Selling Scrap Metal

BrianM

BrianM

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 10, 2009
Location
Burlington NC
Just setting in the living room floor taking apart old APC battery backups for the batteries, transformers and aluminum blocks out of them. People at work think I am a bit crazy for going thru the trouble. I was wondering what's the oddest / weirdest thing anyone else has taken apart to sell for scrap?
 
You win! I can't justify the labor to separate for the small increase in selling price.
 
I strip out computer stuff to get circuit boards, memory, etc, sell for gold recovery. Only motherboard and telcom quality boards, though. Do about 50 pc's at a time, figure I maybe make minimum wage for the time involved. I don't mess with things like power supplies, don't pay enough.
 
It's definitely no major money in any of it. But I just set in the floor, watch TV and take the stuff apart. I won't bring up taking old Syquest Disks apart for the aluminum disc inside, :popcorn:.
 
Taken a couple of auto transmissions apart before. But other than that just throw the shit in the bed and haul it off.


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I have never done any comp stuff but I always strip out all the wiring out of whatever Im takin to the crusher.Seperate the alum/stainless/copper,ect.I almost always can go behind someone and find something of value they left behind.I saw a guy the other day throw away an old medicine cabinet that had about 12 feet of 10/2 wire still hooked to it.Copper wire is bringing over $2 a pound.I usually wait until I have a pretty good pile of stuff before I get rid of it.We go to alot of auctions and lots of times theirs an old appliance,or three,nobody wants and I've been given them just to get them out of the way.
 
The biggest waste of time is aluminum cans. I saved cans for probably a year, had a big ol box of crushed cans, and it was like $7 worth.

Most profitable was a 3 phase transformer. I tried selling it on craigslist for $100 and nobody would buy it. It weighed about 200 pounds. I cut the copper windings out in about 20 minutes, kept all the good bolts, and ended up with 60lbs of copper and 100+lbs of steel, which turned into nearly $200 at the scrapyard. I hated to tear apart a perfectly good piece of equipment, but it ended up being well worth the time.
 
jeepinmatt said:
The biggest waste of time is aluminum cans. I saved cans for probably a year, had a big ol box of crushed cans, and it was like $7 worth.

Most profitable was a 3 phase transformer. I tried selling it on craigslist for $100 and nobody would buy it. It weighed about 200 pounds. I cut the copper windings out in about 20 minutes, kept all the good bolts, and ended up with 60lbs of copper and 100+lbs of steel, which turned into nearly $200 at the scrapyard. I hated to tear apart a perfectly good piece of equipment, but it ended up being well worth the time.
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IIRC it takes about 25 cans to make a pound.I bought an old buzz box welder one time for around $50,it was huge and between the leads and the copper inside I got about $165 out of it.I have unwound elec motors before and it kinda sucks.
 
My FIL and a couple of his friends bought about a dozen old robot welders. 5'x5' base about 8' tall. Cast Aluminum, copper, steel, bronze, industrial silver. It took a ton of work to disassemble those things but they made a good bit of $$
 
jeepinmatt said:
The biggest waste of time is aluminum cans. I saved cans for probably a year, had a big ol box of crushed cans, and it was like $7 worth.
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We go through a shitpile of soda cans a week, starting back in Nov I made a deal w/ my son (8) that if he started saving the cans and crushing them, we'd use the $$ for cub scout stuff.
He's been really excited (I'm sure part of it is the crushing cans part). Last weekend we took a giant 3x2x2 tub full of crushed cans to the local place. I'm pretty sure their scale was reading light anyway - but we only got $4.25. He was pretty disappointed, but at least thought it was cool to see the shredder etc. We decided to wait until we filled a whole trash can next time.

Their rate was only 0.50/lb. Based on that I'd bet it's more like 50 cans to a pound. I may try and actually count them as we fill the bucket to get an idea of what it really is.
 
One of the places here in town wont take em if they are crushed and if they have excessive moisture they will penalize you for the weight.
 
1-tonmudder said:
One of the places here in town wont take em if they are crushed and if they have excessive moisture they will penalize you for the weight.
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At this place they shred it all first, run it through a shaker THEN weigh it. So I don't think it matters. Holy hell I can't imagine saving any $$ worth of cans w/o crushing them lol.
 
back in the day when military surpluss was a secret that only a select few knew about, i used to pick up tons of batteries and all other kinds of scrap that none of the surpluss dealers wanted. Got it for cheap and usually more than tripled my $. Hell, I once bought 4 pallet container/tubs full of brand new copper pipe fittings. Got all 4 pallets for $365. The weight of the copper fittings was roughly 800lbs per pallet :D I could have sold every piece individually and made a ton of $ but I just took them straight to the scrap yard for a quick profit. :D I don't see those deals on there anymore... :(
 
Sorting it out as soon as you toss it is key for me. Not make a whole day of it but a few minutes here and there. I have several barrels setting outside my shop with holes in them with everything I can sort. It gets old stripping wire all day for the pay. But to watch the barrels fill up over a year's time is cool.

