Shake It Up Baby

The DiskMantler, All it needs is an air supply and power.

There are a lot of valuable resources embedded in a computer hard disk drive: stainless steel, circuit board pieces and, or course, the powerful rare earth magnets in the drive’s read/write head. Currently, only about 20-25% of discarded hard drives get any kind of recycling, and those are usually simply ground to tiny pieces and those pieces then sorted to obtain any valuable materials. In the process, the rare earth magnets, which have potentially high value if intact, are destroyed. Shredded rare earth magnet materials are worth a lot less than intact magnets.

But hard drives are notoriously difficult to disassemble. Tiny little screws with non-standard heads, glues, solder and welding all make disassembly difficult and time-consuming, both of which make any recycling process that preserves those valuable components intact expensive and cost-ineffective.

Enter the DiskMantler, which literally shakes a sealed hard drive apart. Seriously, watch this video.

The DiskMantler literally shakes a hard disk drive apart. In one minute. Two at the outside.

Remember when we were told to never move an operating hard drive, or allow it to sustain vibration while running? The drive head might crash into the drive platter, scratching it and damaging the surface and destroying your data.

Heh.

There’s genuine science for how this works. The science came from Gerhard Junker, a perfectly named German scientist, who thoroughly explored the power of vibrations, or “shear loading perpendicular to the fastener axis,” to loosen screws and other fasteners.

So, one minute per drive; that’s 60 x 24 = 1,440 per day. In 2021, 259 million drives were sold world-wide. It’s going to take a lot of DiskMantlers. But they will pay for themselves fairly quickly. There’s a lot demand for rare earth magnets, which are used in EVs, PHEVs, wind turbines. computer hard disk drives and other new technologies. The other parts have value, too, but it’s the magnets that make this process interesting to investors.

“Good Vibrations”! “I Fall to Pieces”! “Shake, Rattle and Roll”!

Please, Santa, please, can WC have a DiskMantler for Christmas?

WC will be off chasing birds for a few days, and is unlikely to have internet access. Blog posts are scheduled, but WC will be unable to deal with comments or emails. Back soon.