Whoohoo, supposed to be another few days of clear. At some point, we’ll be worried about it being too dry, but for now, it’s glorious. There were eventually a few puffy clouds in the sky, and some variable breezes, but it was mostly blue sky and moderate temps. Moar plz.
I slept in a bit, then did some work for my client. After that and some auction stuff, I finally got out of the house into the great weather. I headed to the shop to continue breaking down the “environmental monitoring stations” into scrap, salvage, and “take it to the next hamfest” piles. If I wait until afternoon, I can stand in front of my roll up door, with the truck backed in as a workbench, and be out in the weather but still in the shade. It’s nice.
I did finish the breakdown. Harvested some good parts for the hamfest, my own use, and to sell on ebay. I ended up with a box of “high quality” boards too. That means they have gold, lots of gold, on them. Gold pins, gold ground planes, gold plated connectors. When you build for .gov contracts, you literally gold plate it. To be fair, it’s radiation monitors and some other stuff which might be pretty important, and it’s in an enclosure that will let air in. Gold doesn’t corrode and conducts really well.
Modern electronics still gold plate stuff but they use super thin plating, and lesser alloys of gold. These boards are the good stuff. Rich color, heavy plating. Radios, healthcare, and commercial telcom and networking still get the good stuff. Recyclers know this and pay better for older boards and modern telcom boards.
I’ll also harvest the pins and gold plated connectors. There are a lot of pins because each of the half dozen modules connected to a backplane. I filled a gallon bucket with the multiconnectors and now I need to pull the pins from the blocks and snip them to just the gold plated part. I’ll put the pins in a jar. That will take some time, and I’ll probably do it at my desk at night while watching youtube.
I loaded everything on the truck, then threw a bunch of catalytic converters on top. I’ll try to move those today too. Should be a good payday at the scrap yard.
I’ve also got one pickup. I finally won a blacksmith’s post vise. Wanted one for years, and two were in auctions last week. Sometimes it goes in spurts or clumps like that. Long term desire is to set up a forge and do a little blacksmithing. Used to be, every farm had a forge and someone who knew how to use it for simple stuff. I’ve bid on a couple of farm forges, but they don’t come up very often, and they are very desirable.
Who knows if I’ll ever get a forge set up, but I’ll work on collecting the stuff just in case. I have a lot of projects and plans like that.
Stack some stuff that you can DO STUFF with.
nick