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Yeah I make like 50% more by keeping these on. I have a lot of them.

It happens. I have had heavy heatsinks on RAM. I did the math. It worked. I had about 150 Shielded RAM. About 7 of those were those chunky heatsinks. Plus a couple other ones. Real heavy. Yes. It paid to keep the shields on. But rare. It is obvious when your looking at a Shielded RAM worth weighing out. What do I mean by weighing out? I did a price breakpoint evaluation. Determining. At what weight of a RAM stick with the shielding on. Does it pay to leave it on? My results were interesting. At the time I did the calculation. Gold was at a high price. So. You understand. As the price of gold changes. The price of Clean Gold Fingered RAM changes. So the weight of a Shielded Gold Finger RAM worth keeping with the Shield on changes. We know this. Elementary at best.
What is tough about the calculation. It has to be based on the average weight of a Clean Gold Finger RAM. They do differ. Some RAM have more chips than others. Single sided. Double sided RAM. Again. Why an average? Because you can not see or at least I can not see how many individual RAM chips are on a stick without removing the shield. Removing the shield and weighing each individual clean RAM versus the same RAM with shield on. Prohibited. Too much work. Thus. I did a subjective average weight. Subjective. Yes. I took Clean GFR. From my lot. Based on my own opinion. I didn't call my local congress man to open a million dollar study. To pass through Congress. The Senate. To see what actual average weight of a Clean Gold Finger RAM is. If I did. I bet the study's concluding statement after 5 years of committee appeals. Committe appointments. Etc. Etc. Etc. The final statement would be. "It depends••••••"
So. How do you get an average? Answer. A sample. I took about 100 Clean Gold finger RAM. Weighed them. And divided by 100. That was my average weight of randomn selected clean RAM. Now. I did have about 300 available so I visually tried to grab lightly populated and heavily populated. Large and small. Thin and thick. So. That was my average weight of a Clean Gold Finger RAM. With that weight. And some arithmetic. You get price per pound of that "average RAM stick".
From there. I then compare that Average Gold Finger RAM price to the current Unshielded Gold Fingered RAM price. Through a little algebra. You can constuct a formula that will give you the weight of a Shielded Gold Fingered RAM that pays not to clean.
It was a tedious process. Especially. Weighing out the 100 clean randomnly selected RAM to get my overall Clean GFR weight. Then setting up the formula. And solving for X . X being the weight of the Unshielded GFR that balances the equation. Any weight of a Shielded GFR over the X weight would pay more than cleaning the RAM then submitting at the Clean GFR price. Also you must enter new prices as the e-scrap prices change. I did it once. I am only a casual e-scrapper. But. Its something that is real. Heavy shielded RAM. At times does pay more than Clean GFR.

Note. I used the classic 20% safety factor. So. When I got the weight X. I multiplied my result by 1.20. That way I felt I totally eliminated the error of submitting a Shielded RAM. That would have paid more if cleaned.
Here to learn like everybody else.

The 20% buffer is the bit that makes the whole exercise usable, otherwise one oddball stick could eat the margin. Prices moving around turns it into a rolling cutoff though.

Oh yes. One must do adjustments as the RAM prices change. A good math major could probably set up a nice differential equation to use. Then make a basic computer program where to you insert the new prices. Then with one keystroke. You get the breakpoint.
I am really a small time e-scrapper. An e-scrapper dealing with large numbers on a regular basis would have much more motivation to further search this out.
Also. The same math exercise.could be applied to Gold Finger Cards. It has already been proven that a Gold Finger Card with Bracket will pay more than a Clean Gold Finger Card.
Here to learn like everybody else.
My evaluations are my own opinion.

Until you consider revenue per box and shipping cost. A few more cards per box offset the difference and if it’s a big box, the difference becomes significant. Especially since most of the ones I have seen have 4 screws or less and take 5 seconds to remove.