Scrap metal thread.
 

I need to get me a pickup and a longer trailer. All I've got is a little livestock trailer that is about a 35 s.q.ft. area with tall rails on it that I pull behind a 94 model Cherokee Jeep. The whole setup is just too small. Fully loaded with scrap metal still makes me about $75 - 80 dollars but it would be nice to double that per trip. Right now I got it loaded with a old refrigerator, 2 water heater tanks, a old motorcycle, several bicycles, some old matress springs, several tire wheels, and several peices of odd and end peices of metal. That's all I got room for. Hoping for some nice pocket money tomorrow when I go cash it in.

If I had a longer trailer and could find several junk piles per week, I could make some purty good money.

Are you running ads on craigslist looking for scrap?

If not, you should be. Those ads are free, and in our area, they are netting some great scrap for a friend of mine.

Make sure you are running at least one ad a week.

http://x0e.xanga.com/6aef7bf7d2c3226...m212259118.jpg

I had a ton of scrap on my property. For months every Friday I would load up the pickup and visit my friend in the town where the scrap yard was. It would pay for the gas for the week, a meal, and I would have a little extra cash in my pocket. If I see a bunch of steel laying out on the curb for the trash man I pick it up. I've had a few pick-ups I have used for scrap hauling. The best one so far was an 83 F-250 Diesel. I could load the heck out of it and the truck wouldn't even squat. With that truck I could bring in a couple of hundred dollars worth of scrap in at a time. I got a few pictures of my various scrapping trucks.

http://xc0.xanga.com/985f70075763525...m202037873.jpg

My 77 Ford. It was a darn good truck but it got totalled out by a semi this year. I had it for 8 years.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2670/...1bbf0a2820.jpg

The best scrapping truck I had. I sold it when I needed some quick cash to fix the house.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4154/...e65f1a4f_z.jpg

I've only hauled in a couple of loads with this truck so far. After the 77 got pulverized by the semi I bought this 65 F100 to replace it. Currently it is the only road worthy vehicle I own.

a co-worker has been going to auctions on the weekends and getting everything cheap or for free they can. they made $500 from a $100 investment the other week.

..............I've thought about doing this activity for a while now ! My idea was too find a 20 something heavyduty trailer , then weld some vertical legs on each side and affix a steel support arm over the center of the trailer with an electricial hoist where I could lift heavy chunks of iron and then load them onto the bed of the trailer ! A Tongue pull trailer is better cause it can be lower too the ground ! , fordy

we use our f350 to haul scrap in, its lifted so makes for a little harder loading the big stuff

For those who haven't seen them, I wrote several articles of some of my experience in the salvage metal industry in the survival forum.

http://www.homesteadingtoday.com/sho...d.php?t=332336

That's brilliant! I never thought about doing that! :)

We have been hauling our scrap off the past couple of months. Amazing how much junk the previous owners accumulated....

I'm the scrap guy at auction every Tuesday evening.. Last night for example I got a;

tin kitchen cabinet
2 drawer file cabinet
metal folding chair
floor lamp
table lamp
box full of old tools and junk
metal cookware
large electrical motor with large metal fan blades

Now I haven't checked the lamps yet, they may be brass or have some brass on them and the box full of old tools I have yet to go through along with the cookware.

Oh my costs for last night were
$3.50 for a bowl of Ham and Bean soup
$1.00 for a medium Pepsi..

Some weeks I do better and some I do worse. But my costs are normally about the same..
The auction loves it because they don't have to pay to get rid of it..

so you got that stuff FREE?

Yes I did, it didn't sell.. No one wanted it so they put it down as a "no Sale" item and I get to take it if it is metal..Actually I can take it no matter what it is made of.. They just don't want to have to throw it in their dumpsters and fill them up.. They have to pay by the pound to have them emptied..

I got a complete brass bed a few weeks ago and a brass bed head board last week..

The head board was older and pure brass.. I have people always giving me items to scrap, because it saves them from having to pay to dispose of them..

I gotta get into that, we just scrap stuff picked up on walks along roadways ...

How much does brass go for?

Last I checked it was around $1.50 lb. But it doesn't take much to get a pound of brass..

Now it has been a while since I checked though.

I haul steel/tin at least once a month and haul copper, brass, aluminum about once every 2 months.

we haul every weekend ... girl keeps nudging to go out to the "alternative" shooting ranges and collect spent brass, at 1.50/lbs, I'm motivated NOW ...

That's how I started, then people just started giving it to me.. Now I don't even have to work hard to get it.. Even the company I work for gives me scrap now.. They keep the good scrap such as cooper pipe and brass and alum. cooper coils, but I get the electric motors and on occasion the condensing units and any scrap electrical wire. They just put it in the back of my truck everyday, so I don't even have to load it most of the time.:cool:

But then I've been doing this for 30 years, so I'm known to scrap anything as long as all refrigerant is pump out etc...

Now if I could just find a taker for the plastics I get when stripping some items, then I would have a complete recycle path..

Also if you decide to tear things done you will end up with a lot of waste and need to find a way to get rid of it.
I haul my own garbage to the incinerator so my costs are about $10 -20 every 2 months. But if you have regular garbage pick up it may cost you more then it's worth.. I know around here it is about $55 - 65 a quarter for garbage pick up and more if you have more then a can or 2 per week..

We recycle the plastic bottles and tin cans and cardboard gets burnt or recycled ( I haul this also to the same location, just different bins), so the only house trash we generate is food packaging plastics. Left over food goes to the woods or compost pile..

