We need a way to buy back pieces of materials/alloys from the recyclers. Then they could be considered a sort of an aggregator of the niche materials…
I’ve tried. For the large part, “the small guy” as a purchaser is unwelcome on the premises. It’s simply not economically worth it for them to F around with “small” sales when they generally deal in tonnage. Also, there’s the liability issue of having people muck around in piles of scrap metal, sharp edges, large puncturing bits etc…
The only way I’ve found to have it work out is to deal with small recyclers, generally the “single guy owns a fairly un-busy lot, and is more than happy if you pay him double what he’d get for the scrap for bits you’ve pulled”, or the old “buy a case of beer for the guy working the scrap yard to keep an eye out for old wagon wheels mixed in with the steel scrap, and offer to buy the rims off of him privately”. Not so sure how legal the last one is, but I honestly am not too worried about it if it saves 100+ year old special material from being melted down.
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Same here, same here. No degree but more esoteric knowledge from a number of fields,… One would expect having some success with at least one flavor of physics or mat eng, but nope, no dice. A doctorate from soap operas would make me more socially successful.
Re metals, the most fun is not as much in the encyclopedic knowledge of the compositions but in the role of the individual elements, how they segregate to grain boundaries, influence grain growth, influence corrosion and mechanical behavior… The level where atom meets another atom…
You make me want to build a small induction furnace…
(Todo: some metallography etching. I played with Nital a bit, but the grain boundaries are poorly visible as neither of my microscopes is of metallography grade. Will have to try that kind with a name I cannot remember that deposits sulfides with layer thickness depending on the grain orientation and the result is not a somewhat poorly defined line-art but a color mosaic. The sample polishing before the etch is a bitch, though, if you don’t do it well enough you get tons of artefacts…)
What’s ABS hammer-in? Do tell! Do tell! 
Legal schmegal, as long as nobody is significantly harmed.
Quite some of my electronics is “stolen” from recycle bins or even recycle yards. And the recycling guy to whom my employer is sending the old stuff is irked rather often as many things they are getting are a gutted hulk from which everything salvageable/repairable got removed by guess who. Tough luck, I got the first dip.
Stripping parts off old boards is quite relaxing and therapeutic.
I should do more work with bare metal…
“American Bladesmith Society” gathering where there are little seminars and a bunch of metal folks hanging out for an extended weekend. They happen all over the US, but the only one I can justify traveling to is out here in CA in the fall of each year. A couple of years ago we made some Wootz, and the year before, smelted steel from ore. Tons of fun.
And yeah, I’m cheap enough that the only gold I get to mess with is from recycled electronics. Put a computer or anything with a fingerboard out near my place, and I’m scrapping it.
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[drool]
I should buy some tax-free investment gold and dissolve it and work a bit on gold-plating, the hard and not-wearing-off-easily kind for electronics. (Pretty much the reverse of your approach.) Brush-plating, if it’d work. Much cheaper that way than going the off-the-shelf plating baths way.
Played with some etching and electroetching, too, though not yet extensively. Mainly along the lines of laser-etch of a paint mask, then chemical etch of the exposed parts. Some for circuitboards, some for jewellery. (Chem etch of a copper metal plate, followed by silver-plating without removing the mask, results in silver-on-copper inlay that is sunk under the surface and does not wear so easily; patterning of the resist can be done by conventional circuitboard lithography methods, I used laser burn-off; photoresist way should also work but then you get the three cans of worms with spraying an even layer of the resist, correct exposure, and correct development and it is too easy to screw one of them up.) I should try out such sequential etching-blackening of brass, for steampunk/antique-looking instrument panels/labels. You could potentially sequence masking, etching, electrodeposition and mechanical polishing to create complex inlays of silver or copper or gold in steel…
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