scrapping mistakes. - Page 2

Tradionally I would agree with the theory of taking the item, but since the city just shut me down for keeping stuff in my trailer, I'm feeling like scrap on the spot sounds like a good idea. It sounds more efficient, too.

yeah so long as your neat, they have 10lb less of weight to lift into the truck.
I was thinking about the people that break the yolks out too, if i'm scrapping 'em out, then they come along they might break the back but not the tube as they'll see it has no yolk.
efficient as, coming home with a truck load of tv boards, degaussing cables & yolks is much more efficient then a few heavy tv's that will need to be handled 2 or 3 times over before disposing of it yourself.

I'm actually over crt tv's all together, I won't be picking up or even scrapping crt tv's on the spot anymore.
I have lots of boards to scrap and with a choice of ewaste out there, I prefer pc monitors.
in about a years time i'm going to start an ewaste biz' officially, that's when i'll get back to doing crt tv's.

I love flat screen tv's though, even the big ones are easy enough to handle and load up, nice and clean to scrap, nice boards.
my wires are building up a bit, don't think i'll be stripping insulated wire, the thicker ones just seem to have 3 smaller ones inside, so i'd have to strip them out then strip again, can't see how it would be worth the time which I don't seem to have much of at the moment.
I have two wheelie bins full of insulated wire, today I started to separate into categories, just 4 atm, one for cords, one for regular wire, one for ribbon wire and one for x-mas lights, i'm sure there's aluminium wire in there, i'll figure it out.

Today I relocated things out of the garage, scrapped some tv's in there and made my way back in!
felt great to have some workspace back.
now i'm scrapping the garage, my needs have changed there so things are going out and i'm setting myself up a scrappers garage.
I already have an awesome bench and even got a big old vice on it, everything else is going out, i'm resetting the tool board
to hold all the things I need when scrapping, one side of the garage will have tubs, trays & buckets for all different things I keep.
i'm redoing the lighting, have a couple extra lights to put up which should give me a better view when scrapping inside.

I want to make some sort of lady susan, is that what you call them up there? not sure, but you know the turntable in chinese resteraunts that sit in the middle of the table and you spin the food around? yeah, well that's what I want in the centre of my
garage floor.
so I can sit down to a tv for instance and spin it around as I unscrew things, at the moment i'm doing tv's on a milk crate
and I can sort of spin it around ok, but something bigger, stronger and more stable would be great.

I'm going for a truck, without steel to cash in, there's no cash flow and there's not many businesses in this world that survive long without cash flow. I don't have enough hands to generate cashable copper on a weekly basis, it's impossible to gather and scrap enough items to be able to drive to the scrap yard at the end of the week and get a decent payout, week in week out, impossible.

the higher value things supposedly like cpu's and motherboards ect, they may take months or years to build up, if you score 10 pc towers today doesn't mean you'll get 10 tommorow and the next day, so you put them awway until you build a pile, but this doesn't pay the bills, so yeah, steel is king I feel.

it's taken me 2 months to come to realisation why the dozens of scrappers I see around the place aren't touching electricals appart from cutting cords, at the end of the day they aren't taking it back home to then spend hours scrapping, just sorting metals, they end the week at the scrap yard, unloading there stuff, collecting cash and going home, all done and not a trace of scrapping in sight.

This is great for me as I do like to scrap electricals so I have the pick of the crop, but with a truck I can also dip into their line just as they dip into mine by cutting cords and taking all the microwaves.
a truck will give me all the options, and can expand on it by adding a trailer aventually, doing this in a hatchback is hard and is too small to even take my load of wire to the scrap yard in one hit.

Originally Posted by scrapperben

doing this in a hatchback is hard and is too small to even take my load of wire to the scrap yard in one hit.

Do they still have utes down there? Seems like that would be perfect.

yep we do, that's what I meant, I just call ute's, trucks, here to save confusion as they seem to call everything trucks in the U.S.
to me a truck is a truck with a big honky horn.

We have had "utes" here -- Google the Chevrolet El Camino or Ford Ranchero, but they fell out of fashion decades ago. Our "pickups" are full-framed vehicles with heavy-duty (not car-derived) suspensions with a typical payload in excess of 1000lbs and up. Google the Ram 1500, Ford F150, Chevrolet Silverado. Those are typically called "trucks", although the term is also used with diesel tractors used to pull long (50 foot) trailers (google Kenworth, Peterbilt, Mack) often called "semi trucks" or "18 wheelers."

