I Scrapped An Old Electric Organ and Found $400 of Palladium

theirratonalist

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Nov 9, 2010
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Its been a few years since checking in with you guys, but I recently had some luck scrapping an old electric organ. I found over $400 of scrap palladium inside.

It was an old broken Hammond tonewheel organ, and I had no luck selling it. (In fact, a few people emailed me asking to sell me THEIR Hammond stuff.)

The long story short is that Hammond used solid palladium wire in their keyboards back in the day, and you can find up to 8 grams of the stuff depending on the organ model. They used palladium because the tone wheels are super sensitive, and the palladium insured a very crisp electrical connection when you pressed down on a key. Even the small tonewheel organs have 3+ grams of palladium.

I wrote a post on my blog about scrapping the electric organ, you can read it here. I explain everything in great detail.

Each keyboard has several nickel busbars that are lined with solid palladium wire. If you use a flat razor blade, you can scrape the palladium off of the busbars. If you know what you're doing, you can harvest the palladium in under an hour. So far, I have saved up over 1 toz.

Anyway, I thought y'all would get a kick out of that.
 

SD51

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Aug 24, 2016
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Great idea since nobody wanted the organ...
 

pepperj

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WTG, Great recovery on the palladium-and thinking out of the box.
 

Gare

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Presently using Deus 2's & have Minelabs, Nokta's Tesoro's DEus's Have them all . Have WAY to many need to get rid of some
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THANKS FOR THE heads up !!!
 

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