Pick the board in front of you
Tap a region of the diagram to see what lives there, then work down the strip order. Each step links to the full component card.
Spot prices
Tap any number to edit. Everything on this page recalculates instantly. Values reset when you close the app.
1 troy oz = 31.1035 g. Copper is priced per lb, not per oz. Live fetch needs a connection and pulls from a free public feed — everything still works offline without it.
Lot value estimator
Pick a material, enter how much you have, and see contained metal value against what the market actually pays.
Is this lot worth shipping?
Refiners charge a flat lot fee plus a per-pound treatment charge, and freight is not a rounding error. This works out whether an assay-based lot clears its own costs, and compares it against just selling to a flat-rate grade buyer.
Your photos
Every component has drawn variants at true scale. You can add your own photos on top — open a component, tap 📷 Add your photo, and shoot the part in your hand. Photos live in memory while the app is open; Export writes a fresh copy of this file with them permanently baked in.
Photos are downscaled to 900 px and re-encoded as JPEG so the file stays portable. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — this all happens inside your browser.
Reality check
- Contained ≠ paid, and right now the gap is unusually wide. Gold near $4,000/oz is roughly triple where it sat when most refiner payout tables and rules of thumb were written. On concentrated material (fingers, ceramics, pins) buyers have mostly kept up. On whole boards they have not — you'll see payouts at 15–30% of contained value across the board categories in this app. That's partly real processing cost and partly lag. It's also why sorting and concentrating before you sell matters more than it used to.
- Nobody pays contained value. Refining costs money and buyers take a margin. Hobby wet chemistry recovers 70–90% and costs you chemicals, time, and waste disposal you're legally on the hook for.
- Weigh what's actually on the scale. Ceramic bodies, heat spreaders, cartridge shells and FR4 slabs are dead weight that crush your $/lb. Always strip first, then weigh.
- Date code beats package type. Gold bond wire went to copper around 2010–2014. MLCC palladium went to nickel around 1998–2005. Same-looking part, 10× less metal.
- eBay is a selling channel, not a buying one. Fingers and pins routinely sell above their full contained value. Great if you're the seller.
Read this before you cut anything
Scrapping is mostly safe. A short list of things in this guide are not, and they are not obvious by looking at them. Beryllium oxide ceramic looks like ordinary white ceramic. A CRT that has been unplugged for a year can still kill you. A magnetron is worth about two dollars and can give you an incurable lung disease.
The rule that covers 90% of it: never grind, sand, torch, shred, or burn anything you can't positively identify. Cold cutting and controlled heat are almost always fine.
Board grading at a glance
Dating a board — era decoder
Era drives scrap value more than anything else. Three transitions do most of the work: palladium to nickel MLCCs around 1998–2005, leaded to lead-free solder on 1 July 2006, and gold to copper bond wire around 2010–2014.
Reading date codes and markings
Board surface finishes
What the pads are plated with, how to tell by eye, and why only one of these is worth going after.
Removal temperature quick-reference
Sn63Pb37 (pre-2006) melts at 183 °C. SAC305 lead-free (post-2006) melts at 217–220 °C — hotter tools, but the board scorches sooner.
Metal colour key
Colours are consistent everywhere in the app — on cards, in tags, and on the calculator.
Sell it working, not by the pound
Myths that cost people money
What's in here
The component drawings are technical illustrations built from published package dimensions, not photographs — so they're accurate on shape, proportion and size, but a real part will have solder residue, wear and printed markings the drawing can't show. Add your own photos as you meet each part; that's what makes the guide yours.
About this data
Yields are community-measured and assay figures from refining forums, commercial refiner published rates, and peer-reviewed characterisation studies — cross-checked across sources where possible. Ranges are wide because real scrap is wide.
Prices reflect early August 2026: US mail-in refiner payout tables, European refiner buy lists, and eBay retail comps. Re-check before any large shipment. Refiner rates move with the metal markets, sometimes weekly.
Confidence tags: high means multiple concordant measurements. med means one solid source or a defensible calculation. low means an estimate — treat it as a starting point, not a quote.
This is a reference tool, not professional safety or financial advice. Follow local regulations for hazardous waste, and when a component's hazard section says sell it intact, sell it intact.