We also have "S.U.V."s which are sometimes car-based, sometimes pickup-truck based, also called "trucks" by some. These are enclosed passenger vehicles not typically intended for hauling loads of scrap metal, although people certainly do so. Google "Jeep Grand Cherokee", "Ford Explorer", "Chevrolet Tahoe" for examples. I'm pretty sure there is an Aussie-market right hand drive version of the Grand Cherokee, and probably others.

I doubt too many people here on the American side know that an Aussie truck really looks more like an El Camino than a Chevy Silverado.... :-)

""I doubt too many people here on the American side know that an Aussie truck really looks more like an El Camino than a Chevy Silverado.... :-)""

Nope I personally had no idea what the aussies of the world drove. I dont think I could get much done from the bed of an elcamino, although I have been in a few of them that had built engines in them for going VERY fast. >>P

I'm not too worried about someone asking me what im doing. Im Illinois, people aren't allowed to throw tvs and electronics in the trash. What I do is take the yolk, board, wires, and the vcr if it has one. Then I leave a sticker with my logo and phone # stating that all electronic components have been removed from this unit, and it's ok to throw away. If someone asks what im doing, I explain to them that If I didn't take this stuff out, the trash guy wouldn't take it. Most people have no idea whats in their tvs

Saw this down in a dry creek bed yesterday

Wondering what I can do with it? There's no way I can lift it out of there, not sure how big the tube is, but the TV stands at least 4 foot tall.
Looks like it's assembled totally with star bits too

Says RCA there, but I didn't get a size or model number, year or nothing
Afraid to try and drag it out with a rope, probably bust the tube all over the place, not sure if I could even get it up into the truck. Any suggestions?

yeah, scrap it on the spot and take it up in parts.

Well.. today in the area I was scavenging, that's what this council calls it to make it sound like it's the worse thing ever to do.
I noticed a transfer station, I didn't know there were transfer stations like that, where they don't actually dump anything in the ground. prices to dispose of waste there is real high, except for some items which are free to drop off.
and to my good fortune, TV's!
I can just rock on up and give 'em as many as I have, what a huge relief! looking down the barrel at over 200 crt's,
I was starting to get a bit discouraged as to eventually make a business out of this, I couldn't see it possible without the safety net of at least having an abundance of tv's to pick up and scrap.

even better is the transfer station is exactly where i'm picking things up from, so I can take up tv's and bring back goodies in one hit.
drove home all excited about this, unloaded the car and have packed it tight with scrapped tv's ready to go in the morning.
tommorow i'm scrapping all my humongous tv's, by the end of the day it will transform my garage, my storage areas and my broadbean crop.

cruising home I saw a pc beside a bin, thought why not, had no room anywhere in the car so tied it to the roof.
got it home, opened the side and found it to be a real strange one, the tower was just a shell and inside was 6 loose power boxes
and 2 zip drives, that's it, how odd is that?
at first I felt a bit stooged, but beggers can't be chosers as they say.

I found a tv that was mostly scrapped. Someone left a spool of copper on the yoke, which I removed without tools. There were some broken bits of board lying around. I took the cherry and left the crust of the pie.

Originally Posted by scrapperben

Well.. today in the area I was scavenging, that's what this council calls it to make it sound like it's the worse thing ever to do.

Can I give you some unsolicited advice? Don't take that crap from city council.

I am politically active in my hometown. That is to say, they don't even bother asking my name or address anymore when I walk up to the podium at a council meeting to speak. They all know who I am.

If council calls what you do something that you find offensive, let 'em know about it! In public! Tell them you aren't some lowly scavenger like a bottom-feeding carp, you're an independent businessman in the recycling business, and you perform a valuable service to society!

The ONLY way to change hearts and minds is to tell people there's another viewpoint, another way to think about it, another side to the story. Otherwise, they just believe what they've been told, and they assume that since Joe the City Councilman said it, it must be true.

But those people in shirts and ties behind that counter at those meetings? They're just people. And they can be wrong. Boy, can they ever be wrong. And if they're slandering your business by equating it with the worst aspect of society, stand up and tell 'em you don't appreciate it. Be polite. Think about what you're going to say before you go up to the meeting. Find the "public comments" part of the meeting on the agenda, walk up there with pride and tell them that scrapping is a legitimate business.

I sure as hell would!