industrial breaker box

Im new to this forum, but I am not new to scrapping. I work for a demolition company and have done alot of it. However i havent processed alot of things. I get easy copper wire and pipe all the time so when things have copper thst sre hard to get to they just go into a metal dumpster and get sold as shred.... Well im stsrting to bring thid stuff home and trying to take it apart.. I did a soda machine an old water fountain and now i have this giant breaker box.. The buss bar has already been tsken off the back but now im stuck tsking it apart piece by piece trying to get all the brass and copper out.. Have any of you messed with these? Also i have gigantic fuses with copper bars sticking out on either end i thinj its all worth going thru .. Any advice? Is there anything in here other than brass or copper? I see some small piece thst seem to not be copper or brass but are non magnetic...

Originally Posted by Copperchopper

Im new to this forum, but I am not new to scrapping. I work for a demolition company and have done alot of it. However i havent processed alot of things. I get easy copper wire and pipe all the time so when things have copper thst sre hard to get to they just go into a metal dumpster and get sold as shred.... Well im stsrting to bring thid stuff home and trying to take it apart.. I did a soda machine an old water fountain and now i have this giant breaker box.. The buss bar has already been tsken off the back but now im stuck tsking it apart piece by piece trying to get all the brass and copper out.. Have any of you messed with these? Also i have gigantic fuses with copper bars sticking out on either end i thinj its all worth going thru .. Any advice? Is there anything in here other than brass or copper? I see some small piece thst seem to not be copper or brass but are non magnetic...

Some copper parts maybe tin plated, you'll know the difference between aluminum and copper by the weight, you can always do a scratch test.

Screws and such that give a problems, if its a screw give the head a decent rap with a hammer this relieves the tension on the thread. Believe it or not when a screw or bolt is in use its stretched under tension.

If the screw or bolt is still giving you a beef, hit the head from side to side this procedure make the hole oblong or egg shaped, the screw should come out now.. You notice I said should and not would come out,

Last resort bigger hammer.

Originally Posted by Copperchopper

Im new to this forum, but I am not new to scrapping. I work for a demolition company and have done alot of it. However i havent processed alot of things. I get easy copper wire and pipe all the time so when things have copper thst sre hard to get to they just go into a metal dumpster and get sold as shred.... Well im stsrting to bring thid stuff home and trying to take it apart.. I did a soda machine an old water fountain and now i have this giant breaker box.. The buss bar has already been tsken off the back but now im stuck tsking it apart piece by piece trying to get all the brass and copper out.. Have any of you messed with these? Also i have gigantic fuses with copper bars sticking out on either end i thinj its all worth going thru .. Any advice? Is there anything in here other than brass or copper? I see some small piece thst seem to not be copper or brass but are non magnetic...

Some copper parts maybe tin plated, you'll know the difference between aluminum and copper by the weight, you can always do a scratch test.

Screws and such that give a problems, if its a screw give the head a decent rap with a hammer this relieves the tension on the thread. Believe it or not when a screw or bolt is in use its stretched under tension.

If the screw or bolt is still giving you a beef, hit the head from side to side this procedure make the hole oblong or egg shaped, the screw should come out now.. You notice I said should and not would come out,

Last resort bigger hammer.

Watch those breaker boxes, if its like one I scrapped, it might have been for a furnace but it had three glass tubes full of Mercury.
Nice to look at, but I am glad I found them before it got scrapped. As shred.
Its nice to see the Mercury in the glass, buy don't shake it hard, Mercurys heavy and can break the glass.
I shook a vial of Mercury once and looked at it, something was different about it... Less Mercury?
Ah, yeah....
The person who put it there had not left the little cardboard seal under the cap.......

The 'Silvery' looking metals can be Tin plated Copper or Brass, a scratch tests good.
I have found on some small stuff that if I nip a nip with side cutters and then bend the metal at the nip, till it breaks, you can see the bare base metal and it crystal structure. That's when its easy to figure between Brass and Copper. A magnifying glass (mines from a xerox copier) helps 100%.

I separate all my plated Brass and Copper from Brass and Copper, they just chuck it into the same bin...
I do not know what the story is there. It just seems wrong to me.

Alloy2 gave me a 'heads up' a couple of days ago that its probably not a good idea to put Magnesium in with the 'Domestic Aluminium' as I have been doing. I figured 'there's Ali grades with Magnesium so its OK'.
But its not something they want too much of in there.
At the same time I found Silver in Ali metals not a bad thing. Yay to leaving heatsink paste on heatsinks.....

For the screws, Alloys hint works 99% of the time. For the 1%, if its a Philips screw, insert screwdriver and bash it in a bit with a hammer.
Hitting the screw head with a hammer bruises it a bit, this is good. When you bash the screwdriver it 'seats' into the bruised head, it reforms the head to the exact shape of the screwdriver tip, so there's more contact and more grip.

If that don't work still, carefully push and turn the screwdriver anticlockwise, just enough so the screwdriver pops out of the socket a bit.
Now while holding the screwdriver so it won't turn, bash it with a hammer...
I call it my 'poor mans Impact driver'.

Last hint, unscrew everything else holding the peice of metal in place and shift/wiggle it, try unscrewing the screw now.

i sure would like to see pics of all the stuff in that big breaker box.