Beginner's diary

I am not sure, if it's allowed to post here in the style of a personal blog, with occasional updates, as my journey progress and when I need to share something, because I would like to get some reactions from your experiences.

I am not sure why my first post here is in a lack of responses, I would appreciate some. Or maybe if I broken some rules, please let me know, maybe I talk stupid questions. Btw, I am from Czech Republic and when I talk about prices, I just recalculate with current echange rate to USD currency.

Anyway. I was very happy when I pre-calculated my future earnings from scraping electromotors (em). It sounded unbilievable to me at first. My counting was based on a number I have found somewhere at this forum - and this number is 30-40% of copper in the weight of a em. As I wrote in my first post, it made logic to buy all the working em at auctions and scrap them for better money. I hardly could believe it. And when I bought my first 5 em and scraped them, I was very disappointed. Now I know, that there was not more than 14% of cu in one of them. The oldest one, the heaviest, had only 2.8% (btw the cu was white, like aluminium, is it still copper?). The best one, with 13.5% was the lightest, the 10kg em, there was 1.35kg of cu.



Before this realization I was starting to imagine how I would double the money with each em bought. Now, I need to revise my strategy and accept the fact, that there are no easy money again

But I am surprised that even the advanced scrappers here, don't know how many % of cu is in a em in average. I got replies with similar numbers as posted here, they said, it's around 30%. All I see now, they never precisely measured it. They just see big pile of cu and think, it's very much - or otherwise I can't explain it. I now understand the prices for unstripped em, they are $0.46/kg

Now, I am going to measure how much cu is in a tv, computer monitor.

And I am looking forward for a heavy welding machine, my friend is scrapping 3 of them very early. He is doing it many years, in a big way, and he says, there's 40kg of cu in a 190kg welding machine (not average, but in a exact brand) - but I am afraid, he just estimates these numbers and I hope it won't be the same as with ems.

I forgot, all the 5 ems had no copper in a rotor, so I need to learn, which ems have cu in a rotor and maybe aim for them, but first, weigh them and see the profit per kg (so I know what price buy them for).

Thanks for listening