First thing you ever foud scrapping - Page 2

Originally Posted by KzScrapper

Not the first but in the beginning of posting adds on Craigslist I got a call for a dishwasher and almost passed but figured it was better then waiting for the next call. Before I got there they called back to see what else I could take...anything metal, anything that plugs in.

When I got there they had a pile with car batteries, wire, dishwasher(stainless tub!) and small kitchen appliances including this. (Set the hook in the wife's mouth for good)

kz whats the worst?

Originally Posted by auminer

Well, I just found what's probably the coolest thing I ever found scrappin':

A cell phone in the street.

Big deal? Well, there's more. I was loading my truck with a couple prom dresses my wife wanted me to take to the thrift store I get scrap from every day. So I set my phone down on the truck's bedrail ""for just a sec"" while I opened the door with one hand, holding the box with the other hand. So I set the box in the truck and rearranged a couple things and the box fell and I had to pick it up and yaddayaddayadda... so I got in the truck & took off.

Now, like yall, I always keep my eyes peeled when driving, so I'm almost back home, and right by the turn-in for my alley, I spotted something in the road. ....Hmmmmmm.... looks like a cellphone..... Hmmmmmmm..... looks like..... HOLY $#!+ it IS my cellphone!!!!



Whew!

It's fine. Couple scratches on the tuff-cover thingy, but all-in-all good shape.

I did the same thing last month. Found my cell phone where I had stopped to peak in a dumpster 3 hrs before. It was a total fluke too.

Best thing I ever found was a cash register, one of my first finds too, that when I took apart in my garage......had $95 stuffed in the back of it!

A fridge with live roaches all over it and then one time I sold a used fridge to a government subsidy apt building owner and after I refused to knock money off the fridge for him giving me the old one I told him I'm not in the business of scrap metal I'm in the business of used fridges so he begged me to take it so I loaded it up and the compressor was so full on and around with roach eggs I knew exactly why the fridge quit working ... Nasty stuff I've run across plenty of needles blood vomit hi it excrement. Exercise caution when scrapping wear gloves and use tools for everything you can because you never know what you are going to find in whatever it is that you are opening

the first thing i ever scrapped was copper pipes & brass taps
im a plumber by trade & i did a whole residential complex

i installed new lines for all 61 homes & had to remove the old copper pipes where i connected to the water meter outside every home
since the old pipes were all underground except for a small part where it came out of the ground and connected to the meters i mentioned, i did not get as much copper & brass as i hoped to get

but all said & done, i made about$55 on whatever i managed to salvage.

its a shame, cos what i got is just a small part of whats still there underground.

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.

Our business was called out to help clean out an estate...first day was just the garage. Paid $30/hr left with the bed stacked. Tools...a lot of brass. Day 2, cleared out the house, another full load, plus 4 more of trash and donatables. That was 7 more hours paid. Been scrapping since.

Originally Posted by KzScrapper

Like others on here, a freezer with bad food. I always check before loading but the one time I didn't I got burned. Waited till trash day then with a mask, jug of bleach and short shifts I was able to get the stuff double bagged and out to the curb.

Nice guy. Had someone drop a nasty fridge full next to me on the shred pile last week. Reeked.