My first scraping was some old metal at a farmers place that he needed removed. This is roughly 1987 or so. I carried a trailer load in and had no idea how things even worked. I made like $25 and thought it was awesome. After that, there was an old house on my friends land that they used to store hay in. Imagine an old clapboard farm house that had been abandoned for 50 years. We stripped the wire out of it along with some other old houses that had already fallen down. We made like $50 each and that was when copper only paid like $0.85 a pound.

The worst scrap job was for another guy who had the old family farm. All the barns and house were swallowed by by underbrush and were falling down. He was paying us to tear down some of the old structures and haul off the junk. Well all the junk was metal except the wood that we burned on the spot. There was an old butane tank that already had holes in it. Honey bees had made a huge hive in there. We just burned the wood around it and they moved. We cut it and there was lots of honey inside. Then the same site, there was an old washer and dryer in the woods that had been previously pulled out of the old house. The brush had grown up all around it. I pulled them out with my truck and black snakes (non poisonous ones) came jumping out. I thought I had them all out but as I hauled that load down the road, people would drive up next to me and honk and tell me snakes were popping off my trailer. Kind so funny after it was all over.



Best find was during a foreclosure clean out. I had a guy that would contract directly with a bank for foreclosure clean outs. If there was much metal, he would call me up and I would clean all the metal out and he would count that volume of material in his clean out cost. Anyway, I went to this 2 story house that had been used as a drug house. It smelled so bad that it might have been a meth house. Lots and lots of trash and anything of value was removed. As I looks through piles of trash in the living room, I see 2 silver colored canister things. They were smashed like someone stomped on their side. I picked them up and looked at the bottom and it was stamped with silver hallmarks. They were only scrap but they paid out $300 for the 2 pieces.