New Scrapper: Balancing the start up budget. tools, gas, etc - Page 2

Originally Posted by auminer

I must respectfully disagree with the steadfast rule of never paying for scrap.

I get the appeal of having zero investment in your product, but the truest truism of all truisms is "It takes money to make money". If you are able to keep yourself as profitably busy as you desire to be and still follow your rule of never buying inventory, then by all means carry on smartly!! But if you're ever having downtime, or find yourself doing dubiously profitable things like unwinding miles of yellow tape to recover tiny thin strands of copper from a miniscule transformer, then perhaps a re-thinking of the 'no buying' policy is in order.

Last month I won an auction for $95.27. It's virtually impossible to separate out every last dime of income from those items... random unstripped wire went in the tub with wire from other sources, small heatsinks from servers went in the 6063 tub, etc, etc. but I do know of right at 900 bucks worth of income that was solely attributed to the items I got in that auction. I'll take a 900% markup any day of the week!

Unless, of course, your intent is more to purely be a RECYCLER, as your name implies... if the money is your secondary motive, coming in after the satisfaction of having salvaged those items from entering the wastestream, I get that, too.

If you pay for scrap, more power to you. However, I have defined and coined my effort on not paying. Will I one day, if the price is right and the opportunity presents itself, maybe. You see, I'm not just your average Joe Scrapper. I'm a scrapper with a bit of intellect, not that you're not, but I incorporate human psychology, temperaments, networking, communication, and an effective process to avoid buying scrap. Don't get me wrong, one can truly turn a good profit from buying scrap, however, from my profit calculation, I'm turning an exceptionally high return ALL the time. It works for me and I'm happy with that.

Originally Posted by 99problems

I kinda thought about that, but then figured these were tools i should probably eventually buy anyway, but all have been truly helpful in getting started, only thing i think i could have done without was the security bit set, and maybe the pry bar. Everything else I use practically everytime i go out. I really dont plan on buying any other tools for a while unless something breaks, or gets lost. I just needed those basics to get started so i dont have to bash everything with a hammer to get the goodies out.


I WOULD LOVE to just buy scrap like computer towers and other items i could flip, or scrap out. I just havent gotten that far as far as finding auctions etc, PLEASE POINT ME IN THE right direction. I really want purchase cars and scrap them, but that definitely requires a truck which i am trying to build up to getting.

Another thing you can do is frequent all sort of thrift stores. You will be surprise the amount of tools you can accumulate for practically nothing. I purchased a 6 hammer set for $4.99 from the Salvation Army.