So I went to the dump on Sunday evening because it's closed on Monday and Tuesday. It's a good time to go, as sometimes they go in on the days it's closed and push the piles, burn the wood, etc. Then you show up on Wednesday to a whole lot of nothing.

Anyhow, Sunday was a pretty nice haul for aluminum, even though some needed to be cleaned up. I also got a Dell Pentium II tower with the cpu intact and all the ram. There was water damage to a lot of it but it doesn't affect the scrap value. I don't think a bit of water damages the gold at all. It's probably worth about $10 in scrap value but I am just going to save all the boards and hoard them until I figure out what to do with them. The wires go in the wire bin and the steel goes back to the metal pile.

The guy-wire turned out to have a steel core so I had to spend a bit of time unravelling it but that's okay. I have close to an hour into cleaning everything up and I have about forty pounds of clean aluminum at around $0.70 CAD per pound so that's almost $30 to stack up with what I already have, plus it keeps a lot of stuff in the resource loop.

I have to pick up a wire wheel for the grinder to try and get the paint off of aluminum. I found out the hard way that you lose about 15% if there is any paint on it. They mean ANY paint. Just cleaning 60 pounds will pay for the wheel so it's probably worth it if it's not completely painted.

The rest of the aluminum pile looks like this now.

The Apple ImageWriter 2 seems to be undamaged but I have no way to test it as there are no cords or anything. This is what it looks like now.

Most of the motors were not worth opening up to get the copper out, especially this one.

This is after 15-20 minutes of messing with it.

Maybe a ten cents worth of copper.

This motor, on the other hand...

...was super easy to get apart and the sides just broke out really fast and clean.

I got two of these in about 5 minutes.

To summarize:

I can't really say whether it's worth it or not for you. It definitely is a worthwhile hobby for me as I love doing it and I earn a bit of money from it. I find it incredibly interesting and hope to build up a good shop full of tools over the next few years, solely on the money I make from scrapping. I could easily do it with what I have and use the money for other things, like buying crypto, going on a date night, or saving for a rainy day but I feel tools will benefit me the most for the long-term.

So tell me, what have you saved or scrapped this week? What would you do with an extra $50 a week?