is i'm going to break one of them open okay and very simple all i'm going to do is i'm just going to put a screwdriver between them and separate them to pry them out i'm going to make sure i put safety glasses on okay so very easy to do again it just has a couple prongs on it i'm going to open this up just using a hammer i want to break this plastic okay what's gonna happen is it will i start opening it there is the spool of copper i'm actually just gonna peel off the sides to reveal there you go this and if i peel back these prongs as you can see there that dot is silver and there are if i turn it around there's another one and there is another one so this little silver contact box has three small pieces of silver as well as a little spool of copper so what i will do is i will actually tear up take a pair of pliers and cut these little pieces of silver off i'll put them into a vial and hopefully one day i will hit it with some nitric acid and as you can see i've already done a number of them here okay so i'm starting to build up my collection i'm also going to show you for the sake of this video how to take off this copper very simple i'm just going to take a screwdriver and i'm going to peel up this piece of steel so this comes up it's it's just steel i'm gonna take a pair of pliers i'm gonna pull this spool of copper out just gonna twist it out i'm going to put my silver contacts over there and the nice thing as you can see is it's starting to come off there it is look how easy that was okay and if it doesn't come off right away you might have to just clip with a pair of pliers the top cap so you can kind of see it there this little piece of steel is going to go into my steel pile okay but again i have a little bit of copper here as well i just throw this into a bag and this eventually will be number uh two copper which is currently three dollars and 54 cents canadian so that's great there are other types of contact boxes as well these comp contact boxes come out of vacuum cleaners they come out of microwaves and they are the same thing you're just gonna hit it with a hammer the plastic will break off and here's a bigger version you'll see if i opened it up there is some more silver contacts okay so again they come off of any type of circuit board okay and one thing i do want to warn you of is this the contact boxes are a nice thick plastic you will see other types of um rectangular boxes on a circuit board for example this one this is not a hard plastic so these are actually not contact boxes so these actually um if you turn them over after breaking them off and you do not see a plastic and bottom they will not have silver they have something else in them and they are not they do not have silver okay so just a word of caution with that okay another place you're gonna find silver is any type of button or click so this is just an on and off switch you hear the switch here's a trigger anything that has a click is also going to have a silver contact in it okay and again it depends on the size this is off of a blender it's got the push buttons there are little pieces of of silver contacts sometimes if they are not metallic looking color sometimes they are copper but most of them will be silver the other place you're going to find silver contacts or silver story is off of these ribbons these ribbons are often connected on microwaves and other types of computer circuit boards and these don't look like a lot but if i look i'm gonna take this up to the camera right on the top there those fingers right there are silver so some people will keep the whole thing for me i actually keep it but i also just take a pair of scissors and i will cut the top of this and i will just put this into my silver contact bin uh the rest of it i will just put into a jar and maybe one day when i actually get some nitric acid i will see if i can refine the silver out of there but for sure the top pieces i'm definitely going to keep and as you can see they come in different lengths they come in different widths okay but they all have the silver top on them excuse me any type of knobs these came off of uh dryers and stoves these knobs the switches this one that has the bell if i break that open it's gonna also have a silver contact okay so any types of knobs like this a circuit board also has some of them this comes out of a computer not only does it have gold which i will talk about in another video but some of them have a lithium battery if it says lithium on top it also has a small coat of silver so what i do is i take these off and i put them into a vial so as you can see these are all lithium batteries the nice thing about this is you definitely want to get these out of the water system um put these off to the side like i said because they do have a little bit of silver uh but again it's if they say lithium on them um the other ones may not have a silver coat um but for sure you definitely want to either way take these and separate them so they don't end up in the landfill and in our water system because of the lead so lithium batteries another place as you can see here this is off of a microwave if i turn it around the microwave has a leaf right here or a foil and all i'm going to do for the sake of this video very simple i'm going to take a knife and i'm just going to take a knife and peel it underneath the face plate [Music] as you can see this board here any type of push board is going to have a silver [Music] circuit board underneath so again i'm also needs i need to pry that up it's usually connected by tape or glue and sometimes like this one there is two layers to it it's not always two layers but i'm just gonna peel that this should pop through if i'm pulling on it okay so this circuit board all of these metallic looking buttons is silver as well there's another one here so i'm going to further take this one off i might have to do it later oh there it comes be careful you don't hurt yourself sometimes it's attached with glue it's trickier than others there we go okay so here is another one okay and now the rest of this is going to be i'm going to put this into my steel pin because this is steel but as you can see they are on this is another microwave any type of push button you will find silver circuit boards some people will actually instead of refining them they will actually just collect these just like their circuit boards they will bring them there are online places you can bring them to as well i have not done that yet i've just been saving it up but again you could also take these to the scrap yard but you want to check if your scrap yard gives you low grade medium grade high grade because of the silver contact on here or the silver content i cannot see you getting lower than mid-grade um if you get them all together in my opinion it is not worth bringing them in because i don't make very much money from circuit boards um are there any other places and again there are i'm just going to show you as well here's a couple other ones these come off of microwaves as well if i pop the cap off of that it will also reveal a silver dot okay so i'm going to do that this is just a piece of steel hopefully it comes off sometimes it's tacked on there we go so inside you can see two really nice silver contacts inside there so another example as i said you will find these on the um in the control box you they will usually be attached to your low grade wire or colored wire and it'll be just hanging off there so you definitely want to collect these as well because as i said most appliances you will find silver another one here just a control panel there is some copper but if i turn it over on this side there is the metallic color which shows that these are silver as well on the circuit board there are three also three silver contacts as well and they're they're not you know there's not a lot of silver someone's gonna argue that they're you know it takes so much to make weight but given the price of precious metals and the fact that it is free silver it is definitely worth your while hope you found this this video informative please comment down below like share subscribe and i'll catch you on the next one tin man out

Channel: Tin Man Scrapper

Views: 99,122

Rating: 4.8914027 out of 5

Keywords: Tin Man Scrapper, silver, silver contacts, precious metal, free silver, circuit boards

Id: Q4V8kowHcD4

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/NuisanceTax]

By “contact boxes” he means relays. Yes it’s free, but your time needed to extract it should not be. You would be better off working a few hours of overtime and converting the extra cash into silver. There is a reason why large companies are not paying hordes of people to sit around and pry silver components off circuit boards. The reason is that it is not economically feasible.

[u/bokitothegreat]

I would like to see a demo on how to harvest silver from plated contacts and copper. Contact buttons are almost pure silver but plating is thin and more difficult.

[u/rb109544]

Great post! Answering things I've pondered!