I'd rather recycle cans for pennies than to fill up the landfills. Since I'm going that way every so often anyways. That's just my character. I sort plastic for nothing.

I recycled an aluminum grill from a 73-77 ford truck by itself last year just to see and got just over $2. Took me 10 minutes to pry it loose / bang it off. So that's $12 an hour considering. Paid for the band-aid for my bleeding finger.:flipoff2:

NEVER recycle an old tube TV. Did one once. Took hours, made a hell of a mess and got nearly nothing out of it...
 
I'm not too worried about stuff going to the landfill. I figure in 30 years the environuts will have things so screwed up, it will be cheaper and easier for mining companies to mine old landfills and recover metals, plastics, etc than to mine ore/raw materials from the earth.

How do they strip wire w/o burning off the insulation? I'm thinking about building something with a couple of high pressure rollers turning into each other to "squash" the wire, thereby ripping apart the insulation. I toss a lot of wire, short or long, anywhere from 24ga to 10ga.
 
There are wire strippers out on the market but can be pricey.

I've seen guys build some cool contraptions for stripping wire. The best one I saw was a guy had an old manual pipe/tube cutter and robbed the cutting wheels off of it. Drilled various sized holes in plate and mounted the cutting wheels (adjustable) so that they lined up with the hole in the plate. Push the wire through the hole and the cutter cut the insulation. He set it up where, for really long pieces of wire, he could hook the bare wire up on a reel and attached his 1/2" drill to the reel. It was simple and effective.
 
rockcity said:
There are wire strippers out on the market but can be pricey.

I've seen guys build some cool contraptions for stripping wire. The best one I saw was a guy had an old manual pipe/tube cutter and robbed the cutting wheels off of it. Drilled various sized holes in plate and mounted the cutting wheels (adjustable) so that they lined up with the hole in the plate. Push the wire through the hole and the cutter cut the insulation. He set it up where, for really long pieces of wire, he could hook the bare wire up on a reel and attached his 1/2" drill to the reel. It was simple and effective.
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yeah I know a guy who bought one a few years ago and I think he paid $10/$12K for it
 
1-tonmudder said:
yeah I know a guy who bought one a few years ago and I think he paid $10/$12K for it
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After a 5 min search on Google they dont show anything close to that price so theres is either more to the story or I misunderstood,probably the latter.:rolleyes:
 
My grandfather is an electrician. I used to work with him in the summers, we would collect all the scrap wire over the course of a summer in a big drum, then take it up to his cabin and burn it in a big fire pit to get all the insulation off. Always got a nice chunk of money, and this was in the 90s before prices on copper went crazy.
 
Got 3 transformers from a medical equipment repair place one time a few years ago they weighed ant 400-500# each, with some help had to pick them up out of one of those big construction dumpsters, about 3' x 3' all aluminum. I ripped the copper windings out of them and got about $300 for it, that is when copper was $3.50 /lb. I kept the aluminum and most of out is now the floor in my buggy :bling: i think it might have been aircraft grade b/c it was hard to cut.
 
rockcity said:
There are wire strippers out on the market but can be pricey.

I've seen guys build some cool contraptions for stripping wire. The best one I saw was a guy had an old manual pipe/tube cutter and robbed the cutting wheels off of it. Drilled various sized holes in plate and mounted the cutting wheels (adjustable) so that they lined up with the hole in the plate. Push the wire through the hole and the cutter cut the insulation. He set it up where, for really long pieces of wire, he could hook the bare wire up on a reel and attached his 1/2" drill to the reel. It was simple and effective.
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My brother made a gig something like this. And he replaces the wheels ever so often. I think he told me it cost about $100 to make. When you're in a certain profession, you see all kinds of tricks to help you out. I always give him my unstripped wire and ac units.

Another note for scrapping: Durham County scrap yards won't accept ac units unless you have an AC license (electrical license will get you by if you talk sweet) for so many units have been stolen by the brothers up here. Opened up the work for anyone with a portable welder. I know a guy that's all he does now is build cages around ac units. He has one hell of a hammer drill as well that I've never seen another before.
 
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