Auctions can be awesome sources for scrap, especially industrial auctions.

While every area is different, I've found that the most successful scrappers actually bid on the scrap, and often score it for $1 or $2.

At industrial auctions, the auctioneers will not give anything away. Their premise is that it wasn't their item to begin with, so you have to pay something for the item.

If it is a business, commercial, or industrial auction, the auction companies love for scrappers to show up, especially when they have been ordered to clear a building of everything. Generally, there are lots and lots of abandoned items to be had for free.

If it is an estate, generally they will just leave the item instead of giving it away.

I could probably write a book on this topic, even though I don't scrap steel myself.

we cannot find a place for plastic, glass or paper that will PAY us to bring it in, so it goes to the city recycle bin ... :(

I gave away about 10k lbs of metals, decent amount of aluminum and stainless in it last month just to get rid of it.

:grit: :grumble: :flame:

had an ex-enslaver that did the same thing ... except I was too stupid to realize the VALUE of said "scrap" ....

Apparently the price of metal has dropped again to $140 per ton. I had 1200 pounds loaded up on that little bitty trailer and got $84.00 total. A couple of weeks ago my FIL and I loaded up a bunch of his junk and took it in and it was $150 per ton then. I still got at least 2 more loads to haul in but it wont be until next week sometimes before I can get around to loading anymore. Hopefully it will go back up some.

Still yet, $84 isn't bad for about 2 or 3 hours work!

Is there any way to check ahead to see what prices will be?

Last week was heavy trash week in our town.

I wondered why I didn't see 52 scrappers out chasing steel scrap. It makes sense now that I see that steel scrap has dropped.

Clovis Im withyou I save all my metal. Its so expensive now its hard to buy a small peice for a farm project. Many good tractors and combine and implements have gone away that way.


I pick scrap piles and the junkyard for pipe and wheels and such and also cultivators and plow parts. Most of my farm stuff is home built. I scored a good gang of a scrapped JD disc about 3weeks ago for 100 dollars. Had a man looking for a set good blades and some bearings for his. Made 400 right there. When I do haul a load off its usually too smallto make anything out of. I can take it to an industrial yard near hear and trade it equal weights for un processed plant steel at the scrap yard.

Yeah just call the scrap yard and ask them.

It's going for $160 a ton here, that's what they got for mine anyway. And I believe $200 down where my brother lives.

I save scrap for metal if it's something useful for cutting up and using for welding things up etc. The place I bought just had so much of it. I let my brother and his friend haul off the 10k lbs just because I had to get the place I bought cleaned up. I still have a little pile with some pipe, channel, square tubing and some plate I kept.

I had just about three times that much junk that wasn't metal I had to clean out as well, filled a 25yd roll off dumpster and burned about twice that much and kept 5-6 big industrial shelving units worth of stuff.

The old guy that owned the place I bought threw nothing away, not even little 8" pieces of scrap lumber. There was 8-9 old lawn mowers alone stuffed in the barn. and that many washers and dryers, and 5-6 refrigerators....chunks of railroad track.. tons of stuff.

A lot of useful stuff too that would likely have been stolen had it not been buried in about 30 tones of junk... ;) Like the 60cc chainsaw I found, a model from about 1975 that runs great.

Most people already know this, but:

Make sure, if you are into scrapping, especially farm equipment, that sometimes there are treasures out there.

Let's say you buy a fence row of farm equipment scrap at an auction. It might net you $500 in scrap steel or iron for your efforts.

If there happens to be an old tractor, make sure you part the thing out or sell it as a whole to a collector. A decent set of fenders off that tractor could sell for $150, the hood $100, the grill $100, etc. Even as a whole tractor, someone would probably pay you more than scrap weight, regardless of what it might be.

The same applies to old harvesters, plows, drills, etc.

HTH.

If it was plastics that are accepted for recycle then I do that.
But most cities don't recycle the higher grade plastics..
Plastics from TV's, monitors, VCR's, DVD Players, etc are recyclable, but not through the County's recycle program..

If I could find any place that would take it for recycle, instead of paying to trash it I would do it.. At this point they can have it for nothing..

Very good advice! I always try to find buyers before I scrap some items..
I even tried to give a museum an old Singer Industrial treadle sewing machine.. Unfortunately they didn't want it. I tried for a about a year to find a buyer.. No luck.. So the head went to scrap and the 2 tier metal table (with the treadle still on it) is used next to my coal forge..

I have a nice brass bed (I believe it is a Full) right now I'm trying to sell. The only thing you would need is slats/or metal box spring and mattress.. It is an older one and is designed for the metal springs..
Up to now I haven't found a buyer, but sooner or later it will be in my way and I will scrap it for the brass..

I sure wish I could sell one of you scrappers my 16' trailer. Huge, bumper pull, little hand winch on front, Sturdy wood bed with 2 steel tire tracks - You could drive a tractor onto it no problem. Everyone who comes to look at it says it's too big :(

Heck, I bet one of you serious scrappers would haul stuff with it for the next 20 years and then make back some money from all the steel on it! Maybe I'll put it on the barter board again...

Would it hold a 12,000+ backhoe?
Although if I remember correctly the backhoe is just over 17'.
Either way right now I can't afford that kind of expense..

Sorry, I can't help you out. We just had to borrow $2000 for the DW dental procedure.. I hate not having any money, other than to pay bills with..