If the shield is removed from the ram do you get standard gold finder ram pricing?

Yes. But you need to be careful to not remove chips in the process.

A standard screwdriver will remove glued or pasted shields.
For riveted ones use a small nail or bolt cutter to snip the edge of the rivets through the corners of the stick.

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Apply a little heat to the shield for stubborn adhesive.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

Every time I do the math on a sample of shielded RAM the before and after prices just aren't that far apart. My process is simple:

- Grab 20-25 sticks of shielded RAM, weigh them and multiply by shielded RAM price
- Remove all metal from those same sticks, weigh them and multiply by the gold fingered RAM price
- Compare prices

I've done this multiple times with different batches of RAM and every time prices are close enough that with my time factored in it doesn't seem worth it.

Am I bad at math? :) Am I just not working with a large enough sample size? I'd love to hear what others are doing and what kind of price differences they're seeing.

See here for info.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=23848

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Worthing0101
Removing the shielding off gold finger Ram. It is not worth it in my world.
I did the same weight ratio experiment comparing. Removing shield vs retaining shield.
You got many different shield types . Maybe an extremely light weight shield removal can pay. But. Now. You are separating shield types. In addition to being time consuming and risk of board damage. I don't do it. In addition. The boardsort price list has a green tag next to the shielded ram category. Meaning best value.
As a sidenote. Processing cellphone. It don't pay either.

Catwhisker You’re correct for The 80% or so
If you only have a tiny pile, it’s worth removing the shields
If you have dozens and dozens and hundreds of pounds, it makes sense in removing the shields

The thing that you’re looking at is what board sort pays for the individual pieces based on that list of what is extra work and what is not
Popping shields held with thermal paste takes a second and gives you number two aluminium in general and clean Gold finger ram.
Where it gets interesting is with high-end gaming and commercial rack and blade servers. Not all ram shields are aluminium.
You wind up with some copper that’s over four bucks a pound
How about tungsten manganese, zinc magnesium?
If the shields are just thermal paste a few seconds doesn’t hurt if the riveted depends on what shields made out of

And there is why so many of us discuss it

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this time you’re 99.9% right but it’s always worth asking here on bigger heavier or older phones.
There are some well documented exceptions
Old brick phones almost always Pay better in pieces
Early blackberry phones have multiple cell phone class boards
Those HP travel phones. The galaxy mega and its European rebrandings. Rugged phones, e.g. CAT/caterpillar DXM et cetera.

Brick phones tend to have a decent amount of heavy gold plate usually in the range of 1/10 14 to 18 K or better in the contact connectors the antenna nub and if early enough the key contacts. Those are things that are local jewelry buyer or coin shop or possibly a reputable pawn shop would be interested in for Melt.

With the exception of the galaxy mega, you should never scrap iPhone or galaxy phones. The resale value of dead trash and broken is still higher than any scrap rate. these phones are known to last a very long time, but parts are rare and expensive making resale even dead worthwhile.
these two lines also have a very large repurpose hacking community that wants those parts and pieces.

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